On 07/08/2008, London School of Puppetry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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?
I've no idea about the forum or mailing list, but I've read statistics[1] which show that about 28% of people in IT are female but that only 1.5% of people within FOSS are female. A census of the Ubuntu community revealed that the proportion of women contributing was about 2.4%. I get the feeling this has changed in recent years, but there's certainly still a large gap. The people I know who use Linux and go to LUG meetings are anything from 16-70 (at a guess) year old males, with a few women in between. So there's certainly a large spread, but from my experience people tend to get involved at college/Uni or after retirement, when they have some free time. > 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? That's a whole can of worms ;) Group like Ubuntu-women and linuxchix[2], etc have certainly done some research and are trying to help the situation (mostly by providing support and encouragement for integrating women into the wider community). I would strongly recommend listening to the talk that Emma Jane Hogbin gave at both LUGRadio Live in the USA[3] and UK[4] this year. It's a good starting point into the subject. In fact, listen to them both as they cover slightly different things. [1] http://ubuntu-women.org/ [2] http://www.linuxchix.org/ [3] http://lugradio.org/live/USA2008/schedule [4] http://lugradio.org/live/UK2008/schedule - it's not available yet, but will be within the next few weeks. -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
