[UbuntuWomen] Hi, I'm the new kid | Can technology be "more female"?

[Elizabeth Krumbach]

On Sat, Apr 25, 2009 at 10:21 AM, julia friesel
<julia.friesel at googlemail.com> wrote:
> I am also currently working on a paper on women in free software, exploring
> why it is that technology is such a male domain and why it can be so
> difficult for women to enter it (or why most of them don't want to in the
> first place), and what the implications of all this are for the digital
> architectures we will continue to live in. So any thoughts on that subject
> are highly appreciated :)

Welcome Julia. Here are some links that you may find particularly useful:

Some collected links, some on standard sexism and feminism, but others
on behavior within open source projects:
http://wiki.ubuntu-women.org/ChallengingSexism

A bit dated by now (I see more women in open source than I did when
this was released, anyway), FLOSSpols has shown that the number of
women in IT in general hovered around 28% in proprietary software and
2.4% in open source: http://flosspols.org/

"Unlocking the Clubhouse" is a fantastic book about the issue (and not
too long). Put together by folks at Carnegie Mellon University they
outline what they believe to be the problem, possible solutions and
actual initiatives they've embarked upon:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/gendergap/www/index.html

All links aside, the following were the major hurdles I found myself
overcoming to stay very heavily involved in tech:

1. Lack of female role models in the industry and community. I joined
LinuxChix and that all changed, but I had a lot of trouble when I felt
alone as a woman in IT, it made me question whether I belonged very
often.

2. Lack of encouragement. For whatever reason in the US there is a
tendency not to encourage females in technical pursuits as much as our
male counterparts (this does look to be changing some, in part due to
pushes like Carnegie Mellon and projects like girlsgotech.org). This
lack of encouragement often leads to women getting heavily involved
only when they discover the joy of tech stuff for themselves - if they
do at all! And this is often at college-age, where they learn
something from a male counterpart who has been involved since his
early teens. I'd say a majority of women I work with regularly in IT
weren't hard core techies until their 20s.

3. Sexism and threats. It has been argued that part of the "IT
culture" is about proving worth, teasing, and general being hard on
each other, so if women can't take the heat - they should find another
industry to be part of instead of trying to change the good ole boys
club that has worked for so long. But it's much more than that for
women, I can deal with teasing and having to prove my worth to my
peers - I have a harder time with aggressive sexism and sometimes
violent threats launched against women involved in tech (see the Kathy
Sierra issue of 2 years ago and the death threats sent to members of
Debian Women).

Hope this helps :)

-- 
Elizabeth Krumbach // Lyz // pleia2
http://www.princessleia.com