Meet India’s women
Open Source warriors

Sameera Deshpande-Dalal, 35, can easily pass off as another software programmer, working at one of India’s thousands of software code shops. But with over 100 contributions to open source compiler (a program that converts software code into machine-level instructions so that the processor can execute them), Deshpande-Dalal, mother of a 15-months-old boy, says support at home made a big difference.

“Sometimes I feel, when they (women) are in this field they are more aggressive because they want to prove that they are as good as their male counterparts,” she says, adding she has not faced gender bias at work yet.

“I don’t have any complaints. I feel girls are not short on talent, it’s just that they have to stick around. Sometimes it becomes difficult if you have a maternity leave, you’re disconnected for six months from everything and you cannot complain about it because the child needs you,” she says.

How did she cope? “I took my child to office with me, and my office supported that,” Deshpande-Dalal says.

Nisha Poyarekar, an open source developer who quit her job at Tech Mahindra in January 2016 to start Reserved-bit, a hackerspace in Pune, says the free and open ideology behind open source attracted her. Moreover, her husband Siddhesh who she was dating before getting married, was a hardcore open source evangelist. And that was a big influence, she admits.

“Siddhesh wouldn’t even allow my mother in law to use anything but open source software. That’s how deep the influence was at home,” she says.

While Siddhesh still pursues his day job at Pune-based open source software company Linaro (he is Deshpande-Dalal’s colleague), the husband-wife duo curate meetups and events for Pune’s open source developer communities. On her part, Nisha is also an active member of the city’s PyLadies group, a community of women Python computing language developers.

“The confidence and self-assurance are lacking big time in the community and the participation also suffers,” says Poyarekar.

The challenge is that of having enough visible women rockstar contributors who inspire others to get more vocal about what they do and participate more actively in the community.

“From a male perspective, one of my concerns as a FOSS contributor has been the lack of coverage about women who are actually doing it. Vaishali, for instance, is vocal enough but then not a lot of women working on open source projects such as compilers are as vocal,” says Siddhesh.

“It’s almost as if they have a lot of other things to worry about than tech, and it’s (being vocal) not worth it,” says Siddhesh.

“My colleague Sameera (Deshpande-Dalal) has been working on open source compilers for over 10 years, is a GCC contributor with over 100 patches out there, really among the most brilliant contributors from India, and nobody knows about her,” he says. (GCC stands for the GNU Compiler Collection, a standard compiler for most UNIX-like operating systems.)

Siddhesh also talks about Kirti Wankhede, another open source developer who actively contributes to kernel virtualization.

Wankhede, 38, now works at Nvidia as her day job.

“I personally feel there are two aspects: first and most important is how you present yourself to the world and then how the world looks up to you. If you present yourself the way you want to be, the world would look up to you the same way. Then you will not find biases in your surrounding,” she says.

With nearly 500 patches contributed to the Linux kernel, Ahmedabad-based Goyal, 22, is another open source warrior.

“From outside, open source and Outreachy looked very intimidating at first, but then in my third year, I decided to give it a shot anyway. I chose Linux kernel because it required knowledge about C language, which I was good at,” she says. “Biases are there because at many places some people feel women aren’t good enough to code. But I haven’t encountered any such bias because the Linux kernel community is really good,” she adds.

What then stops woman from open source? Often, it is just taking the first step. For Divya K Konoor, 35, an open source engineer working with IBM, it was one night of coding when she actually became an open source contributor from just finding the bugs in the software.

“To be honest, it took me a lot of guts to start my first community code contribution. I was reluctant because I was scared to jump into an ocean full of experts from across the world; I thought I would be judged and people in the community would be rude and I wouldn't be able to swim too far,” says Konoor, a Bengaluru resident.

But, one night in office, Konoor was about to let a colleague make a community fix that she had debugged when a female colleague and friend stopped her. “She said, ‘Divya, if you have debugged it, you should contribute to it.’ I sat up till 1 AM that night and finally made my first contribution.”

Like Thakker, who works with business software maker Oracle, other women open source contributors are actively encouraging women to join their tribe. Mumbai-based Manjula Dube, 26, is an active speaker and organizer of open source events. Dube, who works with online movie ticket booking platform BookMyShow, organises Mumbai Women Coders and Mumbai Javascript Meetup apart from speaking at open source conferences in Bengaluru, Berlin and Amsterdam.

“When it comes to having more women in open source. It’s not that we don't have them, we have them in numbers but may be they are just shy and want to still be in their comfort zone,” says Dube.

For Aruna Sankaranarayanan, an engineer with Mapbox, a company that makes customisable maps for third-party applications such as Pinterest, coding and introduction to open source platforms happened quite early. When she was 16, Aruna built a calendar app for the next 500 years. Later, from writing code that tracked internet shutdowns in India to an open source project to find Indian classical music on Wikipedia, she has been more like an open source missionary looking for problems to solve.

“I love the open source ideology – the principles behind giving your users the freedom to modify what you build and the spirit of community that creates,” she says.

Sankaranarayanan says using a software that you own and have community support on can have powerful outcomes. “Open source changed how I approached technology and convinced me very strongly of the impact that technology can have on social issues – be it tracking government shutdowns of data or helping map real-time flood data – the little that I can do with technology and my community have made me feel empowered.”

While coders like Deshpande-Dalal and Goyal – separated by over a decade in terms of age – deny facing any gender bias so far, many others point to the deep yet subtle undercurrent of stereotyping playing through their careers and life.

Jane Herriman says stereotypes lead to not only differences in self-perception but also in skill acquisition between girls and boys. “Gender stereotypes – that boys are better at or more likely to like math, for example – cause the first dominos to fall. Even the toys that children are given (and have marketed to them) signal to boys more than to girls that engineering and tech are for them. Playing with Legos, for example, will heighten spatial reasoning, which will later influence a child’s “aptitude” for particular types of math,” says Herriman, now a director of diversity at Julia Computing, an open source programming language, on email.

She gives her own example. “I went to an all-girls high school that didn’t have a terribly strong math program. My science teachers were fantastic but you had to go to the all-boys school next door to take Advanced Placement Physics,” says Herriman, who completed her bachelors in chemistry from Carnegie Mellon and is now pursuing a Ph.D in material physics from Caltech. Julia Computing is her day job.

She talks about how she was one of two or three in a calculus class, who were taking the course for the first time rather than as a refresher. “I was alongside engineers who had apparently spent their childhoods taking apart radios to understand how they worked, when I didn’t even know how to use a screwdriver. I wanted to study physics but I decided against it because I assumed I wasn’t smart enough,” Herriman says.