[Novalug] How to Encourage Women in Linux

Mackenzie Morgan macoafi@gmail.com
Sat Jun 28 14:03:42 EDT 2008


On Sat, Jun 28, 2008 at 8:33 AM, Stephen Chapman <schap@offenbachers.com> wrote:
> Keith Casey wrote:
>
> On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 3:26 PM, David A. Cafaro <dac@cafaro.net> wrote:
>
>
> Actually, that was the exact problem.  There are plenty of women in the
> field, but they aren't at the networking type events in force.  They aren't
> showing up in the panels, the talks, and the professional meetings at the
> same proportion they represent in the field.  My friend was trying to figure
> out why, and when talking to some of her friends one issue was feeling
> uncomfortable in those situations.
>
>
> Others have noted this too -
> http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/04/14/PHP-Women
>
> Then again, there are some groups - DevChix and phpWomen are my
> favorites - that are starting to show up and be heard.  But I'm
> biased, I'm friends with and have worked with some of the founders of
> both groups. ;)
>
> kc
>
>
>
> I mentioned this to my wife as proof that women are very much involved in
> the technical field because she
> thinks i'm kinda crazy sometimes for speding so much time "programming".
> The first thing she said when I mentioned
> DevChicks and phpWomen is ... "are they support groups?"  .. I hung my head
> down and headed back to the basement...

DevChix is made mostly of Ruby on Rails programmers because the
founder is a Rubyist, and she promotes it at the cons she goes
to...which are Ruby ones.  There's a blog where they post tutorials or
about this neat bit of code they're working on.  The mailing list has
a lot of "introduce yourself and tell a story," that I've noticed, but
that's probably because there was a Ruby con fairly recently, so new
people showing up now.  It's not very high-traffic.  Job postings,
"hey I'm stuck on this bit of code, anyone got an idea?" and yes, the
occasional rant about something that happened that seemed motivated by
sexism.  Oh, also lots of discussion of various articles that pop up
going "ok so these girls are nerds, but guess what? they're HOT too!"

As for LinuxChix, I'm not on any of the main mailing lists, but the
IRC is mostly social.  They switch from social mode to helpful mode
really quickly, though, and that is definitely a knowledgeable
channel.  That's generally the first place I go when Google fails to
help me.

-- 
Mackenzie Morgan
Linux User #432169
ACM Member #3445683
http://ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com <-my blog of Ubuntu stuff
apt-get moo



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