You make interesting points about benevolent dictatorship models being more off-putting to woman. You also point out the opportunity with WordPress to work outside of this model by developing a plugin or theme. Hopefully, the WordPress.org plugin repository helps the great plugins and the people that development them the recognition they deserve.

Feel free to email me directly if you feel there is someone that would be a good moderator on WordPress.com.

There being only one woman on our team Maya Desai (and our accountant) is something that I am sensitive to. Matt is focused on having a diverse team, and I think that likely means having more female team members. If you know of anyone that would be a great fit, I am sure Matt would love to hear from them (and so would I). We are still hiring (my post).

People whose work you are familiar with often make the best colleagues, and Matt has hired many of the team from the community, so I disagree that focusing on one problem is better than another.

My wife and friends offer continuous “support” to keep the hours I spend on the computer almost reasonable. I appreciate this immensely though begrudgingly. It does force me to look for ways to innovate in working smarter instead of harder, but like any endeavour it is about the people and the relationships and sometimes that means working harder to encourage and celebrate those relationships.

First, it’s always tough to be a woman in a male-dominated field, but after enough years of it, you get used to ignoring the sexism and locker-room atmosphere that often prevails. Younger women may have less experience doing that, and therefore may be put off by the tone of discussions on many tech mailing lists and forums; even I (not in the category of “younger”) have been known to sever all ties to particularly hostile development communities. It may be that people who have experienced hostility in other open-source or mailing-list communities have decided not to even try out contributing to WordPress.

I should mention that I found the WordPress community to be much more welcoming and less hostile than others I have been a part of or considered joining, which is why I contribute my time to WordPress and not any of the other open-source software I use on a regular basis. I think the tone of the Codex pages on how to contribute made me feel immediately welcome, and polite replies to my first tentative queries on the Hackers and Docs email list helped as well (perhaps Lorelle and Lloyd are somewhat responsible for this?). Also I think the tone generally on the mailing lists is patient (with a few exceptions). It makes a difference.

Another thought is that to contribute to a project like WordPress, you have to (a) have spare time, (b) have expertise (probably), and (c) want to spend your spare time doing something in your area of expertise. I think all three of these lower the number of women participating. For (b), clearly the number of women software developers is much lower than the number of men. For (a), even today, I think women tend to have more home responsibilities and less spare time. As for (c), perhaps most women developers are less likely than their male counterparts to want to do any extra development work after hours? Who knows… but these three factors together could account for the low representation women have among open-source projects.

Jennifer

Historically, I think the benevolent dictatorship model of wordpress development has been particularly offputting to women (if not even the men can get their voices heard, what chance have women got?) It’s more productive to go off and write a plugin, though you won’t get any recognition for it unless you hang out with the boys in IRC. (I’m surprised you didn’t mention Christine, UTW is probably one of the most widely used plugins out there.) If you want to see the glass ceiling in action, try the wp.com forums: the majority of regular posters are female, but all the visible staff are men and so are the forum moderators. I would be very surprised if the wp.com userbase didn’t have a female majority, but the makeup of the community isn’t reflected by the people who run it (witness the multiple ‘where are the women?’ comments on the news blog post about Mexico). That seems to me to be both more urgent and more easily remedied than the dearth of women on wp-hackers.

Then again, I could be misreading it.

I invite you to check out the resources I’ve been aggregating on Ma.gnolia. I’ll definitely add your post to the mix.