Ubuntu And Women

I’ve been checking out some of the more social parts of the Ubuntu forums lately. There are several threads discussing Ubuntu and women. In one of them, someone links statistics stating that approximately 1.5 to 2.4% of Ubuntu users are female……Really!?

That’s so odd. I talk about it with my female friends often and, while I don’t think any of them would attempt some of the stuff I do, they ask questions and appear interested. In fact, they’ve shown more interest than certain technically inclined men like for instance my father who is an engineer also. Although it’s entirely likely they’re just humoring me.

Still, there are quite a few girl-techies around nowadays. It really surprises me that more of them aren’t using Linux.

Several places in the forum people are discussing what people can do to encourage more women to try Ubuntu. In terms of girl-geeks, I don’t really know. I chose to Ubuntu because it got mentions on techblogs like Engadget and Ubuntu-related articles are on Digg all the time. When I looked into it, the my selling points were the hardware support and the help forums. No other distribution was able to come close to matching those forums in terms of the variety of troubleshooting and the quality of assistance provided. In terms of women in general, the only thing I can think of is selling more computers with Ubuntu pre-installed. Installation and set-up are things that non-geek women tend to shy away from. If that’s taken care of and they have the opportunity to try something in a store, I think that would lead to more women users.