This thread has engendered a few thoughtful posts, a lot of dubious ranting and far too much flat-out sexist crap.
Yes, there are women in open source. Yes, there are female hackers. (And I mean hackers in the true old-guard sense of the word for people who love to write code for its own sake and are very good at it, not people who break into someone else's box.)
Normally I don't go too overboard in the ubergeek oneupsmanship, but I think it's called for here to counter the prevailing winds.
I've been hacking open source since before that phrase was fashionable, we used to just call it "free software". Or even "public domain" if we felt like using big words. Most of it runs on Irix (although some has been ported to Linux) because I got addicted to SGIs when they were the only game in town for fast graphics.
I started playing with computers when I was ten, wrote software on my own time for a while, got my first paying computer job when I was 16. I was the youngest employee at ETA systems, a supercomputer company that's now bankrupt (like all the rest of them). I literally remember when I thought Unix was for wimps, an insane waste of expensive supercomputer cycles. If batch job control was good enough for me, it should be good enough for everybody! (So I did see the light on that one, now I'm a rabid Unix fanatic.)
Got a CS degree at Stanford (while taking quite a few feminist studies classes along the way). Went off to work at The Geometry Center, a research group where developing free software was a major part of our mission. Came back to Stanford to get a PhD in CS. Along the way I adapted some research software for use in a free SGI visualization product.
I am used to almost always being the only or one of the few women in the room. One of the few sports I enjoy doing is kickboxing, which is at least as male dominated. I probably wouldn't have chosen to either start or continue with that if I hadn't built up reserves of confidence from my experiences in CS.
I do believe the low percentage of women in CS is due to cultural conditioning, and that the gender imbalance causes professional difficulties ranging from extreme to subtle. Ellen Spertus has several essays on this (which are worthwhile enough that I'll add yet another pointer to them). In my case most of the difficulties have been subtle, and I've benefitted from many mentors from many people over the years. Most of them have been male, but it's worth pointing out that at my first computer job my boss was female as was hers.
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Yes, there are women in open source. Yes, there are female hackers. (And I mean hackers in the true old-guard sense of the word for people who love to write code for its own sake and are very good at it, not people who break into someone else's box.)
Normally I don't go too overboard in the ubergeek oneupsmanship, but I think it's called for here to counter the prevailing winds.
I've been hacking open source since before that phrase was fashionable, we used to just call it "free software". Or even "public domain" if we felt like using big words. Most of it runs on Irix (although some has been ported to Linux) because I got addicted to SGIs when they were the only game in town for fast graphics.
I started playing with computers when I was ten, wrote software on my own time for a while, got my first paying computer job when I was 16. I was the youngest employee at ETA systems, a supercomputer company that's now bankrupt (like all the rest of them). I literally remember when I thought Unix was for wimps, an insane waste of expensive supercomputer cycles. If batch job control was good enough for me, it should be good enough for everybody! (So I did see the light on that one, now I'm a rabid Unix fanatic.)
Got a CS degree at Stanford (while taking quite a few feminist studies classes along the way). Went off to work at The Geometry Center, a research group where developing free software was a major part of our mission. Came back to Stanford to get a PhD in CS. Along the way I adapted some research software for use in a free SGI visualization product.
I am used to almost always being the only or one of the few women in the room. One of the few sports I enjoy doing is kickboxing, which is at least as male dominated. I probably wouldn't have chosen to either start or continue with that if I hadn't built up reserves of confidence from my experiences in CS.
I do believe the low percentage of women in CS is due to cultural conditioning, and that the gender imbalance causes professional difficulties ranging from extreme to subtle. Ellen Spertus has several essays on this (which are worthwhile enough that I'll add yet another pointer to them). In my case most of the difficulties have been subtle, and I've benefitted from many mentors from many people over the years. Most of them have been male, but it's worth pointing out that at my first computer job my boss was female as was hers.
-- Tamara