Something struck me yesterday, as I was reading a post (could have been an old one) from someone who claimed that 50% of contributors work on ASF projects as part of their $day job. Of course without a citation, but the commit stats on GitHub, as well as volume of email, seems to corroborate on that, we have more commits and email during weekdays.
Now, assuming that is a reasonable approximation... Many companies in USA are heavily vested in D&I efforts, and shouldn't it therefor be of our interest to look at whether these same companies (those that are proactive, such as Google) are assigning under-represented groups to work on open source projects, whether they match their hiring ratios and if there is a difference, ask why is that? If they are over-represented there, what can other companies learn, and if under-represented, what can ASF do about it? How does one even get a job to work on open source in these giants? Wouldn't the D&I departments of these companies be interested in sharing these data? And wouldn't we then be interested in cross-referencing their data with their share in ASF? I think I saw somewhere (her own introduction?) that Gris was employed by Google, so I assume it would be really easy for her to check internally at work on this, as a starting point. If the data exist, quick answers, if data don't exist, maybe see if it can be produced... Reaching out to others, both inside and outside the ASF, in similar companies would be the next step. Cheers Niclas
