Update 4/8: Had a great two hour chat with the organizers, who are modifying the design to give the woman a real identity. The worst part of this situation was not the design, it was the members of our community who devolved into name calling and harassment. (Kind of proves the point that this is not a community whose every member is welcoming.)

I'll post a more in-depth summary on this after the organizers post their upcoming, and very thoughtful, blog post on the matter.

Update: I'm working out a time to chat with the organizers of the event, who reached out to me and assured me that they meant nothing by it. I'm excited to get to continue this dialogue. While I don't presuppose to be the spokesperson for any person or group, I do feel like the opportunity to talk about sexism honestly is a a rare one.

I do want to note that this is not on *them*. There were just nice enough to reach out to try to fix their small part. This is a community problem, an industry wide problem. As the saying goes:

Sexism is a social disease.

Maybe we can even continue this conversation at the event itself...? I smell a presentation. :-)

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Okay, so the lack of women in tech is pretty well known. The lack of women in open source is even worse. And women in Drupal? Pretty embarrassing. Only about 7% of the accounts on Drupal.org belong to women! So. Being a woman who has worked full time in Drupal for over three years makes me feel like I can call it out when I see something that may be contributing to the problem.

These slides are from a talk I gave at DrupalCon in Washington DC on March 6th, 2009. The basic gist is applying the technical principles of Open Source to business practices. It was really fun to give, and the audience was full of super smart, thoughtful people. The discussion after the talk was cool, and it was great to meet new OS biz buddies as well. Can't wait to expand on this!