Sunday night, I flew back from an enlightening 3-day trip to Bucharest, where I spent some quality time with our friends of Mozilla.ro, and where my colleague Gandalf and I gave a talk at eLiberatica 2009. On the plane going home, as I strapped on my seat belt for take-off, a female voice welcomed us on board. It was our captain speaking. In the seat next to me sat a woman in her 20s who looked quite jittery and uncomfortable. I asked her if everything was OK and she confessed that she had a fear of flying and that "knowing a woman was going to fly the plane did not re-assure her one bit". After a smooth flight, she seemed to have completely forgotten what she had uttered hours before. Still, what she said is very telling of course and I bet many people on the plane felt the same way as her. Alas, we still have a long way to go to change people's perception of women flying planes. The same holds true for female developers.

I had the chance to chat with Danese Cooper, who came to speak at the conference and I asked what she thought about the very low number of female developers in the world. She said that the 2% figure that usually floats around is a red herring, and that she thinks that number is actually closer to 10%, if not more. I hope she's right. To be sure, if there is one thing that amazed me at the conference, it was that roughly 20% of attendees were women, most of whom were developers. I spoke to many and I asked them why they thought there were so many female developers in their country. Everyone to agree that in Central and Eastern European countries, if you're a woman, it's very well-viewed to be working in IT and know how to write code. In France, for example, if you're a woman and you say you're a developer, you'll be hard-pressed to find someone who is not taken aback, who thinks you've made an odd career choice, or worse, who looks at you very strangely. In Romania, you'll most probably meet nods of approval. Obviously, this is simplifying things a tad bit but clearly, people's perception of female developers play an important role and we have to start changing mentalities here in France (and most parts of the world, for that matter!). My colleague Delphine has been thinking about this a lot lately and recently wrote about the role of women in Mozilla and in open source in general. She kicked off a fascinating discussion on her blog and I urge you to check it out and share your thoughts!

PS: A big hat-tip to Alina Mierlus who organized Mozilla's participation at eLiberatica 2009. Mulţumesc Alina !