Skud this is a very interesting post. Perhaps you can share your thgtohus on something I've been wondering about, specifically related to: If someone’s being an asshole, call them on their crap. How do you tell if someone’s being an asshole? Well, if there’s a naked woman on the projector screen, that’s a good sign. To what extent do you think the general asshole-ness of a lot of OSS projects is alienating to women? I mean, I realize even asking that reveals some sex discrimination tendency on my part, but hey, KNOW IS HALF THE BATTLE RIGHT?Here's what I'm thinking of: a couple days ago, my friend, who is male, as are nearly all of my friends who are involved in technology crap are, was talking about trying to figure out some problem in Rails. He was working on a project as a contractor, and the work had revealed to him something that could be a bug or perhaps a confusing design ambiguity in Rails. So he logs into IRC to try to talk about it. Immediately, he gets 1500 people assuming he's a n00b saying Well, you shouldn't be doing it THAT way only idiots do it THAT way so your question is fundamentally invalid. He's like Uhhh ok, I know that. This is the codebase I was given. The fact that the way my code works is odd does not in any way invalidate the Rails issue I'm trying to discuss here. He was really annoyed by it, as usual, but he's also able to slough it off easily, for a variety of reasons.Now, I don't know whether this is by nature or nurture or whatever else, but there is definitely in many male centric cultures a lot more value put on posturing, cockiness, machismo, etc. Man, it sounds absurd to describe a bunch of nerds on a mailing list as macho but I hope you see my point. At least among hetero-identified women, this seems to be a lot less common. So basically my question is to what extent do you think the general dickishness of hacker communities contributes to this problem? I think it actually alienates a lot of het male developers too who just don't want to deal with it, but there are enough who will deal that we don't notice it. I.E., maybe the blue side of your last chart could expand considerably to the left as well.