But not nec­es­sar­ily together, as you might assume from the title!

An inter­est­ing obser­va­tion from Rob Rohan on the Macro­me­dia MAX con­fer­ence held last week:

There are women at the con­fer­ence. Almost every devel­oper con­fer­ence
I’ve ever been to has been like 99 — 100% men. And I don’t mean women
just in the designer classes, as stereo­types would lead you to believe,
I mean in the cod­ing classes too. I’d say it was about a 50/50 mix
between men and women at the con­fer­ence. With the news talk­ing about the
decrease of women in math and sci­ence, it was refresh­ing to see.

RobRo­han: Max Observations

Com­pare this to Web Essen­tials 05 held in Syd­ney last month — admit­tedly a slightly dif­fer­ent audi­ence (the web stan­dards set). Mostly men, but quite a few women as well — I didn’t think to look for a per­cent­age but my gut feel­ing is maybe 30%. I’ll have to check with Russ and Peter on that one. But I know there was a con­certed effort to get a lit­tle bit of gen­der bal­ance on the speak­ers list as it had been all male the year before. WE05 achieved that in grand style with inter­na­tional super­stars Molly Holzschlag and Kelly Goto, as well as Aus­tralian Lisa Herrod.

Com­pare again to MXDU — I’ve been to all three of them so far and when peo­ple say “make sure you say hello — I’ll be the guy with glasses/wearing a red shirt/lugging around 3 powerbooks/whatever” I say “you’ll be able to spot me — I’ll be the chick”. Not quite true but might as well be — it’s a very male-dominated event.

Also our Cold­Fu­sion User Group — I’m the only female who shows up with any kind of reg­u­lar­ity. In fact I can only think of three other women who have ever turned up, in the three or more years we’ve been run­ning. Port80 has a few chicks, but again not many regulars.

This is the rea­son that Megs and I started Web Women — to find the female voice in the web indus­try. So far all we’ve actu­ally done is have geeky chatty lunches and break­fasts — but that’s a def­i­nite start, find­ing all these women and get­ting them out and talk­ing about the expe­ri­ence of being a chick in a male-dominated industry.

So what does this have to do with Apple Macs? Noth­ing really! Rob Rohan also talks about the huge num­ber of mac user devel­op­ers at MAX:

There were tons of Apple com­put­ers there. I’d say it was about a 60/40
split with PC’s being on top. And not one ibook — all power­books. I was
blown away by the num­ber of Mac’s there, and again, not just the
design­ers as homog­e­nized stereo­type would have you believe — they were
in cod­ing classes as well.

RobRo­han: Max Observations

Well, I def­i­nitely saw this at Web Essen­tials — except I’d say it was closer to 90% Macs and only 10% PCs. I had my trusty Tablet PC — still hang­ing on, nearly three years old and def­i­nitely look­ing the worse for wear on the exte­rior, but still truck­ing oper­a­tionally — and I was sur­prised to find myself sit­ting next to another Tablet user (coin­ci­den­tally, also female) at one of the ses­sions. I read a blog post some time later from a “DonnaM”:

yes, I’m com­pletely happy to demo my tablet — I do love it for geek and func­tional reasons

Don­naM: Web essen­tials 05 — Day 1

I fired off a com­ment apol­o­gis­ing for not hav­ing time to intro­duce myself prop­erly at the time, being a fel­low TabletPC user AND a chick at that — and it turns out that wasn’t the per­son I sat next to. Which means there was yet another female TabletPC user at WE05. Whoa — we’re tak­ing over.

Seri­ously though, as a PC user — and quite a fanat­i­cal one as well, I love my Tablet and would never go back to a non-penabled note­book — I def­i­nitely felt like a black sheep. Peo­ple would say things like “oh, Apple might make a TabletPC” as though that would be prefer­able and I’d finally be able to have a real com­puter despite my odd­i­ties. Sorry peo­ple, I actu­ally like Win­dows and won’t be switch­ing any­time soon. That’s def­i­nitely not trendy these days!

So there you go — I’m in two minori­ties now, in the web indus­try that is — I’m female AND a happy Win­dows user!