25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women

" So, I guess I disagree with:
1. The claim there is a universal women-in-computing problem. There are society-wide problems. (I guess it is different between countries and even specific neighborhoods)
And therefor
2. I doubt GNOME can do much to resolve the problem."

1. The problem of very few women becoming Free Software contributors affects all societies, regardless of the percentage of women who work on the proprietary software. Otherwise we would evidently have a large representation of women from a particular society, something I'm not aware of.

2. What GNOME and the Free Software community can do is help women who are teetering on the edge of the Free Software community integrate more fully, raise awareness of the value of Free Software contributions and the friendliness of the large parts of the Free Software community among women in technology, provide women contributing to different projects in Free Software a support network so that they don't feel so alone, and show that there are more women interested in contributing to Free Software than are already contributing. This solves problems on a certain level and helps specific people who have reached that level now (namely the 72 interns the program had so far).

Programs like this one also add to the general conversation on the subject and are *part* of the solution. No one effort can be *the* solution for something as complex as this. On other levels there are geeky parents ( http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2012/11/07/flip-all-the-pronouns ), building toys made attractive to girls already conditioned to like pink (Goldie Blox, Lego Friends), all sorts of math, science, technology, and robotics outreach for girls in school, and finally in Free Software OpenHatch that makes and extra effort to reach out to women with introduction to Free Software events in colleges and the Ada Initiative that helps make all Free Software conferences safer for women and fosters a community of women and their supporters in Free Software.