No women?
Recently, I was reading your Raspberry Pi section with my daughter (age 9, wants to be a programmer when she grows up), and she noticed an interesting thing about your magazine that we thought we’d share with you.
Throughout the whole magazine women/girls are represented just seven times – two pictures of Rose from DrWho, the woman in the cartoon, a woman in an advert, two mentions of (nameless) wives and one of a mother. My apologies if we missed anything or if any of the names that are unclear (e.g. Geordiejedi) are women! No contributors, as far as I can tell, are women.
I realise that you want the best contributors, but it is a huge issue to young people—there is the saying, ‘if they don’t see it, they won’t be it’. When I was a 9-year-old, I was a keen Basic programmer, attending tech exhibitions, and reading AcornUser magazine. I lost interest as a teenager and ended up as a Geography teacher. Who knows if lack of female role models was a the cause!
Maybe other issues have a more representative gender balance? I hope so. If we want to make a difference to girls interested in computing, then being ‘gender blind’ – especially if the editorial team are all men – is no longer enough.
Joanna and Nancy Me ll or
Neil says: Many thanks for your letter on such an important topic and if I can reassure you it is something we do take to heart, with us all here having daughters, sisters, wives and mums.
Let me say I’d love to have more female contributors, but we’re limited by the people that actually approach us to become contributors. In my time as editor (now just over three years) not one person that’s inquired about writing has been female.
We could do more to encourage women to write but there are practical limits. Now, where we can we do cover women in technology; our last OSCON US trip we ensured we had a 50/50 split on male/ female interviews and we got to talk to some incredibly talented women in technology. When Les Pounder covers an event he’ll try to include female attendees— in his MozFest 2016 coverage there were two women interviewed.
My explanation for this (and you might recognise it) is that women historically and still today are not encouraged to pursue STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics) subjects. This manifests itself as a 50% dropout rate (outside of all-girl schools) when selecting courses at each qualification stage. So at GCSE there’s almost 50% female class members, A-level 20% and at degree level 12% or less, see
http://bit.ly/LXF222stem. So that’s bad enough, but when it comes to open source development things are even worse. Just 6% of open source devs are reported to be female, contrast that to 29% at proprietary software companies such as Microsoft and an average of around 19% in the general IT workforce, see http://bit.ly/ LXF222women.