When do women write open source code? When it refers to knitting! No lie. I linked yesterday to Stine’s progress bar for WordPress Widget, and sure enough, its original usage, for her, was to chart several craft projects (a really nice Baptism/Christening gown is what I saw). I think it’s ironic that the invisible labor of the past is now the invisible labor of the future, yet we all know that this invisible labor at least translates into realistic funds and money when really good code gets bought, improved on, merchandised, etc.
Source of this debate (for me at least) stems, from Sarah Allen, a bitchin’ programmer and one of the original core at Macromedia’s ShockWave. She pitched a women’s org- San Francisco Women on the Web– a “free dinner” at a place of our choice if some women contributed to open source. At the time, I thought: when we get equal pay for equal work, we may want to contribute to projects. But now I realize, that the use of the programming hasn’t been compelling until somehow, it merged with knitting.
Wait! Kodak’s blog has a post today about cats, and that will rake in the women to open source projects: the cat flipbook. Voila. See, it was just a matter of time.
Now I’m working on open source code (Sarah, better book a table for 2 at French Laundry) for haikus. Women like to write… girls get higher test scores than boys, at least in SF, in writing…
(apologies for stereotypes re: knitting, cats, women, and other pink collar interests)