“She’s high-maintenance with multiple personalities (read: distros) and expects you to be a mind reader when something goes wrong when you just met her. No Linux deserves better than that. Linux deserves the truth. Bring on a nerdy, brainy, hacker guy. No less will do.”
Comment by Sandra F
Unfortunately, Sandra is correct. “Linux is still regarded as being a geeky system only.” Thankfully, Linux is a work in progress and rapidly improving.
Those Novell commercials with Linux as a woman are a great reminder that of all three platforms, the ratio of women to men that use each desktop OS has to be the lowest on Linux. Thankfully, it is a problem that many people take seriously. LinuxChix seems like a good resource.
I would be interesting to find out what initiatives and successes Ubuntu, Red Hat and Novell have had getting diverse participation in their products? Particularly Ubuntu because as a community they seem to have the greatest appreciation and understanding of the need and value of diversity.
WordPress has few female contributors. How do we attract more amazing contributors like Lorelle VanFossen, Christine Davis, and Jennifer Hodgdon?
For the broader issue, there are successful organizations like Alliance of Technology and Women (ATW) and Women in Technology International (WITI).
Chris Messina asked about the future of white boy clubs. Jason Kottke is counting gender diversity at web conferences this year.
We have a long way to come.
Update 2007-03-23: Today, I read Glenda Bautista’s Agendacide article from yesterday about Jeremiah Owyang’s list of Asian technology speakers
7 Comments
linux generally, yes sandra’s right. but Novell/SuSE has been well dressed and helpful for as long as i’ve used it.
as far as bringing more women ‘into the fold’ with wordpress, it would seem (to me, as someone who’s only marginally involved), that encouraging the efforts of the women who are already contributing, would be an incentive to other women to contribute what they can.
but again, i’m not a woman, and i’m not a developer, so my perspective isn’t necessarily relevant.
You might be surprised at how many women are involved in WordPress. Some hide their real names behind uni-sex names for many reasons. One man I know uses a feminine sounding name because working with WordPress is a bit of a conflict of interest with his job. When people use “she” and “her” in reference to him, he laughs and is delighted that his disguise is working.
Yes, there should be more visible women in the tech industry. I know from experience that many are too busy working to get into the spotlight. Thanks for bringing the spotlight to them.
Hey Lloyd, thanks for bringing this up. I was equally baffled by the ads — on the one, it’s nice to see women highlighted in a technical role — since it didn’t seem like they were using her sex (in the usual way) to sell software. At the same time, it also seemed to suggest that she was sophisticated but also flirty, and that the guys were more impressed that she was merely a woman than by her potential technical prowess.
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.
Puppy Linux (my distro of choice because it’s the only thing that runs satisfactorily on my ancient laptop) has no visible female contributors at all, so I have some difficulty buying the concept of Linux as a woman.
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.
Here are a few thoughts, from the perspective of one of the few overtly-female contributors to WordPress (I’m a female software developer and also a reformed female physicist):
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
Jennifer thank you for the comment! You are definitely contributing to making WordPress a better project and a better product!
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.
“that girl again”, thank you for asking why I do not include Christine? I have added her now. I have not had the pleasure of collaborating with her yet. Although I have had no experience with UTW, it is apparent that it is a popular, great plugin.
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.
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