For as much as gender shouldn’t be an issue in IT, sadly it still is. There’s differences between men and women in our industry and Elizabeth Naramore has written up a post looking at some of those differences, the gender balance in the IT market and what can be done about the unfortunate shift its seeing towards fewer and fewer women in IT (and in her more specific examples, the PHP community).

As you probably know by now, March 24th is Ada Lovelace day. Simply put: the day to put a little spotlight on the female tech colleague you admire most. Without the risk of looking like a suck-up, you can turn your whole blog into an ode to that someone special on your team. The idea is to write about only one person, but there we run into my main weak point: you have to pick your favorite. After thinking long and hard, I decided I just knew too many women who would deserve an ode. In this post, I’ll bend the rules a bit, and instead of one full post about one woman, I write a small section about every woman I know in the PHP community. Where known, I’ve added a link to their blogs, and if you google around a bit, I’m sure you can find a full ‘Ada’ post about each and every one of them. Since I can’t choose which I like most, I will instead order them alphabetically. This is definitely not a complete list, but just the ones that keep the highest profiles in the PHP Community

Did you submit a picture to the elephpantworldtour.com contest? They have announced the winners. If you think you may have won, you might want to head over and check it out.

p. The phpwomen “Article Contest” is now over, the judging is complete and the winners have been announced. (of course, I’m not going to tell you here, you have to click inside.)

p. For the month of July, phpwomen.org is holding an article contest! They are accepting articles posted in their Best Practices forum for judging. Their prize lists includes…well, why tell you here, click on inside and I’ll give you the whole scoop.

Lorna Mitchell, Senior Developer at Ibuildings, the senior member of phpwomen.org in Europe, podcaster for PHP Abstract and all around swell person, was recently interviewed at the Dutch PHP Conference. Here’s the interview plus a link to all the DPC videos.

p. Lorna Mitchell, (LornaJane on #phpwomen) recently posted a review of her experiences at the London PHP Conference over at phpwomen.org.

p. Most regular DevZone readers know that we are not shy in our support for phpwomen.org. We believe in the good that they do and want to make sure that everyone who wants to participate in this great cause, can. To that end, my good friend Elizabeth Naramore has posted a call to action over on phpwomen.org.

p. Over at phpwomen.org, Sreevalli Veturi has posted an interview with Nancy Wichmann. They talk about Professional Project Management, Open Source Software, oh and Drupal.

Regular listeners are probably getting tire of hearing me say this, but today we are going to do something a little different. Back in October, PHPWomen passed their first birthday. It’s taken me a while to get everything together but finally, I got a chance to sit down with four of the charter members, Ligaya Turmelle, Elizabeth Naramore, Elizabeth Smith and Sara Golemon and talk about the first year of phpwomen.