Hi, Often on this list we talk about the Digital Divide in terms of money or access to technology. But there is another Digital Divide, and that is in terms of gender.....and in some ways it is even harder to conquer. Often I will give a talk at a university, and out of 200 people in the audience, only in the range of one to 10 will be a woman.
I ran into a group of women in Brazil called "LinuxChix Brazil", part of a larger organization called "LinuxChix International" (www.linuxchix.org), founded by a friend of mine, Deb Richardson (who has since "retired" from LinuxChix), and is currently run by Jenn Vesperman out of Australia. The Brazilian group recently published this page (which inspired me to write to the Digital Divide list today): http://www.linuxchix.org.br/node.php?id=193 which shows the wonderful work that they are going both for the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community, and also for the inclusion of women into that community. The movement has spread to other groups (another group in Brazil called "GNUrias" was started by the daughters of a friend of mine), and they are also doing good things by teaching, doing translations, writing code, etc. You can find information about them at http://www.gnurias.org.br/ but unfortunately this is only in Portugese (rats, should have spent more time at the HUMAN language lab when I was in college). There are, of course, many other groups advocating women in computing, but in my travels I have found one very interesting country, Malaysia. In Malaysia over 70% of the country's university graduates are women, and (not surprisingly) 70% of the people in IT are women. Apparently it is easy for men to get jobs right out of grade school, but harder for women, so the women go on to the university. It is the only country I know where the government has an active program to try to increase the number of MEN to enter and graduate from university, just to make the ratio an even 50-50. So while we continue to talk (and hopefully act) on the other issues of Digital Divide, let's not close our eyes to the lesser realized, but still potent social issues that can also affect it. Warmest regards, maddog -- Jon "maddog" Hall Executive Director Linux International(R) email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 80 Amherst St. Voice: +1.603.672.4557 Amherst, N.H. 03031-3032 U.S.A. WWW: http://www.li.org Board Member: Uniforum Association, USENIX Association (R)Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in several countries. (R)Linux International is a registered trademark in the USA used pursuant to a license from Linux Mark Institute, authorized licensor of Linus Torvalds, owner of the Linux trademark on a worldwide basis (R)UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group in the USA and other countries. _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
