Nix Community Survey 2024 Results: Gender distribution

We could both unlock it, and declare intention about it up front.

Many of the people talking about these issues here have their name on a lot of work in the nix community, if you search the repos for their names. I spend time in the Lix community, and probably 99% of the activities there are careful iteration on code, with demonstrated improvement. Most of the problems you point out here are in reality addressed there in terms of work and outcomes.

For me, it’s important to look at what people are doing. But even more importantly, I also want to understand why they are doing it. I don’t want to jump to conclusions and then assert my foregone conclusion as the reality for that person or those people. Looking at what people are doing and jumping to conclusions about it, without talking to those people about why they are doing it, is in fact the primary root cause of nix community dysfunction in almost every category of activity.

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additionally, here is the stackoverflow survey’s gender responses: Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2022 (2022 numbers because they seem to have not asked gender in the 2023 survey)

for all respondents, men make up ~92%, women ~5%, and other ~4%. when you switch to professional developers only, proportion of men slightly increases, women decreases, and other decreases.

our age distribution matches the age distribution from the stackoverflow survey remarkably well also: Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2022

our statistics very closely matching that of the wider community would loosely imply that we attract users in a rather unbiased fashion. if you want more women or lgbt in the community, that is simply not a nix problem.

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I think you mean: that is not a Nix-specific problem.

One could desire to outperform the industry average. Many of us do.

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This seems like a very tone-deaf thing to say to be honest, like sure like @rhendric mentioned, it’s not a Nix specific issue, but it’s a community issue. We should strive for more diverse folks from all walks of life to come and feel safe here. With the recent drama, we have lost many maintainers who were gender diverse and general minorities, we must work hard to regain their trust.

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Why are we talking about any of this like we’re trying to figure out how many of our fixed pool of recruit-o-matic-9000s we should install in the global internet men’s dormitory vs. the global Internet women’s dormitory?

This is real life. People don’t show up on our forums or in our codebases by a lottery system. Talk about whether or not we ‘should sample with bias’ is nonsense. Neither the continual processes of growth and attrition shaping the demographics of Nix communities nor any interventions we might undertake in them resemble conducting surveys or collecting samples.

Maybe we’re just looking at a runaway metaphor which comes from enthusiastic immersion in the terminology of certain scientific disciplines.

But it’s the opposite of illuminating, and its rhetorical functions are (a) to evoke the authority and objectivity of science in service of a very haphazard argument, and (b) generally identify inclusivity interventions with unfairness without even making a case that some proposed intervention is actually malicious, discriminatory, or harmful.¹

Intentionally or not, that ‘debate’ is an ill-formed tarpit of nastiness better dropped than belabored on its own terms. Its starting point is a framing that amounts to a statistics pun, which is not the kind of thing that can even be subject to methodological critique in the first place.


1: Playing with statistical language makes the appearance of the word ‘bias’ seem somewhat natural and expected, but given that the talk of ‘sampling’ here is merely metaphorical, the scientific denotation of ‘bias’ does not apply. So the colloquial sense of the word, which connotes unfairness, ignorance, corruption, etc., is the only one left to read.

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One could desire to outperform the industry average. Many of us do.

Outperform what? The community survey also showed that ~80% of nix users have been programming for 5+ years. Nix is overwhelmingly embraced by experienced devs, and you can’t magically change the demographics of that population. I’ve not seen one person in this community make any argument as to why we should and should expect to see a higher proportion of women/lgbt in Nix than in the programming or linux communities.

it’s a community issue.

same as above. you can change the population that Nix appeals to e.g. by making it more beginner friendly, or by increasing the number of useful applications of the technology, but that has little to do with “the community”. the population of people who find Nix compelling is fairly fixed and is unlikely to change due to community measures. e.g. if the UX of nix were vastly improved and we had a very compelling case to be adopted by beginner programmers/linux users, perhaps we tap into that population which is more like 10% female. but that still means you’d expect 10% of women. not some other percent.

