More women in the Perl community? Why should I care?

More women in the Perl community? Why should I care?

Tags: Perl, women, feminism

It is a recurring topic that got another push by the OSCON keynote of Skud about Standing out in the crowd so let me go over a couple of reasons why I should or should not care about more women in the Perl community.

I did not do any research but I was lucky to find this blog entry of Elizabeth Naramore about Gender in IT, OSS, and PHP, and how it affects us *all*

She points out two reasons:

Reason #1: Diversity makes us all more creative and innovative.

Equally-gendered teams are more innovative, and innovation is crucial to the success of open source.

Reason #2: Help your (future) daughter

As statistics go the percentage of women in the whole IT industry is dropping. Reverting that trend can help your daughter find her career 10-20 years from now. Helping more women to join the Perl community will help more women to get in te IT industry in general. (I hope).

Other reasons

I am sure there might be other reasons as well. Some might even be valid. BTW it is interesting that there was also a Python related post: Roll call: Women in Python

See also GeekFeminism