In most technical communities, women are a minority. But in the open source world, they are an even greater minority. In 2006, the FLOSSPOLS survey, a broad survey of open source usage and development, funded by the EU, found that only 1.5% of open source contributors were women. In 2007, Kirrily surveyed the Perl community and found that the proportion of female population was 5%. The Drupal community had 10% women, whereas the population of women in technical professions and in computer science in universities was approximately 20%.

Kirrily compares the sense of unease that a woman experiences in participating in a male dominated community to that a male would feel in finding himself to be the only man at a salon, getting his nails done.

She debunks the issues of sexism that are ubiquitously prevalent in the software development community and the workplace. She talks about the enormous pressures to perform well, about being thought less of, and about the feeling of standing out in a crowd that women in the software development community are subject to on a frequent basis. In a survey, while the majority of men pleaded ignorance to the existence of these issues, the majority of women acknowledged them to be the reality on the ground.

Sharing her experience of being a part of a female-majority project, Kirrily conveys the message of equality of gender, and shares her insights as to how work environments can foster diversity.