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I'll tell you what is making it harder for me, as a woman, to choose Open Source software.
I can't program, and a lot of software is created with the programmer's perspective in mind. Have you seen your local programming class lately? There are a lot fewer women who can program than men. Fine. At least make programs friendly to users who can't program. (On a side note, Mozilla is not nearly as customizeable as it claims to be, because only programmers can understand source code.)
Some guys I know who are interested in computers are cocky, annoying jerks. Not all, but a whole lot of them. Most of the computer guys... oh, heck, most of the smart guys I know are far too interested in showing off their knowledge to care about acquiring more knowledge (ie: listening). They don't realize they're trying to compare their penis size with someone who is actually powerful enough to give birth, and confident enough not to have to prove it (the general rule of ego-defenses: if you try to prove something about yourself - such as men always competing with each other - it means you feel a need to prove it, which means you don't actually believe it securely).
When a guy starts displaying his mighty testosterone before me, I don't always understand that he's just trying to compete the way guys compete. I'm not geared to think that way. In the heat of the moment, I consider the discussion, and how he treats me. I find myself more often on the listening end because I don't have the drive to fight him. My ideas fighting his ideas are something totally different to me (they do not seem as segregated in the voices of debating men). Likewise, I take his rambunctiousness personally, because I am geared to think that he would care more about the ideas themselves than his great knowledge of them if he wasn't trying to make things personal.
The biggest problem then, is simply the lack of female influence on the open source world. If there wasn't, I wouldn't be crowded out by a bunch of guys who don't know how to not program, competitive "discussers", or worse, jerky penis-insecure bastards. Nor would I be only drawn to female geeks. It's deprivation that would draw me to them.
What is Ubuntu Women good for? Well, since female influence is so rare, it can get lost in the shuffle of compugeekdom. It is easier for women to be heard if they work together to make the female perspective known.
In that case, I am of the opinion that an ideal compugeekdom would have equal female influence, so we wouldn't need groups like Ubuntu Women to make up for anything. After all, I don't know of any men who are intentionally sexist against women in the computer world (ie: believing women have no potential to be as good with computers or games as men). The few I've asked have expressed concern that more women should be into computers.
Ubuntu Women's goal, then, should be to get more women into Ubuntu. Then we wouldn't have that problem.
Ubuntu, a Linux that is finally meant to be truly user-friendly, can resolve the lack of women in compugeekdom simply by remaining true to its goal. Not only is it made for people who can't program, but it gives everyone a chance to improve it in whatever way they can, instead of emphasizing the value of certain talents over any others.
I'll tell you of my personal experience of women tackling science, which previously lacked women. This is changing. And guess where I have seen it changing the most drastically..? Biology (and, go figure, that was my favourite part of science, too). Fitness, veterinary work, even medicine. The University of Guelph is a prime example. Guelph Uni is known, perhaps misleadingly, as a school of biology. Interestingly, there are so many women in that school, I only see 2 men in their advertising booklet. I wish I remembered the ratio of women to men there. It's pretty drastic (2 or 3 to 1 or something, maybe more).
So maybe women just need to find their niche. I know of a few more traditional things that women would be interested in: stylesheets, aesthetics, designing computers to feel more lifelike and less interruptive (my computer's fan is the new unholiness avoided by Romantics, I tell you), documentation, advertising, coming up with ideas from the user-perspective, and balancing the user-critique (if you read a lot about gender in compugeekdom, you'll have probably heard all this before). As for the women who are into hard programming: Go you! I just think it's perfectly understandable if fewer of us are. After all, studies of school children have shown that boys are more geared towards math, while girls are more geared towards communications.
Now, I'll tell you why I decided to switch to Ubuntu. Maybe this knowledge will give Ubuntu's makers some ideas on how to make Ubuntu more attractive to women.
It's because I went to the right places and found some friendly geeks to hang out with. Listening to them talking about how crappy Microsoft is, and how it only excels by throwing its money around, made me want to move away from it. I don't want stores and companies to tell me what to buy by only having one thing available (I had already been applying this rule to my clothing and hygeine products).
I don't want to be pushed around in my decisions as a consumer, and I want to be an informed consumer. Besides, I'm one of those wierdos who like to spend as little as possible by cooking and sewing and thrift shopping. But really, the whole thing started with thrift shopping because I wanted to pick my own clothes.
So I guess you can say that even using Ubuntu, never mind contributing to it, is a form of feminism for me (same with clothes and hygeine). Mind you, my definition of feminism is pretty loose. To me, it's anything related to women having an overall quality of life that is not limited due to their gender (this allows for feminists to be housewives if, though only if, they choose).
I hope we can get to the point where we won't need to emphasize gender as though there is a problem with it, and simply have balance.
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