I hesitate to chime in because to be quite honest, this just simply is not my personal bugbear, and I feel like every time I try to participate in sociopolitical discussions, nothing is really accomplished, and I probably just make an arse of myself for no benefit to anyone. (I promise, I am self-aware. The most-liked reply to any of my posts on the NixOS Discourse is a rebuttal to a post of mine. There are almost certainly people here who see my posts and think “Oh, it’s that guy that said the stupid thing”. Hello, whoever you are. Maybe some day, in the distant future, I will redeem myself. Or maybe not.)
However, in spite of that, something keeps nagging at me as I see these threads crop up: does anybody have a good example of a community/project/ecosystem that stands as a good example for what to do here? Is there a project that does notably better than average, and if so, how? What are the pros and cons of their approaches? etc.
Just to be clear, this is not some tactical maneuver or anything, I’m actually just curious. I can’t personally think of one that people hold up as a shining example, but it seems like it would be practically useful to have a reference point for a project that actually did intentionally improve; I think without one, it’s hard to really reason about how effective any given measure would be. I can think of examples of projects that do outreach, but I don’t think I know of any that have particularly impressive metrics to show for it.
Also, from a higher level, I’d like to understand what people see as the core problem here. From the perspective of the survey, the problem, I suppose, is that the gender distribution does not match general population demographics. But digging deeper into root causes, it seems like there’s a couple diverging theories:
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The gender distribution of Nix users is a result of the NixOS community being especially toxic/unwelcoming, as evidenced by maintainer exodus.
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The gender distribution of Nix users actually isn’t out of line with technology sector norms, but this should not be seen as a reason to not try to “beat the average” so to speak.
These are obviously somewhat conflicting, though the latter does not imply there are not issues with the NixOS community, it just implies that they may not have had a huge impact on the gender distribution of Nix users.
I am curious what people think.
Unfortunately, I do think it’s going to be really hard to have a single large NixOS community where discussions like this don’t go off the rails. My (perhaps crackpot) take is that everyone in these threads actually truly cares about the future of Nix and NixOS, has no bad intentions at heart, and really does believe the position they’re putting forward, even if some of the expressions here are … not so eloquent, in the heat of the moment. Unfortunately, I realize that this is actually not terribly helpful, since it doesn’t really do anything to fix the fact that we seem to not agree on what is “reasonable” or in some cases even just “true”. (Also, that’s definitely no excuse to behave poorly.)
As I’ve said in the past though, I don’t think that’s a NixOS-specific problem (though maybe it is amplified by the other issues the NixOS community has faced). I think that it’s an increasingly pervasive problem ripping through the world, or at least it feels like it here in America. I’m holding onto hope that one of these years, it will start to feel like these things are improving instead of getting worse…
I will probably not reply a whole lot in these sorts of threads, because like I said, it’s just not my personal issue, but I care about the future of NixOS. If there’s a consensus that there is a serious problem here, I hope we can work towards a solution that will make people happier to be a part of the NixOS community.