As for my stance on the issue, I’m actually slightly down the middle. You bring up an excellent point on why there are few women being noted on the development side, merely from having little time to contribute to the community. In addition, I also agree there are just less woman in general who are interested in development, therefore, pure statistics states there will be less woman on such a list.

On the flip side however, I have found that subconsciously, men (in general) tend not to put as much stock into research, development and contributions made to technology from women. I speak out of pure instinct without any evidence to back it up, but I can remember during my university years, I was revered for being intelligent and geeky and the only female in the department, however, when it came to my research or my opinion given during departmental presentations or the like, the professors responded, but my fellow male students did not. They tended to pass over my opinion as if it were something mildly amusing they had read in the paper. Perhaps one feeds the other. Perhaps I simply amused them as opposed to enlightened them because there are so few woman doing similar endeavours. Or perhaps there are few women in technology because their opinions aren’t always listened to.

I’m not exactly sure which is right, perhaps a combination of discrimination and lack of numbers & time.

Just for clarification: I don’t really believe it’s discrimination at this point. It might have roots there, but I feel that at least in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand women are in the forefront of many industries. Other places in the world, too, but it does seem most commonplace in those countries.

Another clarification – Kim wrote:
” Molly wrote that only herself and Holly seemed note-worthy enough in people’s . . .”

I didn’t make that distinction, it was made for me in the discussion on Eric Meyer’s site. Being very familiar with Rachel’s work (we have a co-authorship on Dreamweaver and CSS from DMXZone, by the way) I wasn’t leaving her out of the list, but others were, and that’s what had me concerned.

Glad the conversation continues!

It’s very strange, I came from a background in telecom in the Northeast US, and it was the only field I saw where race, sex, or education didn’t play a role so much as could you get the job done. Not sure how that came about, but it probably had to do with opportunity and chance. When I went to film school, we learned that a lot of early film editors were women because it was considered a menial task…and the good fortune of those editors to reap the rewards of that kind of oversight.

Maybe we need something like that to happen web development? (just kidding.) It saddens me in this day and age that we still have these kinds of conversations.

Before I got into computers I was working as stagecrew in the theatre – a very male dominated area – and there once the guys realised I could lift the heavy stuff, wasn’t expecting any special treatment because I was a woman and could drink pints with the best of them, I never had any problems! I guess it is a little annoying that you sometimes feel you have to prove yourself whereas a guy would just be accepted but the more women that do prove themselves in male dominated areas then the easier it will be for those that follow – I hope!