Free Software Linux

Where women go, advertising follows. The web is no exception. As we've mentioned before, women appear to outnumber men online, with many writing, reading or otherwise contributing to blogs. And advertisers are finally getting hip to their jive. ComScore results, as highlighted in a recent New York Times article, indicated that advertisers served up "4.4 billion display ads on women’s Web sites in May" and that women’s sites had recorded 84 million visitors in July 2008.

We here at Pingdom have been talking about why we don’t see that many women in Open Source, and were actually about to investigate it further and possibly write a blog post about it.

CivicActions is proud to present our latest collaborative project, which launched today... Women's Funding Network. Our team completed the Drupal development work on this site, in partnership with The Communication Group, and our old friend and former CivicActions colleague, Karyn Gladstone. read more

About a year ago, CMSWire reported on the number of women resigning from information technology jobs in the UK. A new report now indicates that women in IT in the US are declining as well.

In 2006, women made up only 26.7 percent of computer and mathematical positions according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The downward trend has been found across all IT jobs categories with only 16 percent of all network and computer systems administrator positions being held by women in 2006, dropping from 23.4 percent in 2000.

Pia Waugh is a leading advocate for FLOSS in her home country, Australia, and all over the world. In addition to running a consultancy in partnership with her husband, she is the vice president of Linux Australia, the president of Software Freedom International (sponsor of the annual Software Freedom Day events), and on the board of directors of the OLPC Australia program. read more

There I was standing around the LUG booth at the annual Linux expo when I realised that unlike years past, there were considerable numbers of female attendants. No, I am not referring exclusively to those female models hired to promote an OS (I won't mention which one) wearing skimpy demon costumes. read more

If you think that Linux is only "for the boys", then think again. Did you know that there are women-oriented Linux communities that are created to provide both technical and social support for women Linux users? The most well known among them is called LinuxChix, and I’m not kidding. To know more about LinuxChix, I have collected some interesting facts about them so read on.

eWeek has an interesting article regarding women working in IT, or rather, women not working in IT.  The article is, Where Did All the Girl Geeks Go? A professor says he has only one girl in a computer science major class in 2008, down from 40 percent in 2000. What happened? eWEEK gets field experts to weigh in. While women hold 51 percent of professional jobs in the United States, they make up only 26 percent of the IT work force, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology. Furthermore, fewer women worked in IT in 2008 than in 2000. The article later discusses about the need to put more effort into convincing women that working with technology can be cool.  This argument and others the article makes for how to get more women involved in IT and computer science is a problem.  I don't know a single geek, whether male or female, that had to be convinced that technology is cool. read more

The other day, colleagues and I made a list of of things that sound bad but aren't -- such as Jawbreakers and Chunky Monkey. But now I've started making a list of things that sound good but aren't. Topping the list are sites catered toward women. Don't get me wrong, women rock. And what makes us so visibly cool is that we have diverse interests, moods and yes, emotions. But that doesn't mean we can't handle weeding through the Internet to find what we seek, whether it be the weather, a great pair of shoes or gasp! --news. However, Yahoo! begs to differ. They think that the gentler sex are easily distracted by all the choices available to us on the magical Web that we need a one-stop shop offering content from women's magazines and blogs with a "distinctive voice" . Why else would they launch Shine?

I just found the following interesting facts compiled by Women Who Tech, which incidentally is hosting a Tele-Summit on Women in Technology on March 31st, 2008. Top 5 Cities Where Women Work in IT

• Washington, DC Metro area - women account for 32.3% of the IT workforce. Detroit - women account for 31.5% of the IT workforce. Baltimore - women account for 28.6% of the IT workforce. Philadelphia - women account for 28.2% of the IT workforce. Atlanta - women account for 28.2% of the IT workforce. read more

Today I found an excellent small website about the gender imbalance in Free software. There's been a lot about the topic on the linux/free software news sites too. Large parts of the free software community are rather hostile towards women, as unfortunately is usual in communities with a huge male majority. Which then prevents the community from becoming balanced because it will be unattractive to women. Advertisement: read more