In the words of Pieter Hintjens: I’ve worked in the software industry for 30 years, and I’ve seen the disappearance of women from software teams. It’s quite visible, and quite astonishing, because the companies I used to work in were sexist, discriminatory, macho, and often caricatures of the unfair workplace. All the managers were white men. But when it came to talent, there was never much fuss. You sought the best young programmers, you trained them, you paid them all (men and women) as little as you could. The only discrimination was on age, mainly because of salary costs.

Yet today, there is little or no sexism in the teams I work most with. Most of the people I work with could be any age, gender, background, it’s invisible and it is irrelevant. There is no visible gender on your GitHub profile unless you post a photo, or use your full name. True, globally distributed projects like ZeroMQ are perhaps still rare, but in our open source projects there are still very few women contributors. We’ve worked very hard in ZeroMQ to remove all plausible barriers to contributors. While overall diversity is growing rapidly (with contributors from across the globe, and literally, no discrimination of any kind I can detect), gender diversity seems even lower in our open source projects than any workplace I’ve ever seen.