I was the design/user experience lead for the WordPress open source project for 4.5 years, and project managed the development team for most of that time as well. I’ve recently shifted gears to focus more on community management and growing our contributor ranks with an emphasis on increasing diversity, starting with women. Automattic is my employer, and graciously donates most of my time to work on the open source project.
I’ve lived all over the country, in almost every cool place I ever wanted to live. Right now I’m based in Portland, OR. I have three cats (which is one more than I meant to have), and am a good cook/baker. Last year I updated my name.
I’m a weird mix of bleeding-heart liberal, libertarian, and pro-regulation, so I have a terrible time taking quizzes that plot you on a political graph. For example, I don’t think marriage should exist as a governmentally-regulated status at all, but I do think you should have to pass a fairly comprehensive training program and obtain a license to be allowed to have/raise a child. Aside from a few oddities like that, I’m about as left as they come.
I like books, plants, baby sea turtles, and a bunch of other stuff that I have failed to make time for as I have gotten older and more dependent on the computer. My goal is to reduce the time I spend looking at screens and increase the time I spend looking at real things, and possibly to make a small pond in my backyard.
Jen Mylo, On Hiatus 
“…growing our contributor ranks with an emphasis on increasing diversity, starting with women.”
So, I read this passage and I am led to believe that women are not as engaged in the WP community at the same rate as men? I ask you why do you believe this is the case? It seems to me that if you are providing information on how to set up and thrive in this environment, the unadulterated information speak for itself and attract an equal number of male and female participants. It should not need to be biased to attract either gender. Enlighten me a little bit on this because I really want to understand the problem.
There are numerous resources on the internet about how societal bias and education skews toward men for tech stuff. We have not made it a project to collect such resources since it is apparent just by looking at speaker lists or contributor props that our numbers are skewed male.
Thanks for your reply Jen.
I think it would be important to look at some empirical data. I would especially be interested to see how this bears out as a correlate to age. I think that the bias is tremendously biased towards males in “older” age groups. However, I would reject male bias based solely on anecdotal evidence for the younger age groups.
I appreciate you sharing your opinion, but based on our experiences this is not true within the WordPress community.
In any case, what reason is there NOT to encourage women to use WordPress and got involved in our contributor community?