I’m sitting here looking at women’s swag apparel wondering how many women we have as project owners on CodePlex (or who work on CodePlex projects).  I remember talking to a handful of women at TechEd regarding CodePlex, but i don’t recall anyone working on a project or owning a project.

I found this FLOSS research study that states…

We proposed to study the role of gender in free/libre/open source software (F/LOSS) communities because an earlier EC study (Ghosh et al 2002, 2005) revealed a significant discrepancy in the proportion of men to women. It showed that just about 1.5% of F/LOSS community members were female at that time, compared with 28% in proprietary software (NSF 2004)

Of course, these studies are several years old, so the numbers could be different today.  If someone knows of a more recent study, let me know.  Also, i’m not sure what “community members” are defined as, but it seems to imply those who are involved in a project in some way, whether owner, developer, or contributor.

With over 5,000 projects on CodePlex now, if we do the math (5000 * .015), we get 75 projects that have women working on it in some way.

Any women out there?  Let me know!