Jane Wells recently put the call out to the WordPress Professionals mailing list asking for recommendations for Women WordPress developers. That is, those who develop plugins or patches for WordPress, not bloggers. Personally, when I think of women involved with WordPress, I think of Lorelle VanFossen, Lisa Sabin Wilson, and a few others. Other than Lisa who develops themes, I can’t think of any women off the top of my head that contributes routinely to the development of WordPress or plugins.
If you are a female WordPress developer and you live on the West Coast, preferably around San Francisco, CA get in contact with Jane Wells as soon as possible. You may end up with the opportunity to present at WordCamp San Francisco.
Didn’t think very far Jeff :). What about Andrea_r who contributes directly to your own WP Tavern website and forum and is very active in the WordPress (particularly WordPress MU world)?
He did say “and a few others”. 😛
During the post, I thought of Lorelle, Liz Strauss, Andrea, Kim Parsell, Kit Singleton, and some others. But I don’t see them as developers unless I’m wrong. There are plenty of women who contribute to WordPress but which of them are PHP coders, developers, ones that can submit patches to WordPress? That is who this post is looking for.
Historically, WP has had trouble retaining female developers, but I think that’s an issue with most open source software. Hopefully, the professionalisation of the project, the presence of women at Automattic and the movement away from an aggressive and occasionally misogynistic fanboy culture will improve matters, and a year from now you will no longer be struggling to think of women coders.
(The other problem, of course, is that for a number of social and cultural reasons, female developers tend not to be as addicted to self-promotion as the men. This may be harder to overcome.)
Strong title 😉 Recently I saw a statistics for 2008 conform which senior developers are approximately equally part from both sex. So due to this post I think WordPress is a “masculine software” at this point, isn’t it? 🙂
However, I don’t bother which sex contributes more bringing WordPress to live and evolution, great job!
“I can’t think of any women off the top of my head that contributes routinely to the development of WordPress or plugins”
Maybe it’s a gender thing, I tend to be a more behind-the-scenes type person 🙂 too bad I’m neither in San Francisco nor NYC. Would be a fab opportunity.
I can think of two female developers, but one of them develops privately from what I understand.
THere’s hightechredneckwoman from hightechredneckwoman.com she’s been a WP plugin
developer for as long as i know. She don’t care a hoot about me, but she’s my idol. lol
then there’s Jennifer, who’s been a WP developer / mother for as long as WP has been
in existence. She was a MT gal until she switched to wordpress back in the 1.x days.
I forget where her blog is at, [something]goddess I forget off the top of my head now. lol
but I know she’s friends with several other female developers that she has listed on her
blogroll.
Hehe. You talkin’ ’bout me? scriptygoddess.com – I actually emailed her. However, the email I received about it didn’t specify CA area – I don’t live in CA. The coding I do now for wordpres isn’t so much patch/plugin development as it is customizing themes – usually for the purpose of making it behave like a typical CMS. So not sure if I can help or not – but I did reach out. 🙂
here it is. scriptygoddess.com I knew I would think of it eventually. LOL
I just know her as Jennifer from her old MT blog days.
Good job! I am a female developer with Joomla!. Drupal does a great job supporting women. Glad to see the WordPress community working on this, as well.
Well, I’m another one. Furtunately well known in Israel. Unfortunately live in Israel.
But… I must say I don’t know of any other woman WP developers in IL.