Donate to the Ada Initiative, support women in free/open culture, get a snazzy Ada Lovelace pendant

Vaurora sez, "Wikipedia has 9% women editors, open source software a mere 2% women. You can change these numbers by donating to the Ada Initiative and getting a pendant with a portrait of Countess Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer. The Ada Initiative is the world's only non-profit dedicated entirely to increasing women in open technology and culture (open source, Wikipedia, Creative Commons, fan culture, etc.). Founded by Linux kernel file systems hacker Valerie Aurora and computational linguistics grad student Mary Gardiner in early 2011, the Ada Initiative has already made big changes in open technology and culture with projects like the conference anti-harassment policy. Today, you can attend over 30 conferences organized by people who agree that women shouldn't be harassed or groped (previously an opinion up for vigorous debate)!"

Support women in open technology and culture | Donate to the Ada Initiative (Thanks, Vaurora, via Submitterator!)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: charitable giving • floss • gender • happy mutants • submitterator

More at Boing Boing

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

E T

“Wikipedia has 9% women editors… ” donate and get a pendant or become an editor?
- John Smith
  
  I’m glad you weren’t too intimidated to reply to this. I am.
http://nmjk.myopenid.com/ nmjk

@Craig R Meyer
You’re right that “most” women have little interest in these subjects, but then, statistically, “most” men also have less interest in these subjects, because there are a host of other occupations that are occupied by women and men alike.

The audiences that these sorts of initiatives are encouraging are those who *are* interested but are readily excluded from the efforts due to (whether deliberate or inadvertent) discrimination, abuse, and the multitudinous “default” ways of interacting that implicitly advantage male-typical behaviour because that’s the prototype around which the field was generated.

The reasons cited in my preceding paragraph all harbour vast amounts of debate, vitriolic disagreement, evidence, and counter-evidence, and are all worthy of addressing on their own. I don’t intend to defend or pursue any question of whether they exist or don’t, are relevant or not, etc. I use them only to posit that there are existing obstacles for women who *are* interested in the STEM fields, and that that is the reason the initiatives you object to exist.

We’re not forcing girls who would rather be psychologists, or nurses, or teachers, (or whatever) into STEM. We’re encouraging the girls whose preferences are already STEM.