People don’t show up on our forums or in our codebases by a lottery system

ok but it isn’t hard to model adoption-by-gender as a set of stochastic processes. given that ~everyone who uses nix is either a programmer or linux user, that is the population of possible users. rather than say “sampling” there is a process by which people from the population encounter nix and either decide to adopt it or not. our demographics matching that of the larger population imply that there are probably no nix-specific barriers to entry or barriers that keep anyone from sticking around.

haphazard argument

I’ve not made an argument and have read very few in this or any similar thread in the first place.

and it’s a very long stretch to imply that makes it harmful to adopt outreachy…

I don’t see any implication of it being “harmful” in any reading of @APCodes comments

Though given:

Outreachy is a program that organizes three-month paid internships with free and open-source software projects for people who are typically underrepresented in those projects.

If wasting time and money is harmful then sure, I’ll say it’s harmful. Because women aren’t underrepresented in Nix. There’s my first argument I guess. “Representation” only makes sense in the context of a specific population. The population nix appeals to is quite fixed. And the Nix community is very representative of that population. Making an effort to disproportionately appeal to subsets of that population would most likely be wasteful given where we currently sit.

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No, but there are barriers, and there’s no reason every community shouldn’t be striving to eliminate them. Arguments like this, which suppose that the status quo is somehow the correct state of the world are exactly what people are talking about when they say a community is not inclusive. Each community should be making improvements, and Nix is one of those.

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That does not necessarily mean we are doing good, it only mean we are not doing worse. And considering the attitude of the StackOverflow community, which from my experience can be really toxic (sample size 1),so their data might be biased as well. I also think that there are a lot more people who do not engage in technical communities online and are therefore missing in the statistics due to uninclusive cultures. (There is a reason Rule 37 seems to be true across almost all of the internet)

If this group is made up of exactly like this because there is some inherent reason outside of culture barriers then there would be no issue. But i can come up with no reasons for that.

This should also not be treated as a dichotomy. We can (and should) do these things simultaneously: investigate causes for woman and minorities to feel unwell{come,} in the community,have some outreach to create a more equal balance than the industry and improve the community as a whole.

As long as nobody is advocating for discriminating against members of the community to achieve more equality we lose nothing by trying to do so with the actions stated so far (aside from some money and time of those who are engaged in them), but we lose out on good people and their contributions if we don’t. In the worst case we attract people who leave shortly after, in which case their reasons give us insight about where we can do better.

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What are the barriers? I’m asking from a place of deep ignorance. I always assumed nix is an OSS project, if you want to use it you can, and if you want to contribute you start hanging out on discourse + matrix + github and pick up work.

The only major barrier I can conceive of is the use of English as the lingua franca if you don’t natively speak English, and I guess owning a computer + internet connection that can pull and build the monorepo.

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For the people that care about solving this issue, and aren’t just here to stifle or belabor a solution, I think one of the most obviously pressing problems is self evident from many of the replies in this thread.

The community is full of people inherently hostile to diversity.

If we want something more than slight increments, somehow combating that attitude should be a first priority. I think in many cases, veteran contributors that are men should be louder on these issues, and speak out more to change the culture. Being silent does make you complicit, whether you like it or not.

There is no formalism that will solve this alone, there must also be a culture change. Realistically, I’m not sure this will ever really come without people that champion that change on the moderation team or other positions that have actual power.

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Please stop making assumptions about your colleagues that you can’t back up, just because they have different ideas on how to accomplish things than you.

I had a nice post (deleted by mods within ten minutes or so of posting for whatever reason) outlining how we could do things that would help everybody and as a knock-on effect hopefully achieve similar outcomes to an explicit reallocation of project resources to DEI efforts.

Further, and I’m really sick of this, this is an election day in my country (US). I live in Houston, one of the most diverse places in the country (we have six official languages at our polling stations). I lead engineering at a company explicitly promoting progressive values and helping non-profits do outreach for exactly this sort of thing at scale. I have taught several classes bringing new folks, many of them women and people of color, into the field and getting them set up on basic development tools and practices. I’ve worked in hiring to make sure those folks get a fair shake and have hired them.

