Adapt, act, or rebel? Constructing a narrative about women in free and open source software

Free and open source software is no longer limited to traditional software developers creating products to satisfy their own needs, but people with varied skills sets are coming together to satisfy the needs of a growing consumer base. With increasing diversity in consumers, comes the need to increase the diversity of participants. However, previous reports suggest that women compose less than five percent of FOSS contributors. Researchers often construct a view of FOSS that only acknowledges the men and the programmers, and the research on women focuses on barriers to participation. This paper focuses on the diversity that is inherent in a multicultural and geographically distributed environment by interviewing twenty women and men: ambassadors, artists, packagers, programmers, translators, and writers. The purpose of this paper is to outline how participants navigate their community using a combination of technical, social, and cultural skills, and highlighting when actions are implicitly and explicitly gendered