A friend, Beth Macy, died last weekend. She was the treasurer of our Mac User Group. Of course, when a friend passes one has many thoughts but the one of relevance here is the role of women in technology training. Specifically, I noticed that a large percentage of my reference books were authored by women.

Another Elizabeth, surname Castro taught me HTML through several versions of her book, HTML for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickStart Guide, though now the title includes XHTML and CSS.

I have other reference books, most more inclusive but this is still the first choice when I need to look up a bit of seldom used syntax.

I’m currently finishing up a series of introduction to Mac OS X classes that are a joint project with our MUG and WSU NOP Learning Center. The text I chose is the Little Mac Book, Tiger Edition by Robin Williams, whose The Mac is Not a Typewriter, was my introduction to graphic design on a Mac.

The general Mac reference books I recommend in the class resource list include Maria Langer’s Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger : Visual QuickStart Guide.

When I was teaching web design, my basic text was Learning Web Design : A Beginner’s Guide to HTML, Graphics, and Beyond. Another woman, Jennifer Niederst wrote this.

If I were teaching the class today I would probably use Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML by another Elizabeth, Freeman along with Eric Freeman.

And I certainly don’t want to forget Photoshop learning with Lynda, Laura, who taught me what Perl I know, or Molly, who helped me with Movable Type and who has been strong voice for Web Standards for years.

A question to ponder is why in a field that has such a small percentage of women professionals do women write such a high percentage of the better training books?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 12th, 2006 at 9:28 am and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.