Hypothetical Talk at BroCon (Not actually BroCon, it was the recent Las Vegas ReactConf, and yes, I should have known 😃 Las Vegas + JavaScript. I did not give this, just an imagining)

“How many of you are fathers?” I ask.

Half the room raises their hands.

“How many of you contribute to open source?”

Hands are kept up

“How many contributed, or still contribute, to open source when your wife or partner was taking care of your child?”

Hands start shaking, some don’t know if they should go down or not.

“Look at your neighbor, keep your hand raised if that neighbor is a woman.”

All hands are down.

“Do we still wonder why women don’t contribute to Open Source? I contributed before I had a child, not so much now.”

(Inspired from a conversation on the way home from ReactConf with another woman engineer, who had not had children (yet). I posited that open source is “invisible labor” and women have a lot of that already. She posited that JavaScript used to be front-end development, a largely pink collar job (mostly women do it). Then React became a “real programming language” and men started taking over.)