Girls and Software

Susan Sons — Tue, 04 Feb 2014 21:14:11 +0000

December 2013's EOF, titled "Mars Needs Women", visited an interesting fact: that the male/female ratio among Linux Journal readers, and Linux kernel developers, is so lopsided (male high, female low) that graphing it would produce a near-vertical line. I was hoping the piece would invite a Linux hacker on the female side of that graph to step up and move the conversation forward. And sure enough, here we have Susan Sons aka @HedgeMage. Read on.—Doc Searls

Yep, I said "girls". Since men were once boys, but women sprang from the head of Zeus full-grown and fighting like modern-day Athenas, you can start flaming me now for using that nasty word...unless you'd like to see the industry through the eyes of a girl who grew up to be a woman in the midst of a loose collection of open-source communities.

Looking around at the hackers I know, the great ones started before puberty. Even if they lacked computers, they were taking apart alarm clocks, repairing pencil sharpeners or tinkering with ham radios. Some of them built pumpkin launchers or LEGO trains. I started coding when I was six years old, sitting in my father's basement office, on the machine he used to track inventory for his repair service. After a summer of determined trial and error, I'd managed to make some gorillas throw things other than exploding bananas. It felt like victory!

When I was 12, I got my hands on a Slackware disk and installed it on my computer—a Christmas gift from my parents in an especially good year for my dad's company—and I found a bug in a program. The program was in C, a language I'd never seen. I found my way onto IRC and explained the predicament: what was happening, how to reproduce it and where I thought I'd found the problem.

I was pretty clueless then—I hadn't even realized that the reason I couldn't read the code well was that there was more than one programming language in the world—but the channel denizens pointed me to the project's issue tracker, explained its purpose and helped me file my first bug report.

What I didn't find out about until later was the following private message exchange between one of the veterans who'd been helping me and a channel denizen who recognized my nickname from a mailing list:

coder0: That was a really well-asked question...but why do I get the feeling he's a 16yo boy?

coder1: Because she's a 12yo girl.

coder0: Well...wow. What do her parents do that she thinks like that?

coder1: I think she's on a farm somewhere, actually.

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Mars Needs Women

Doc Searls — Thu, 05 Dec 2013 16:44:53 +0000

by Doc Searls

Linux is pretty much an all-male project. Let's change that.

Here at Linux Journal, nearly 100% of our subscribers are male. So are all of our editors and regular writers, with the single exception of the one in charge. Meanwhile, our publisher and Webmistress are both female. In fact, so is our entire ownership. I bring this up because I believe women have leadership advantages that most guys—especially in tech—fail to respect, perhaps because we guys have been poorly taught to respect them. Garrison Keillor explains this in The Book of Guys:

Here's what they won't tell you in class:

Girls had it better from the beginning, don't kid yourself. They were allowed to play in the house, where the books were and the adults, and boys were sent outdoors like livestock. Boys were noisy and rough, and girls were nice, so they got to stay and we had to go. Boys ran around in the yard with toy guns going kkshh-kkshh, fighting wars for made-up reasons and arguing about who was dead, while girls stayed inside and played with dolls, creating complex family groups and learning to solve problems through negotiation and role-playing. Which gender is better equipped, on the whole, to live an adult life, would you guess? ...Is there any doubt about this? Is it even close?

...Men adore women. Our mothers taught us to. Women do not adore men; women are amused by men, we are a source of chuckles. That's because women are the makers of life, and we aren't. We will never breast-feed. We get more than our share of loot and we are, for some reason, incredibly brave and funny and inventive, and yet our role in procreation basically is to get crazy and howl and spray our seed in all directions.

So we carry adolescence around in our bodies all our lives.

Later he adds this:

Spectacular dumbness is a guy type of gift. We are good at great schemes and failed brilliance, and some eras seem to encourage this.

He wrote that in 1993, one year before Linux hit v1.0 and Linux Journal was born, and two years before the Net as we know it today (graphical browsers, ISPs, Amazon, Craigslist, cookies) came together. Since then, great schemes and failed brilliance have been running non-stop in the technology world, even through bust cycles. And, with too few exceptions (for example, Linux Journal), guys have run the show.

It's easy to see this as a matter of leadership. In "Silicon Valley Has a Code Name for Sexism & Racism", Vivek Wadhwa says:

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