misbehaving.net

beauty through technology

women in free software

Over at GrandTextAuto Nick's posted an interesting write-up of Hanna Wallach's recent talk on women in the open software movement. Did you know that while 28% of proprietary software developers are female, only about 1.5% of free software developers are? Or that while young men get their first computer at 15, on average, women, on average, have to wait until they're over 20?

Buy your daughters computers!

swapping gender on websites (a cognitive game)

Ping created a little hack that allows you to read websites with the gendered pronoun information swapped. It's a fascinating cognitive game because your brain is really used to certain assumptions about people based on gender. Spend a day surfing the web with the genders swapped and see when your brain starts itching.

The Debian Women Project

Hanna Wallach posted her slides from a talk she gave on Debian Women yesterday. She showed statistics showing that 10-20% of computer science undergrads are women, and that 20-35% of IT professionals are women, and yet there are only 4-8 women among the nearly 1000 developers of the open source Debian "universal" operating system. That's less than one percent. While Hanna mentions possible reasons briefly, her main concern in the talk is to show what is being done in Debian Women.

Debian Women started up last May, and looks like an excellent example of how visible womens' networks can really help when women are such a nearly-invisible minority.

The gender profile of Wikipedia

Joi Ito has been spending time with those heavily involved in the Wikipedia community. He has noticed that the bulk of active community members are women. He's curious if this is common of other wikis.

I'm curious if there are stats on Wikipedia's membership. Liz has pointed out that the bulk of librarians are women. I'm curious if there's a connection there.

Beyond the Pretty (Inter)Face

A lot of people have been sending me the link to the Visual Thesaurus lately, and it's picking up a lot of links in del.icio.us, as well. It's visually quite striking.

The first person who sent this to me, however, was my mother. And she suggested that I start by looking up the word "woman." So I did. You should, too. (I'll wait.)

Here are the meanings that the thesaurus assigns to this noun:

1. An adult female person (as opposed to a man)
2. Women as a class
3. A human female who does housework
4. (informal) A female person who plays a significant role (wife or mistress or girlfriend) in the life of a particular man.

The largest, most visually significant cluster of words shown in the visual representation focuses around "cleaning woman," and includes "charwoman," "char," and "cleaning lady" as additional terms.

I would expect something like this from an archaic dictionary...but not from a reference tool for the 21st century. This is not the definition of "woman" that I want my 7 and 9-year-old sons using as their basis for understanding gender.

Let's be careful about blindly accepting new tools--from thesauri to search engines--without thinking about the information within them, and their ability to shape perceptions.

Kinja

Meg and I are happy to announce the launch of Kinja, a new weblog reader we've been working on for a long time now.

NY Times on Kinja: Blog-Bleary? Try (What Else?) a Blog

Define "software developer"

Ben Trott's post, Software Development and Usability, over at SixLog:

Movable Type (and TypePad) is, and has always been, jointly developed by Mena and me, and she is every bit as much a "software developer" as I am... it's much easier to see "programming" as driving a product than "usability" or "architecture", but in reality, a poorly-designed product is just as unusable as a buggy one... one of the reasons that Movable Type is so popular is because the product combines element from both Mena and me. And I don't know if it's a female-male combination or if it's just the combination of our personalities, and frankly it really doesn't matter.

Golden Blogging Rule

Something for a Sunday Afternoon.

Swiped the link from Netwoman.

I gotta wonder how the Baptists are feeling about this killer app.