Tech Post #3: Women and Open Source Code

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)

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 8th, 2006 at 3:03 pm and is filed under feminism, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. View blog reactions Stumble it! icon_su.gif You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Viewing 2 Comments

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    I'm going to ignore the naseau coming up from the craft comments, and state that I think it's entirely a matter of numbers.

    If one in a thousand programmers contributes to open source, and 28% of those earning computing degrees are women, and 50% of them remain in computing careers, we certainly should expect very few women in open source.

    Add to the fact that women in families still do most of the housework and childrearing, and optional fun activities like contributing to open source are going to happen in even smaller percentages.
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    I'd like to point out that plenty of people contribute to open source projects "behind the scenes" by logging bugs, contributing to user forums and mailing lists, and writing to those on the project with feedback and feature ideas.

    Not everyone has the time to take a substantial unpaid role on one of these projects, but there are those of us who pitch in where we can to help out our favorite products.

    And this applies to people of any gender - there are plenty of projects that don't get developed or are abandoned because of lack of programmers. Men need to pay rent, too...
 

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