My CMS Can Kick Your CMS's Ass

Wow, everybody got quiet on this thread when the woman actually shows up. :-)

Sara, I had a chance to look at your blog and actually put it in my favorites before visiting here. With my primary background in the sciences (Atmospheric Science and for a while doubling in Environmental Studies), it's sad to say that women are few in number not only in IT but also in the sciences and engineering. I've seen a number of organizations do all they can to try to recruit more women into the "geek" fields and yet, the numbers pretty much remain the same. I wish it would take more than just encouragement to get women in the profession, but there seems to be something else also needed. What that something else is, I don't really know.

I will say, you're right we need to get more women into IT if we're ever going to allow the IT (and Drupal) culture to become more mainstream. In the mid 90s, as a meteorologist I started working with my agency's Website. I was good at it and was able to transition into IT very easily. However, that Website didn't really mature until I began working on the site with another fellow meteorolgist who also happened to be a woman. Her contributions literally transformed that site from Black & White to full living color. You ought to see what she has done lately with PHP and MySQL!

- Bryan

by training my daughters to use and develop drupal.
I am embarassed that my generation is responsible for such a random, inconsistant and unnecessarily hard set of standards and tools to master but kids seem to take it in their stride.

You are entirely correct.

A while ago, http://drupal.org/node/4877#comment-7695 we had a small discussion on this. Obviously 'getting more women to join' should not be a goal itself. 'getting a more diverse team' or 'opening up he community to not only a hapy few geeks' or something in those lines is.

I am not surprised to see, that more women join Drupal. It show Drupal is not entirely technical.

(Allright, that needs some clarificaion, i guess :) not insulting anyone, but i speak from a rather nasty experience. During my studies in Amsterdam (aviation, industrial and marine technologies) we had a women/man ration of 300/2 in our department. :/ )

Drupal has become multifaceted, and it thus appeals to more diverse people. hell, we even have designers these days :)

now, back to the point. Encouraging -profesionally- women to work in the community. or better, encouraging -profesionally- a more diverse developer (= contributors) base (which, i'd like to stress is not the same as a diverse user base) .

* open up the communication by providing more ways of communication. IRC, forums, blogs and ML appeals to certain folks only.
* open up, by meeting Real Life. We did that, it worked.
* listen better. We are very good at that (imo), but it can be improved. We should listen to what people around us say and learn from that. Silly example: if 200 people say drupal sucks for installing, they might have a point, even if we don't think so.
* Collaboration. even more then now,on different fields. I beleive nothing is more fun that to dive into a certain part or issue with a few people to fix a certain issue. It helps newer people, it brings people together, it feels more confortable for new people or for people in doubt if 'they belong to this community'.

---
Bèr Kessels
Professional www.webschuur.com
Personal bler.webschuur.com