Apparently Mark Shuttleworth said something along the lines of “linux is hard to explain to girls.” Now, I’m not sure what he meant by it or if he really even said it, but I’ll take the Kirrily Robert’s word for it. You can check her letter to Mr. Shuttleworth out here. I’m not a feminist, and to be honest a lot of feminists are off the deep end (in my opinion) and are completely irrational, but Kirrily seems to have raised a good point and I totally understand her frustration.

I’ll let you, the reader develop your own opinion about this whole controversy but I do want to let you know what my opinion is on this whole thing. First off, I’m not going to call Mark Shuttleworth a male chauvinist quite yet, but I do think he needs to recant, as do some of my readers. The field of engineering, computer sciences, and software development are male dominated fields, and they could use more females. It is a medical fact that women ARE different than men, psychologically and physically. The physical part doesn’t really matter when it comes to engineering, but what about the psychological part?

I don’t imagine the IQ distribution among women is that much different than it is for men, so logically it follows that women are just as capable of working in engineering. That being said, they think differently – perhaps this is why most women don’t choose engineering or software development as careers. In my previous post, “Misconceptions about Ubuntu Linux” a guy by the name of Frank posted a great comment which I’d encourage everyone to read. He mentioned that he’d worked with some women in his undergrad computer science studies at UMN and had a delightful experience. I think he’s right on – women could add new dimensions to software!

So I’d like to close with asking Mark Shuttleworth to please recant his comment or at least explain it. I’d really hate to think that this OS I love so much is headed up by a guy who doesn’t respect women.