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Last week I had the good fortune of attending DrupalCon Barcelona 2007 -- a convergence of some 400+ people involved in the Drupal open source project, from all over the world.
7% of us were women. And I dare say that was not an under-reprentation of the Drupal community as a whole.
It really might seem, at first blush, to be quite surprising that an open source project like Drupal, which has a very open, inviting and not-all-that-macho development community, has so few women, but the problem of female under-representaqtion is endemic across technology; open source is no exception. During a BOF session at DrupalCon Barcelona 2007, some of us wondered why that is.
The consensus answer: visibility.
Working in the shadows (or at least alone in one's room)
When we went around the table, introducing ourselves, right away we found we had something besides Drupal in common: nearly all of us were self-taught. We certainly were not products of big engineering schools. None of us had career counsellors pushing us into IT. In fact, most of us kind of stumbled into web programming and development almost by accident. No, we came from business, accounting, film, art, activism....
What struck me was that we noticed the same thing in the Deeply Geeky session at BlogHer 2006: nearly all the women in tech who were present were self-taught. The message: it's never too late.
Meet Robin. ("robeano"). She just did first commit on signit module. How did she learn coding? Don't look at her academic background: she studied business administration. Now she's working for a large Drupal development company.
Say hello to Sophea ("ms.static") from Helsinki (by way of Sydney and Delhi). She got into Drupal through experimental sound and participatory radio. She describes herself as more of an audio geek than a coder, but has found her interest in collaborative audio systems has drawn her into the Drupal community. Now she's interested in pushing Drupal in terms of handling sound.
Tracy is with Greenpeace. She started learning Drupal only this past spring. She had been working with Cold Fusion for 10 years, and ended up managing the web side of the Greenpeace UK office.
Zoe ("zoeyk") is an information architect. Before sitting down at our round table, she was wondering what she's doing here at DrupalCon "with all these guys." She comes out of the non-profit arts organizing and curating world, and got involved in technology more from the user side. She finds Drupal challenging, so she's trying to ease into the Drupal world. I think that's how a lot of us felt at the start.
Then there's Stephanie ("stephthegeek"). She says she's always been a geek, but fakes being a programmer. (We all laughed.) She does freelance work as a themer.
You don't have to be a rock star (to be a star)
In open source communities, the only barrier to entry is your own initiative (and complementary bravery, determination, curiosity and -- hopefully -- bliss). In a do-ocracy, you can gain credibility just by doing. No certificates required.
And you can start at the proverbial bottom and rise up to become a star.
Look at Addi ("add1sun"). Her background had nothing at all to do with computers. Now a major coding contributor to Drupal, Addi learned php and Drupal only a year and a half ago! She had studied to be an anthropologist and lived in Thailand for a while and then came back to the States and started working for the government back state-side, where she was just "stamping and moving paper." Then the IT department wanted her to be an end-user to test a new program for her department. The thing is, she soon discovered that it was easier for her to learn the code and just fix it than to try to explain to the IT coders what they had to code. From that she became the systems administrator for her department. Now she's a full-time Drupal developer and trainer , and on the board of the recently formed Drupal Association [my bad].
Karen ("KarenS") kind of stormed onto the Drupal scene all of the sudden. But like the others, she did not study computers: she was a CPA. She happened to like computers,
