Brandon J. Van Every

Yes those are management problems. My point is that women don't magically have management skills that are appropriate for any given team. They're just as capable of being bad managers or bad participants as anyone else. Most of the small open source projects fail because there's no money in them and people are inexperienced. When people gain experience they tend to move on to more sustainable enterprises, which may or may not have an open source component.

I'm going to guess that role models in high school and college matter a great deal. I only had 2 in college. One was Don Greenberg, who wasn't really a CS guy but rather an Architecture guy, who did early work in 3D graphics. His approach was entirely hands-on, compared to a CS dept. that was mostly theoretical mumbo jumbo back then. The other was Devika Subramanian, whose class I happened to take as a senior because she was just so interesting and human in her sales pitch for it. The class was about databases, not a subject I had any inherent interest in.

The rest of the CS faculty were complete duds. They were awkward, and talked about a lot of stuff that doesn't matter. I ended up majoring in Sociocultural Anthropology, where smaller groups of people would have meaningful human conversations / debates about important things. This despite my natural aptitude for mathematics, physics, and computer science. I liked the human beings and didn't like the geeks, even being half-geek myself. Any Anthro geek was far more personable and worth speaking to than a CS geek, even the squirreliest of the Anthro professors.

After college I knew that 3D graphics was what I wanted to do, so I taught it to myself. I doubt most people do that.

Do something about the culture of CS depts. being totally repulsive to "more normal" human beings and it's possible that more women will be interested in taking classes. In my case I think my Nature won out, because Nurture was definitely pushing me away from CS for a time.