To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet) [LWN.net]

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 29, 2007 6:44 UTC (Sat) by Sertorius (guest, #47862)
Parent article: To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

This whole discussion is very "western-centric" (US/Europe/Australia
etc.), but it comes down to a fundamental problem: there aren't very many
women in Engineering and IT in the western world.

You will find the situation quite different in other contries, such as
China, Russia or (gasp) Iran. I am an electrical Engineer, and in
Australia this is one of the most male-dominated professions (much more so
than IT). However, having worked in China, I can say from first-hand
experience that at least 25% of the EE workforce is female (the company I
worked at had closer to 40%). In Iran, more than half of Engineering
graduates are women (my wife is Iranian and is an electrical engineer!).
Russia also has a culture of women in Engineering as so many young men
were killed in World War II that women were recruited en masse
to make up the shortfall - a legacy which remains to this day.

Want to see more women in Engineering? Go overseas! :-)

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Funny you should say this.

Posted Sep 29, 2007 8:09 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

I've seen a lot of "women in Engineering" in Russia. Testers, designers, writers. And one software engineer - among hundred or so.

I've also seen few women who have title "software engineer" but actually are creating Excel spreadsheets and test plans - and know nothing about complexities, scalability, etc. When they needed some serious redesign of system - invariable they shuffled it to the male colleague or subcontractor... Why they were there and had title "software engineer" ? Yup: they were legacy of "after World War II" era...