Please spare me with this “hurr durr you obviously don’t care about diversity” stumping. I care about making Nix the best it can be, and I believe that the way to get there–given that we have a diverse set of viewpoints in the community and you can’t please everybody!–is to prioritize improving Nix and its onboarding because a) it has issues that turn off all new developers and that’s where your demographic change is going to come from and b) even the most die-hard “we don’t need to optimize for diversity” people can still swallow the desirability of improving Nix.

I might be incorrect in that approach, and if we try it and it doesn’t work I’ll have been mistaken–but please stop being divisive and uncharitable to people.

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One way to improve the distribution would be to make Nix more accessible for people outside of Europe and North America because the gender gap narrows as you get further away. We can’t do anything as a community to solve this problem for EU/NA other than wait for more proletarianization and offshoring of IT work.

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(in case it isn’t obvious from my last post I’ve tuned out from this thread, surely next year we’ll solve our diversity issues)

(I’ve been made aware of this thread, and wow it sucks to see lack of basic decency and empathy for their peers being on display…)

(I assume you’re vagueposting about me. Hi. It’s why I’m replying.)

Are people who are pushed to burnout and despair, basically being bullied away, really acting on their own free will?

Because that’s what happened. The NixOS community absolutely 100% does need to re-evaluate and consider what systemic failures in the organization (or lack thereof) that enabled the abuse to, first exist, then continue.

So no, let’s not get this all twisted: it’s important to reflect on what pushed these maintainers to feel like they needed to leave. It shows that the environment is not welcoming.

Though I didn’t expect anything more from you, as you were continuously on the side of the abusers, and, hi, you’re one of those people that made me feel unwelcome.

And as far as regaining trust? I did point out some first steps. Though seeing nothing happened in the months since, I don’t have any real expectations. Hopefully maybe the Steering Committee will have a think about all that at some point? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I’ll just voice this out again here: I never desired to leave the community. I endured for months, hopeful that it was just taking time for things to get better. It never did. So I was pushed out.

So y’all who are reading this: don’t buy into the false narrative shown here that maintainers left on their own. Maintainers I know of left due to alienation caused by a vociferous minority. The structures continuously enabled the abusers. And the decisions were not snap decisions. They were reflected and heart-wrenching actions.

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I read this thread and it just makes me so tired. 30% “there’s no problem” and 30% “there’s nothing we can/want to do” answers is not a good foundation to have a productive discussion in. One could spend hours answering and debunking the at times obvious bullshit that has been spewed here, valuable time and energy that one could equally well use to actually improve the situation. But it’s an uphill battle, and the next clueless person will happily add three ill-informed paragraphs to the pile of verbal misery.

I therefore invite the people who are interested in improving this issue to move over to Improving diversity in this community

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Man, how did we get here? When I first came to this project and community maybe 2017 or so, you were one of the main contributors to parts of nixos and soc implementations. You welcomed me and helped me tremendously. Much respect to you.

Some people need to do much, much better here. They need to listen more. If you feel pushed out, then that is how you feel. We don’t tell you how you feel. You tell us. If you feel like people are making you feel pushed out, I’m going to take your word for it, because I already know what kind of person you are. In my view, people making you feel this way are destroying this community if they can’t find a way to treat you and other valuable people like you with respect.

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What are the things that are unique to helping those members feel welcome that are distinct from helping all new members feel welcome?

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I was hoping for some more actionable things.

Like:

  • There are no teams on the community page charged with outreach to those communities (the marketing and moderation teams both have adjacent responsibilities, I guess, but aren’t charged specifically with that task).
  • There are no events aimed at those populations that I can see (I suppose the Lix fork kinda qualifies?).
  • The 2024 survey made progress in breaking down with a bit more detail how people identify (based on what I saw), but didn’t have a cis/trans qualifier and probably could’ve had more options/intersectionalities.
  • The community page doesn’t provide links to relevant resources (maybe this is correct, maybe it’s outside the scope, but it’s a place where it’d be nice to know if it was deliberate or not).

(whoops, wrong thread)

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:

  • The gender distribution of Nix users is a result of the NixOS community being especially toxic/unwelcoming, as evidenced by maintainer exodus.

  • 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.

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