Dave Shea and some other peo­ple have raised the topic “where are all the women in css design”? He lists the major blogs dis­cussing the issue so I won’t bother list­ing them here again. Basi­cally, they seem to be out there, per­haps in slightly lower num­bers than the blokes, but apart from a cou­ple of notable excep­tions like Molly and Holly they’re not as loud.

Well, peo­ple, if you think design women are rare, I’d like to intro­duce you to all the female Cold­Fu­sion devel­op­ers that I’ve ever met in per­son: Kim from my local CFUG, and Patti Lee who I sat next to at the MXDU blogger’s din­ner. Yep, that adds up to a grand total of two.

I know of oth­ers, of course, that I have never met… Sandy Clark, Fuse­boxer of great note… Kathryn But­terly and Jeanne Sarfaty-Glazer from the old Fuse­box Advi­sory com­mit­tee, nei­ther of whom I’ve heard any­thing about for ages… Erika Walker-Arnold from CFTalk… there’s a hand­ful of oth­ers, but still, not many.

Even where I work — office of 16 peo­ple — I was the first girl 5 years ago, and while we have had at times up to two other female employ­ees, they’ve been either graph­ics, HTML or accounts. Not that I was a devel­oper to start with, and not that I can really call myself a devel­oper any­more, with all the other roles I have.

So why do I think there’s not more of us? Dunno. Why does any­one end up writ­ing web appli­ca­tions? The last thing I would have thought about at school was “Wow, those web-based database-backed busi­ness and ecom­merce appli­ca­tions, now that would be a cool career”! Even at uni it was all Flash ani­ma­tions, 3D mod­el­ling, band web sites and cd-rom zines. Not a data­base in sight, although I love them now.

You wanna know what I actu­ally think? Women have a ten­dency (warn­ing: extreme stereo­typ­ing ahead) to be nat­u­rally good at com­mu­ni­cat­ing, liais­ing, man­ag­ing, plan­ning, teach­ing and per­form­ing sim­i­lar roles in IT. So women who could end up as code mon­keys get directed into those kind of areas when the need arises, and they never go back.

Slightly related note: a post on CFAussie tonight about the ori­gins of OO Pro­gram­ming ended up lead­ing me to the Wikipedia entry on Ada Lovelace, the author of the world’s first com­puter pro­grams and an all round groovy chick. It made inter­est­ing read­ing — one bit in par­tic­u­lar con­flicted with some other things I’d read:

biog­ra­phers have noted that Lovelace strug­gled with math­e­mat­ics, and there is some debate as to whether Lovelace under­stood deeply the con­cepts behind pro­gram­ming Babbage’s engine, or was more of a fig­ure­head used by Bab­bage for pub­lic rela­tions purposes.

Being quite inter­ested in the ori­gins of com­puter pro­gram­ming, espe­cially from the female angle, I read quite a bit about our Ada back at uni (when I was learn­ing the lan­guage Ada, actu­ally) and most of what I read back then was kind of the oppo­site — that Bab­bage, while bril­liant, was not par­tic­u­larly prac­ti­cal, and Ada’s con­tri­bu­tions were impor­tant to high­light the poten­tial real-world appli­ca­tions of his inven­tions. That is, she under­stood it bet­ter than he did.

And to veer even fur­ther off the top­i­cal path — hey, it’s 2am here, there’s cool music on RAGE (selec­tions picked by a 15 or 16 year old Daniel Johns from Sil­ver­chair, quite a few years back), and I have to be at my grandma’s by 6am tomor­row (this) morn­ing to cook her break­fast — I highly rec­om­mend The Dif­fer­ence Engine, Bruce Ster­ling and William Gibson’s col­lab­o­ra­tive novel. It’s a kind of 18th cen­tury alter­nate sci­ence fic­tion his­tory, based on the sup­po­si­tion that Bab­bage actu­ally man­aged to build his the­o­ret­i­cal com­put­ers, ush­er­ing in the infor­ma­tion age early. It’s very cool.

I’m ram­bling, sorry. Good night!