Thought for a Topic

[bcholmes]

Note to self: consider suggesting a WisCon panel on the role of women in the tech industry in general, and Open Source software in particular. I think that Emma Jane Hogbin's presentation is a good starting point, but there are a lot of good analses of the problem.

I particularly liked finding the link to the Five Geek Social Fallacies.

Two interesting data points to look up:

1. What percentage of speakers at JavaOne were women?
2. This week, Agile 2008 is taking place in Toronto. Is the percentage any different there?

Comments

[indefatigable42.livejournal.com]

You should join the LinuxChix (http://www.linuxchix.org/) mailing list and ask if anyone there goes to WisCon and would want to talk about it, or would have any ideas for a panel. You'd get lots of feedback there.

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

Although I have no idea what the men/women proportion is at the conference, I note that a female friend of mine is presenting at the Agile.

I'm only replying because I'm thinking, hey, that's where glib_dichotomy is. Nifty! I'm not making any sort of statement. Caveat caveat yadda yadda.

[badgerbag.livejournal.com]

I'm in... especially if we bring it round to talking about female characters in science fiction and how sf portrays hackers & geeks & techies

[heyfoureyes.livejournal.com]

Remember the University of Wisconsin study that just came out on lack of a gender difference (http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1826399,00.html) in math ability on standardized tests.

[secretsoflife.livejournal.com]

a couple of resources:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/gendergap/www/index.html <-- this book is the main reason i didn't drop out of CS.

I've also tagged a few relevant things on delicious: http://delicious.com/hypatia.ca/opensource+unlockingtheclubhouse

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

Thus Spake Zuska (http://scienceblogs.com/thusspakezuska/) is a good resource on women and sexism in science and engineering.