Where have all the Girl Geeks gone?

Is open source closed to women geeks? Recently the GNOME desktop project put out a call for submissions to a summer programming mentorship, and received 181 applications... from 181 men. This spurred GNOME to action, and this week they announced a new outreach program for women only, to encourage more feminine coding. This brings to light the well known issue of a dearth of women in science & technology. Women with bachelor's degrees in computer science peaked in 1985 at 37%, and has been dropping since. Recent numbers show 28% of computer science degrees go to women. (This is in spite of the fact that women now earn 57% of all bachelor's degrees at college). According to GNOME, the percentage of women in free software development is much lower - just 2% of free software developers have the brains, but not the balls (so to speak). If you'd like to lend a hand & help engage more girls and women in compu sci, start at Association for Women in Computing or ACM-W. Best one-liner on this story goes to Nick Farrell, for his gem: A woman's place is in the Gnome. <grin>