> You can look at the pipeline of programmers and you will see a demographic pretty similar to open source.

Source please? Last I heard of, that was not the case.

As https://www.wired.com/2017/06/diversity-open-source-even-wor... contexualizes about the research published at https://opensourcesurvey.org/2017/ :

] GitHub, the world's leading repository of open-source code, surveyed 5,500 open source users and developers from around the world on a range of topics. It also asked for demographic information. And it was informative. Of that randomly selected cohort, a full 95 percent of respondents were male. Only three percent identified as female and one percent as non-binary. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 22.6 percent of professional computer programmers are female. About 16 percent of respondents said they belonged to ethnic or national groups that are in the minority in the country they live in. Black, Asian, and Latino programmers account for a total of about 34 percent of programmers in the US, according to the bureau.

This is one of the studies referenced in the paper.

To be fair, these numbers (world-wide participation vs. US labor representation) are not directly comparable. But since a large number of FOSS developers come from the US, there would need to be a huge number of non-US male software developers to shift the demographics meaningfully.

Other counter-examples:

> Several surveys have found that existing FOSS communities are very homogenous populations and made up of mostly men. There are significantly fewer women participating in FOSS when compared to the percentage of women in computing in general. - https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_o...

> Although organizations are taking actions to increase gender diversity, the percentage of women in OSS projects are in average lower than 10%. Only 7.5% of the contributions to public code from the last 50 years were authored by women [6]. Women represent only 5.2% of the contributors to the Apache Software Foundation [7], 9.9% in Linux kernel [8],and 10% of OpenStack contributors [9], three of the largest and most well-known OSS communities. Indeed, women represent only 9% of GitHub users [10]. - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.08763.pdf

and here's the US statistics, from https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm :

Computer programmers: 417k employed, 21.1% women
Software developers: 1,883k employed, 19.4% women
Software quality assurance analysts and testers: 82K employed, 25.1% women

I don't know what '"solutions"' you are talking about. I don't understand your nail salon analogy. I don't know which referenced studies you refer to. I don't know why you are sure they are wrong, when your doubt could be an expression of your own prejudice.

And you're the one who brought up "naked people". The point wasn't that NSFW images keep women out of FOSS, it was an example of how FOSS project participation CANNOT be viewed as "self-selection" because, as fivelessminutes correctly points out "a lot of contributors (eg, ones logging in on a work pc)" would be in workplace environments which prohibit certain types of imagery, like "sexy women", which was the term I used.

To turn that into "the reason women are kept out of the industry" is completely misreading my comments.