Tag Archives: pay

Quick hit: Apply for paid internships in open source, running Jan-March 2013

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GNOME Outreach Program for Women

Máirín Duffy’s GNOME Outreach Program for Women logo

You might have heard about GNOME’s Outreach Program for Women, which pays USD$5000 stipends for three-month internships for women to work on GNOME. There are opportunities for work in coding, marketing, design, documentation, testing, and more, and you don’t have to have any open source experience or programming experience to apply.

Well, in the upcoming round of internships, there are eight mentoring projects offering at least 17 internship placements in total, and I’m proud to say that one of them is Wikimedia, the project that supports Wikipedia. (I’m the Engineering Community Manager for Wikimedia and basically buttonholed GNOME’s Marina Zhurakhinskaya at a conference in October specifically to ask whether Wikimedia could participate in this program, and I am delighted that we are taking part.) Other projects participating include Deltacloud, Fedora, GNOME, JBoss, Mozilla, OpenStack and Tor.

Any woman interested in working on these projects is welcome to apply, provided she is available for a full-time internship during this time period (more details). This program is open to anyone who identifies herself as a woman.

Please take a look and start the application process as soon as you can, since the application process includes getting in touch with a mentor and completing a small task. And help us spread the word!

Quick hit: One reason women make less money

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This won’t be news to anyone who’s read Women Don’t Ask, but it’s worth revisiting. There’s this thread going on Reddit entitled I work for a large multinational tech company, I regularly hire woman for 65% to 75% of what males make. I am sick of it, here is why it happens, and how you can avoid it.

Here’s a quote:

Our process, despite the pay gap, is identical for men and women. We start with phone interviews, and move into a personal and technical interview. Once a candidate passes both of those, we start salary negotiations. This is where the women seem to come in last.

The reason they don’t keep up, from where I sit, is simple. Often, a woman will enter the salary negotiation phase and I’ll tell them a number will be sent to them in a couple days. Usually we start around $45k for an entry level position. 50% to 60% of the women I interview simply take this offer. It’s insane, I already know I can get authorization for more if you simply refuse. Inversely, almost 90% of the men I interview immediately ask for more upon getting the offer.

The next major mistake happens with how they ask for more.

Read the rest here.

NOTE: I do not work for a large multinational company. I am quoting someone else who does. (People often seem to get confused when I quote people who are talking in the first person, so this is a reminder before you comment — if you want to talk to the original poster, go to Reddit rather than posting here.)

Want more women in open source? Try paying them.

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This is a remix of a post by the same name I made after running a BOF on attracting women to open source.

One of the most interesting suggestions I’ve heard on how to get more women into open source is pretty simple: Pay them.

As someone who loves doing this as a volunteer, I want to protest. Shouldn’t we all be doing this for the betterment of the world or something? But the more I think about it, the more I love this idea.

Think about the challenges women face getting involved with open source projects.

Feeling like they don’t belong? Paying someone is a pretty strong “we want you” signal, both to the woman herself and to others who might challenge her.

Not having enough time because of other life-work commitments? Making it your paid gig makes this the “work” part of that equation, rather than some part that just doesn’t quite fit.

Fewer opportunities for mentoring? Again, having the structure of a company behind you can make it a lot easier to ask for help within a known structure rather than trying to guess the social norms of an open source project.

There aren’t many women? Well, hiring a few is a great way to get the ball rolling, hopefully making it easier for future women. It’s an interesting way to handle the bootstrapping problem.

Paying women to do open source work isn’t going to solve all our problems, but it cuts through a lot of the Gordian knot that’s there. It just might be a useful tool for changing the status quo.