Its not just women that are being put off. I'm a man, and when I worked for an IHV, I dreaded every interaction with the Linux kernel community due to the tone of the interactions. It was by far the most hostile community we engaged with. I often submitted patches through either junior developers in our company who were Linux enthusiasts, or through friends who were established in the Linux community just to avoid dealing with the people on the subsystem list.
By contrast the *BSD communities were far more helpful, as were the closed-source MacOSX and Solaris driver/kernel mailing lists, as well as the private interactions with folks from Apple and Sun.
By contrast the *BSD communities were far more helpful, as were the closed-source MacOSX and Solaris driver/kernel mailing lists, as well as the private interactions with folks from Apple and Sun.