1. Women in IT ● Definitions ● Situation: ● Women in IT in general ● Women in Free Software ● Possible Reasons ● Why is the presence of women so important? ● Actions ● Links ● Sources

2. Definition [Wikipedia 8.07] Information technology (IT), as defined by the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), is "the study, design, development, implementation, support or management of computer-based information systems, particularly software applications and computer hardware." In short, IT deals with the use of electronic computers and computer software to convert, store, protect, process, transmit and retrieve information, securely.

3. Situation ● Women in IT – USA: 17% in CS Courses (2004) – EU: between 15 and 35% (2004) [1] ● Women working as IT specialists – USA: 25% (2005-IT) – EU : 28 % (2001-ITC)

4. Situation (2) ● Women in Free Software – according to a Techworld Article in 2005, there are approx. 25% of women amongst the proprietary software developpers. [2] – Only betwe en 1.5% [3] and 2.4% [4] of Free Software contributors are women.

5. Possible reasons ● The myth of programming skill and knowledge [5] : – population distribution is imbalenced in the Free Software based knowledge demography -> unbalanced gender distribution amongst strong programming culture: if one does not code, s/he seems to be left out of the FS movement. – Boundary and barriers of accessing ICT knowledge seem to be established instead of breaking down the hierarchy of accessing ICT knowledge

6. Possible reasons (2) ● There is no biological reason for a gender difference in programming ability: – Cultural backgrounds – Educational backgrounds – Historical backgrounds -> many women today do not have a strong programming experience.

7. Presence of women is important ● for professional reasons ● for the Free Software movement ● for womens personal interests

8. Actions ● Educational at home ● educational in school ● in professional surrounding ● in the Free Software community ● diminish machism in the Free Software community without falling into an exagerated feministic behaviour

9. Actions (2) ● Programmers DO NOT play a more important rule in the FS community ●...”The code has to follow documentation, otherwise it's a bug :-)” Patricia Jung on debian-women ML [6] ● FS cannot get widespread without documentation, reporting bugs and mentoring.

10. Links ● LinuxChix: http://www.linuxchix.orghttp://www.linuxchix.org ● Debian-Women: http://www.debian-women.orghttp://www.debian-women.org ● Ubuntu-Women: http://www.ubuntu-women.orghttp://www.ubuntu-women.org ● Fedora-Women: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Women http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Women ● BSD-Chix: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/BSDChix/ http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/BSDChix/

11. Links (2) ● Gnome-Women: http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWomen http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWomen ● KDE-Women: http://women.kde.org/http://women.kde.org/ ● PHP-Women: http://www.phpwomen.org/http://www.phpwomen.org/ ● Apache-Women-mailing list: http://mail- archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/www-women/http://mail- archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/www-women/ ● OSI-Women mailing list: http://www.opensource.org/ http://www.opensource.org/

12. Sources [1] http://www.ftu-namur.org/projets/proj-15.htmlhttp://www.ftu-namur.org/projets/proj-15.html [2] http://www.techworld.com/applications/news/index.cfm?NewsID=4182http://www.techworld.com/applications/news/index.cfm?NewsID=4182 [3] http://www.flosspols.org/deliverables/FLOSSPOLS-D16- Gender_Integrated_Report_of_Findings.pdfhttp://www.flosspols.org/deliverables/FLOSSPOLS-D16- Gender_Integrated_Report_of_Findings.pdf [4] http://www.eskar.dk/andreas/output/PersonalProfile.HTMhttp://www.eskar.dk/andreas/output/PersonalProfile.HTM [5] A Techno-Feminist Perspektive on the Free/Libre Open Source Software Development, Yuwei Lin, 2005 (GPL) [6] http://lists.debian.org/debian-women/2005/05/msg00116.htmlhttp://lists.debian.org/debian-women/2005/05/msg00116.html [7] http://cielissime.free.fr/linuxchixfr/femmes-en-info-16H30.pdfhttp://cielissime.free.fr/linuxchixfr/femmes-en-info-16H30.pdf

13. Licence This talk is released under the GPL v3 [I] and higher. [I] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html

14. Aknowledgment This talk ist based on various talks held by other women before me, namely – Aurélie Chaumat, – Melissa Draper, – Belinda Lopez, – Fernanda Weiden and many others. Many thanks to all the women (and men!) who keep this movement alive ! Myriam R. Schweingruber