I just found the O'Reilly Women in Technology article series, which will be going on through September.  It features articles from women working in a variety of tech arenas -- and in glancing at them it looks like the voices and opinions on working as a women in tech are as varied as the fields, themselves.  I've read "I Don't Like Articles about Women in Technology," by Amy Hoy, and "Advice on Careers in Technology for Geeky (and not-so-Geeky) Women," by Dawn Foster, and so far am impressed by the tone and attitude.  It's not so much about "what's being done to keep us away" as much as it asks why we seem to choose to stay away from tech fields.  Of course there are several more articles to read, and more to come within the month...looking forward to reading them all, for sure.

A couple of months ago, I got curious about what kind of stats there were regarding women specifically in web design.  The first link I found was to this Jeffrey Zeldman article, which was interesting in the findings that the number of women working in the general IT category (he couldn't find any specifically for web design) seems to be dropping.  The most interesting thing about this article, though, was the discussion that took place afterward, in the comments.

Many commenters brought up the fact that in their work places, women are well-represented in the web design field.  They also mentioned that a good percentage of their customers are women, which brought on more who didn't really notice it until it was mentioned but thought, yeah, there are a lot of women on both sides of the web design coin.  If you do a Google search for web designers, chances are that you'll come across a huge number of freelancers who are women and, in fact, it seems from the searches I've done that there is a greater percentage of women doing web design freelance than there are men.  Maybe that's where a lot of the misconception of fewer women in the field lies.

As some of the commenters on Zeldman's article pointed out, more men speak at conferences and write books -- and the theories behind that varied from the fact that a lot of female designers are freelance and thus not making the money to be able to travel and speak, to the theory that a lot of women have a better ability to separate their work life from the rest of their life, and making time for that takes away from being able to write and speak.  Some blame it on a man's inherent need to promote himself matched by the theory that there are no female "rock stars."  Most of the comments had very valid points to them, though, and it made me think more into why it could be that although there is a possibility of a great number of women working in the field, more men are getting the glory.

I do think that it makes sense that freelancers are probably not making the kind of money that they would be making if they were designing for an established firm, and I'm sure that a lot of the female freelancers with children are doing it to balance the desire for work with the desire to stay home with their kids.  I also think that a lot of it has to do with the rate of change in our field (and all tech fields, really) -- the opinions on what good design is or what usability means etc. are all valid but that for every one, there are a hundred more.  Most of us -- men and women -- don't have the time to take note of the prevailing opinions on a subject before throwing out our own expert voice...and by the time we find the time, the thoughts on our favorite subject have shifted to another plane.

Also, the web isn't the small place it used to be, with just a few people leading the way -- it's now full of people who want to design and to become more hands on, who have great ideas but whose voices have much farther to carry than those who came before us.  I think that in many cases, a lot of the better-known (and thus we think more successful) people in web design were able to attain that after reaching a certain level professionally, when they were afforded more time for writing and speaking.  With that, naturally, comes the money to be able to do that.

It's no secret that men were represented more heavily than women in technology at an earlier time, and so considering that those who speak and write more are the designers who have been involved in the web pretty much from the beginning, it's no surprise that the majority are men.

It does seem to be changing though.  I can form a more educated personal opinion after attending my first conference -- the Webmaster Jam Session in Dallas.  The lineup of speakers is definitely male-oriented...there are three female speakers out of twenty four.  It will be interesting to see who attends though.  I'm looking forward to it...mostly to meet other designers from other parts of the city, female or male.