I think Alyssa Wright in her 2013 SOTMUS talk did an excellent job at showing the depth of the problem of gender exclusion in the OSM community - The Threads of OSM Discussions: Are the Doors Really Open?. Because OSM is a product that is created by a community, and requires a broad and engaged community for it’s sucess, it’s worth watching for anyone who cares about OSM.

To summarize a few key points from the talk:

1. Women’s Participation in Open Source (including OSM) is far lower (3% of contributors to OSM, 1% of participants in Open Source). This is in 2013. I don’t have updated statistics on this, but I think at this point the burden of proof should be on those claiming it has been fixed.

2. One of the proposed reasons she found for this was that “maybe there is active hostility toward women.”

3. This is a major problem because “maps are biased by the norms, traditions, assumptions, and political biases of the map maker,” and exclusion reduces the “collective intelligence of diversity” of OSM.

4. An analysis of participation in OSM Dev and OSM Talk mailing threads showed the lack of gender diversity in who is participating in OSM conversations.

Both open hostility and microaggressions push women out of conversations and as a consequence, the community.

Here are a few concrete examples:
Sarcastically referencing acceptable gender pronouns  »> It seems to get less posts each month than the number of letters in ‘LGBTQ’, and most certainly less than the current number of acceptable gender pronouns. @alexkemp

Belittling someone’s lived experience while questioning ability to comprehend
»>just hand-waving “ooh, I/we/they have been discriminated against”. Who? What? Where? When? How? (plus a guess at) Why? How come you are all unable to understand a call from multiple people for “concrete evidence” is a call for “substantia”, rather than just more hand-waving. @alexkemp

Heather, thank you for your continued efforts to make OSM a better community. A broader, more diverse community leads to a better map and better technology. Looking forward to learning from the Open Gender Monologues you and Kate will be leading this summer!