Women in Linux

Hello readers, today I am not going to tell you about some tricks and tweaks in Linux, instead I want to come forward with the issue of Women in Linux. As you all might know that Linux has been developing and growing so fast. People also has great influence about Linux and are pretty much interested in Linux, but among them many would be men, why women are not included in this very much ?

The basic reason might be like women are not so much interested in technologies; they are just using it not knowing much about it. Some women might think that it is good to stay away from Linux. Some might feel that other FOSS contributors will not treat them respectfully or they don’t want to be the only woman in the group. There are also many women who are interested in Linux and other technologies, but are always demoralized because they are women.

But these reasons make no sense. We, women can do lot of stuffs but just have to be more confident. Why to feel that we are less capable then men and why to raise the gender issues. Why to still have that kind of mentality which will pull us down. Instead we women should also encourage other women to join with Linux. There are many Open Source Foundations that have started programs for women so that women can join the community and can feel the friendly environment, like GNOME Foundation’s Outreach Program for Women, which offers internship program where women can learn and can explore themselves about Linux. Then there is a program that supports women in Open Source through GitHub and Ada initiative partnership to give away free private source code repositories to women learning open source software. The main goal of this program was to increase diversity in open source software and to give women a chance to grow their programming skills in private before participating in mainstream open source community. So there are many such programs that Open Source has dedicated to women so that they take more interest in Linux and the percentage of women working in Linux increases.

So I would say if Linux is taking so many efforts to include the women in their community, why we should not take a step ahead and start learning and practicing it. It’s not so difficult, that women can’t learn about Linux and Open Source. There are many women who are doing a great job in Open Source like Mitchell Baker – Chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation and Chairperson and former Chief Executive Officer of Mozilla Corporation, Kristen Carlson Accardi – Linux kernel hacker, Linux kernel subsystem maintainer and there are many more.

So we should encourage more and more women to include in open source community by giving directions and explain them clearly, encouraging them in computing, not criticizing women, acting friendly, and discussing topics about Linux and there are many more ways also.

I hope by reading this, at least few women should get involved with Linux and start learning and developing their skills in Linux.