Men also have shorter life expectancy.
USA: male 75.29 years, female 81.13 years
EU: male 75.75 years, female 81.46 years

Numbers are from wolframalpha.

The following numbers are from Statistics Finland so I don’t know how well they compare to other countries.
population: 49.0% male, 51.0% female
life expectancy: male 76.3 years, female 83.0 years
average age for first time marriage: male 32.5 years, female 30.2 years (so men lose an additional 2.3 years from the time they are eligible to take the grandparent test)
single parent families with children under 18y: male parent 16%, female parent 84% (seems pretty probable that the person taking the parent test is the one who they live with)

population +60 years: female 56.7%
population +70 years: female 61.6%
population +80 years: female 69.2%
population +90 years: female 79.1%
population +100 years: female 85.0%

I’m not saying that those numbers alone explain the uneven distribution of male and female test subjects. Just pointing out that there can be many valid reasons for it.

Late night comments are susceptible to that sort of thing.

Besides, he’ll probably find more info if he looks under both names :P

But hey, why not throw in all 6 ENIAC programmers, Barbara Liskov (Turing Award recipient last year), and Wendy Hall (head of the Association for Computing Machinery)?

I agree with you that the stories themselves, both in the act and in the telling, are generally positive. I think they help drive momentum around usability, and (as you point out) may also help stimulate interest and participation by open source “outsiders”.

I do not agree that the stereotype is true, however.

Yes, it is a fact that women are under-represented in many technology fields, and in the open source community in particular. However, that’s not the population we’re talking about here: it is its complement, the population of people who are not techies, i.e. “everyone else”). Women make up a solid half of “everyone else”.

For example (warning: made-up numbers), if we say that “techies” make up 1% of the population, and 90% of them are male, then (assuming I did the math right) the population of non-techies is still 49.5% male.

This holds so long as we can agree that techies are a relatively small minority in the general population, which should be uncontroversial. Even if that minority is strongly male-dominated, there are nearly equal numbers of men as women out there who could be subjects of a “non-techie test” like this.

As it happens, the techies that I know are overwhelmingly light-skinned. However, I wouldn’t conclude from that that darker-skinned people can’t be techies. It just happens that most of the people I know (techies and non-techies) are light-skinned (I live in London).

Now don’t get me wrong – I wish it was, and the idea that this is due to a lack of ability or even a lack of interest in computing among women is certainly something I deem insulting… but we can’t fight facts.

Only 10% of IT professionals are female, even fewer current comp-sci students are. This is a sad reality, but it is a reality. Now I have no doubt that the main reasoning is cultural, in Madagascar the figures are reversed, only 10% of IT students are male – but in Madagascar the culture expects boys to do jobs like being policemen or plumbers engineering is seen as a “girly” job.

In most of Western society, it’s seen as a boyish job without much interaction with people and lack of socializing – and girls are expected to hate it, so only the most hardcore geeky girls ever even try it.

Reality is though – both cultures have it dead wrong, the interest in technology, if sparked – is lifelong and the personality types best at it is just as common among men as among women – if it were not, then we wouldn’t see such a complete reversal in figures purely by looking at a different culture.

So yes, we absolutely must make an effort to change the culture to a viewpoint that bears at least a little more resemblance to reality.

And now I will say the controversial bit: I think these articles are actually doing a good thing, even if most of the people in the story are female, in fact BECAUSE most of them are.
Those stories do not end there. Some of those women will find their technology interest peaked by the experience, will begin exploring rather than just using those computers. Their friends will ask them about that funny thing -and they’ll find themselves advocating in the same way their sons and boyfriends had advocated to them.

In other words, some of those women in the stories are geeks who due to bad cultural conditioning have never found it out… and they are about to discover a whole new world, about to experience that wonderful sensation of “this is just so awesomely cool” we had the first time we geek boys of the west were having when we were ten years old.

In short: the prevalence of female characters in these stories is a result of the current situation, created by an incorrect cultural bias, but the stories represent a trend among technologists that will actually reduce the effects of this bias – ultimately helping to remove the bias itself. I think the long term consequences of reacting to the bias in this particular manner is not to enforce it – but to destroy it.
This is not an assumption that the mother or girlfriend can’t use it, it’s an assumption that she just never had a chance – and an attempt to provide that chance, the continuous successes (and nobody publishes the failures) is a direct assault on the bias you are worried about.