Rock On, Julia Lerman!

Gracing the front page of ZiffDavis' DevSource this week is the smiling face of Julia Lerman, an early reader and commenter here on misbehaving.net, and only the the third person to be profiled as a ".NET Rock Star."

Of particular interest to me--and probably to many of our readers--is what she has to say about the underrepresentation of women in technology, especially in the Microsoft programming community:

I think that the lack of women in visible roles in our community is one of the biggest problems. A general consensus is that there are about 10% women in IT, and that this same percentage applies to programmers. But if you look at authors and conference speakers, it's miniscule in comparison. Take a look at the speaker list for TechEd 2004. There are as many speakers named Brian (including one Bryan) as there are women speakers.

Certainly, a lot of social and cultural factors make IT a more heavily male populated field, but I think that if we saw more visible role models that were women, two things would happen. One is that more women would make themselves known in the community and the other is that more young women would be encouraged to come into technology.

Clearly this interview is a step in the right direction. Congratulations, Julia!