So, I signed up to write a blog post for Ada Lovelace day as I am a woman, I'm in tech, and womens' issues are altogether close to my heart. As today started I didn't think that I was actually going to get around to doing it with the other mountains of things to do piled up around me - literally in part, as I'm moving. But a tweet about webchick's AL day list prompted me to at least throw something together.
It won't be a surprise to anyone when I say that, as a side of effect of the global view that women being born inherently over-emotional and irrational, tech and even more specifically programming circles have been and still are largely a boys' club. We men and women living in modern times owe a lot to daring and admirable women who have forced their way into being considered equal, able to vote, owning property, holding jobs and countless other rights we now take for granted.
I'm happy to be involved in a community, specifically the Drupal community, where a woman has become the co-head cheese if you will. Now, honestly, I don't know Angie Byron personally. I don't think I've ever actually *met* her, though like most people reading this, I know of her, have heard her speak, seen her around at Drupalcons and admire her inconceivable (for me, anyway) ability to keep this giant community and code base together.
Luckily for her, as it might be sort of creepy, I'm not even intimately familiar with her experience in the community and how she became one of the few people in the world whose knowledge of this platform that is used by some of the biggest companies in the world, thousands of websites and a kajillion users worldwide garnered her the position as the co-maintainer for the whole freaking thing. But that is damned impressive. I can't even keep up with group messages or the state of particular modules let alone the whole shebang!
Another layer if impressiveness is added on when you consider that the Drupal community, while as a whole is fairly progressive, isn't immune to hosting factions of people who have a very boys' club attitude. The Drupalchix group page says that only 10% of the Drupal community consists of women, which is better than 1.5% of the open source world as a whole. Furthermore, the members of the Drupalchix group feel a need for it to exist, which I would call pretty strong anecdotal evidence.
Layered onto the rest, consider this blog post that I read - sadly, I don't remember where I read it, but it was about someone's experience speaking of Drupal in a country where women are still second rate citizens. The author mused about what it meant that they were presenting this platform to a bunch of men who wouldn't normally recognize a woman as a figure of authority. But here they were learning this platform where, should they ever contribute back to its core, a woman is likely to be the one to approve or deny its inclusion. If you know of the article I'm speaking of please leave the link. That is a powerful thing.
I'm not sure if this post is a duplicate of one that may be written a little better or actually thought out before hand. If such a post exists, I could not find it. But I wanted to make sure that every day women, in addition to historical figures, were being recognized. Of course also specifically Angie, whom many, MANY people owe part of their livelihood and their company's success (and their awesome personal blogs existence, even) to her efforts.
yXGeDGdtzvh
RafOw0 fbzvjphyqrid, [url=http://foixytxubsiu.com/]foixytxubsiu[/url], [link=http://mifterklktii.com/]mifterklktii[/link], http://iaurhddedpmb.com/
Angie, that is so lovely and
Angie, that is so lovely and flattering coming from you - you are easily the most inspiring and encouraging woman in tech as far as my career has gone, and I'm sure many would say the same.
whoa
whoa, I would of never guessed that I would be inspiring anyone to anything but villainy or something.
I really think that the women in our community add to it's awesomeness, and not necessarily because they are women and women have some secret magical ability or anything. The key is diversity, because the way I see it, Drupal powers an incredible range of websites in a ton of different categories. So to maintain a system like this, we need an incredible range of people from a ton of different categories. Not just people from both sexes, but also people from all nationalities, all ethnic backgrounds, all religious backgrounds, etc...
If 1 or 2 similar people work on a project and they agree on everything right away, there's a good chance it'll suck and/or be very limited to only the vision of these few individuals.
Now if you take 20 or more really diverse people and have them work on a project, chances that they'll agree on everything right away pretty much dissipate and stuff turn into finding the golden middle way that doesn't piss anyone off too much. Granted, this also has it's downsides... speed for instance. But I think the upsides outweigh the downsides.
And Angie... don't even try to downplay your role in this, it won't work anyway :P
Wow!
I can't believe you took time out of moving to write this post. Now that's dedication! Thank you so much for mentioning me! I don't think we have ever "met" either, but let's make sure we change that at Drupalcon SF, ok? :)
For being an off-the-top-of-your-head post, there is actually quite a lot to chew upon here.
On the whole, I think the Drupal community is a lot more egalitarian than most, and I'm happy to be one example of that as the Drupal "co-head" cheese. :D But we are definitely not immune to sexism. The most recent example being the Louise incident on the Drupalcon Paris website last year. It was interesting, because one woman's observation that the image on the website seemed sexist to her evoked a *flurry* of responses, from all ends of the opinion spectrum. Louise essentially became a catalyst for bringing the larger issue of sexism in technology to the forefront of our community's consciousness, when it really never comes up in "normal" day-to-day conversation in the issue queues and whatnot.
The Drupalchix group exists, but it was started primarily so the folks at the "real life" Drupalchix get-together at Drupalcon Boston would have a place to talk after the conference, to continue discussions that we started there about the fact that we exist ;) and how to get more women involved in the community. Since then, it's evolved to becoming a place where we can not only discuss over-arching issues of gender inequality and how they relate to our community (like tokenism), but it also acts as a welcome mat for new women coming into the Drupal community, and even a place where people can get help on Drupal problems in a less "scary" environment. And after Drupalcon SF, it might become something else yet again. :)
I don't think I've seen that post about presenting Drupal in a place where women are treated as second-class citizens (was it the U.S.? j/k ;)), but that's a fascinating observation. And not only am I approving/denying their patches, but Karen Stevenson, Allie Micka, Stella Power, and/or Michelle Cox probably wrote several of the modules they're using, Addison Berry heads up the team who maintains the documentation they read to understand the project, Lisa Rex is coordinating efforts to redesign the website they use to download modules, and Jen Lampton is co-organizing the big-ass conference in a month where the next wave of Drupal innovation they'll use on their projects will be incubated. I think Drupal serves as a great example of a project that has a lot of women behind its "community plumbing," and that fact really causes you to think about how many women are doing awesome things in other tools we use day-to-day and take for granted.
Anyway, great post, Theresa. And thanks once again for the shout-out. I'm honoured. :)