My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

We're currently 22 people. 5 are female. Which makes 23%, more or less in the ballpark for professional software-development.

But those 4 women are 2 graphic designers, 1 assistant (manning the telephone, and doing simple menial work, no formal education) 1 woman doing cleaning and 1 programmer.

Which mean that among our *programmers* less than 10% are female.

Our graphic designers are very competent, do excellent work, have a solid education to back them and do a job that would be severly needed in free software too. But it's not a job that would lead them to post on the kernel mailing-list very often, even if they where doing it, which they don't.

When it comes to free software, I see no large difference between the sexes. 3 of our males are heavily into free software as users and have minor contributions, 2 additional have some experience with it. Among the females the percentage is similar, 1 of them knows free software well (though as a user, not a contributor), and 1 other has some experience with it.

A single example doesn't show anything. Just saying, from my POV I *do* see the problem that females are severly under-represented in technical work. But I *DONT* see any evidence whatsoever that free software is worse than proprietary software in this respect.

If anything, the female participation in the LUGs both here in Stavanger and in Bergen is *higher* than that. Not high, but higher than among the technical staff at my worksplace. Perhaps in the LUGs on the order of 20-25%.

I've worked in three different countries, visited workplaces at other three countries, even in Scandinavia which supposed to be very emancipated, still I haven't noticed that 28% percent women. I had three female bosses so far, that's more than the amount of female software developers in the current project I'm working in (~20 developers, 1 female).

Also, though I know saying this is futile: the sexist crack about secretaries was unnecessary and vile.

Unfortunately political correctness sometimes leads to decreasing sense of humour. Anyway, when I was 10 years old and we had a kind of computer class in the school (completely voluntary, at afternoons), I don't seem to remember many girls attending. I don't seem to remember that there were any girls at all, even though the teacher was a female math teacher. I'm pretty sure this has nothing to do with the impoliteness of some developers: if it's not biology, then it's a socialization issue at a quite young age.

One more note: I know a couple of people personally, who work in financial jobs. Auditors, controllers, etc. All of them are female. I don't know much about that environment, but I think it's harsher than software development, after all, they work with hard money.