I was scanning the web this morning and read a post titled “Where are the Women in WordPress?” The title made me wonder if it was a guy looking for his soul-mate through a dating website or hot singles WordPress blog. Then I realized the post was written by a woman. As I began to read the post I was pretty much disappointed. It’s always disappointing when one gender berates another or lumps a group into a stereotype. Asking where the women are in WordPress seems a rather silly question when anyone working with women and WordPress can tell you that women represent highly in the WordPress community.
Women are at the forefront of WordPress. They are the users who use it to blog their ideas and manage their business websites. Of course men use it too. Women though like WordPress because it puts the control of their website in their hands—I’m told they like the feeling of empowerment. It’s also easy to go from novice to full-fledged blogger or webmaster in a short period of time—I’m told women don’t have a lot of time to tinker around learning new software (believe me, I understand that point!).
You don’t have to look into university classrooms or tech schools for WordPress developers. The composition of graduating classes isn’t an indicator of who is working with WordPress. Why? It’s open source software so anyone with knowledge of PHP can develop for it. No college degree needed. Hop on and enjoy being part of WordPress.
No obligation, no registration cloaks who is working with WordPress. I see women (and men) WordPress users through my web practice. I’ve also gotten to know developers of both sexes. WordPress is truly open source—there’s no means of tracking the demographics of who blogs with it and who develops for it. When you download a new Plugin it won’t tell you if the developer was male or female—no sexism on WordPress.
So if you’re wondering where are the WordPress women… check out the blogs in your community, the websites of entrepreneurs in your business networking groups and WordPress site developers like myself. You’ll find plenty of men and women making WordPress work.
