A personal appeal from Mary Gardiner: the Ada Initiative needs your help

When I was 15 I went on the web for the first time. A boy in my computing class went to Yahoo!, typed in girls” and spent some time showing me porn.

Photograph of Mary Gardiner

Ive programmed since I was a kid. Ive loved the idea of open technology since I read a curious article in the 1990s about people all over the world, fixing complex bugs in an operating system that a university student had named after himself.

But every so often, Im reminded how my Internet experience began. Women friends havent been safe on mailing lists, they havent been safe on Wikipedias talk pages, and they havent been safe at conferences. And even when they are safe, sometimes theyre lonely: estimates of womens participation in open source run to about 2%, and as Wikipedia editors at 9%.


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