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At DrupalCon Boston 2008, which took place this past week, some 850-900 people attended. Of those, only 2% 7% were women. Just a few months ago, we represented 7% at DrupalCon Barcelona 2007. So are things getting worse no better for women in the Drupal open source software world? 
I don't think so. For one thing, some of the biggest contributors and community leaders in Drupal are women. Several of us are Permanent Members of the Drupal Association. Some of the prominent Drupal design/development services companies are headed by women. (Disclosure: I am president of one of them.) 
It's not enough. We need to get more women involved in Drupal and open source. Indeed, we want to get more people involved in Drupal and open source. What's the answer? I said before: 
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.
Well, so far we're visible. 
But even this is not enough. 
Part of the problem lies not in macho coding culture, but rather in the woeful state of computer and software education in our schools. Most of the people involved in open source are there in spite of their formal educations (or lack thereof). Computer work is pretty much taught only in Computer Science departments, which usually are subsets of Mathematics departments. Despite the fact that nearly every student will be working with computers in whatever field they enter, they likely will never have even one class where they study any sort of computer science or algorithm theory. 
And then there's open source software, which still is largely invisible to Computer Science departments. Perhaps this is because Computer Science professors aren't very familiar with open source. All I know is that it's not because open source software skills aren't marketable. It's one area where market growth has been spectacular. 
Is it any wonder that women especially are not likely to end up in an open source software community? As I noted before, the leading women involved with Drupal came to it from other vocations and educational backgrounds. 
Angie, Addi, Karen and Michelle may be luminaries within the Drupal world, but outside of that world how well are they known? Women who stumble upon Drupal are almost certainly made to feel welcome -- it's really a friendly and open community -- but how many women who are programming or design oriented have even heard of Drupal? The visibility factor may have gone up two big notches in the past couple of weeks when two high-profile women in tech have blogged about their new interest in Drupal. 
Last month, Anne Zelenka got interested in Drupal -- interestingly not because of Drupal's features or quality of code, but rather because a venture capital firm got interested enough to back Acquia (which just launched with the intention of becoming for Drupal something like what RedHat is for Linux).
I didn’t even know until I read a recent post from Cote’ that there’s a venture-funded Drupal startup, Acquia. Surely I saw that when Cote’ first mentioned it, but it didn’t impress me until now — because now I have an actual project or two or three to use it on. I think that’s pretty cool even if $7M sounds like nothing to my GigaOM-jaded brain. It makes me feel that betting my project (and more important my human capital) on Drupal is a reasonably rational thing to do.
Shelley Powers started asking questions about
