Indeed. There are many, many women movers and shakers in CS. There's Kim Polese, "that chick who was involved in writing java", actually the product manager who unleashed it on the world. Now CEO of Marimba. There's Dr. Anita Borg, who made incredible breakthroughs in cache optimization and founded the systers mailing list and the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computer Science. Fran Hill, pioneer in parallelization and optimizing compilers. There are more -- a lot more -- but few remember them in discussions like these.
And as much as I also idolized Grace Hopper and Ada Lovelace, bringing up their names in these kind of discussions only adds to the false impression that there are no current women computer scientists. The problem is not simply one of lack of gender parity in the field of computing (though that is a problem), but also lack of adequate recognition.
As for the open source community, I don't know why there appears to be a larger gender parity problem here, if indeed there is one. I can tell you why I'm not part of the open source movement, as much as I admire it: because my life is already full. I have about 12 hours per day available for computer science; 8-10 is already taken up working at a technical job that lights my fire and pays me money. (unix systems administrator, primarily solaris, if you're curious.) The other two or so are taken up coaching for programming team, something else I'm passionate about. My other four waking hours a day tend to get spent on grooming, eating, and socializing.:-) So as you see, my "problem" is far from being not interested, as other posters have suggested. It's being interested in far too many aspects of computer science, and settling on ones that don't necessarily interest you.
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My point.
Indeed. There are many, many women movers and shakers in CS. There's Kim Polese, "that chick who was involved in writing java", actually the product manager who unleashed it on the world. Now CEO of Marimba. There's Dr. Anita Borg, who made incredible breakthroughs in cache optimization and founded the systers mailing list and the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computer Science. Fran Hill, pioneer in parallelization and optimizing compilers. There are more -- a lot more -- but few remember them in discussions like these.
And as much as I also idolized Grace Hopper and Ada Lovelace, bringing up their names in these kind of discussions only adds to the false impression that there are no current women computer scientists. The problem is not simply one of lack of gender parity in the field of computing (though that is a problem), but also lack of adequate recognition.
As for the open source community, I don't know why there appears to be a larger gender parity problem here, if indeed there is one. I can tell you why I'm not part of the open source movement, as much as I admire it: because my life is already full. I have about 12 hours per day available for computer science; 8-10 is already taken up working at a technical job that lights my fire and pays me money. (unix systems administrator, primarily solaris, if you're curious.) The other two or so are taken up coaching for programming team, something else I'm passionate about. My other four waking hours a day tend to get spent on grooming, eating, and socializing.