From Ada to Barbie

Last week, Mattel announced that, as a result of a poll of fans, for Barbie’s next career, she will be a computer engineer.



Even if new Barbie's fashions has been designed by Mattel in order to be as chic as possible (very different from the one of her popular predecessor Ada Lovelace), I'm pretty sure that the results of the poll has been influenced more by the word of mouth spreded in previous month in developpers comunities than by the real wishes of young girls.



The reality infact is that only 2% of women work in FLOSS communities, against more than 25% in proprietary software. In the development field, numbers are even lower: the percentage of Open Source women developers falls down to almost 1% (European Commission FLOSSPOL 2002-2005).

Many FLOSS projects already had women's groups to try to invert this negative trend: Ubuntu Women, PHP Women, GNOME Women, DrupalChix, and many others.

SpagoWorld's projects are a nice exception in this sense with a percentage of women invloved just a little bit under 50%. SpagoBI core team, for example, is composed at this time by 10 person, 6 men and 4 women. Among them three work on developement and one is the project leader.