London School of Puppetry wrote: > In a conversation recently someone said to me that Ubuntu is only for > techies.....and blokes at that- and young blokes at that! > Out of interest, as a middle-aged woman- I rarely see any other female names > on the forum- but I really like Ubuntu but could not do without the help > from the Forum > -what is the general format of the forum?and could anything be done to > change the age/gender profile to make Ubuntu more accessible to others-OR > are there lots of middle-aged females out there?
Caroline >>> There was a poll of this list last December, which turned up some surprises about the age distribution of this list's membership - IIRC, there are a lot more older members than you might expect, and a significant number of retired folk. I can't find the data any more, but the thread included this post: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-uk/2007-December/010282.html (Anyone know how to recover the results?) But, as you say, there are very few women on this list (four or five max???). This is not unusual, is it? I took my wife to Stallman's talk in Manchester a little while ago, and she was not at all surprised to find herself one of only three or four women in a packed meeting of a couple of hundred or more. (BTW, she's not a computing/technology type, and only came to indulge me; but she enjoyed the talk enormously, and was deeply impressed with RMS's wit, diamond-sharp intellect and unyielding insistence on people using language precisely. She is, by the way, a psychologist! ;-) ) With regard to women in Linux, Val Henson's wonderful article remains a classic: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO/ Mac -- [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
