"Always make new mistakes", Esther Dyson says. It's not a lesson you want to learn twice. But that's what happened last year, when we ran an ad that presumed not only that our readership was entirely male, but also frustrated by women who would not "go down" on them. Not only was this a huge mistake, but one made even more inexcusable by the fact that we ran same damned ad a number of years back, after which we promised it wouldn't happen again.

Both times the ad deserved the outrage it provoked. A huge irony here is that Linux Journal is not only owned by women, but run by women on both the publishing and editorial sides of the house. Still, it happened. That our good sense as well as our institutional memory failed us twice is no excuse. Nor is it enough just to apologize. We need to debug and patch not only our own problems, but the larger ones for which ads like this are one symptom among many.

The stats alone are grim.

Last year Gartner reported that the percentage of women in IT declined from 42 percent in 1996 to 32.4 percent in 2004. The same study showed no noticeable progress in the number of women in professional or management ranks of IT. Worse, Gartner saw fewer women getting into IT at all, and fewer women entering computer science programs in college.

This decline is world-wide. Mary Lou Roberts of The Linux Beacon quotes Mark Raskino, one of the authors of the Gartner study: " I'm really struck by the fact that this is global. There was no company that has come back to us and said, 'our country is different.' Even in Sweden, which is an archetype of strong social approaches to equality issues, the numbers of women in IT are declining." In 2005, Sonja Thompson of TechRepublic wrote about how the U.K.'s IT industry "has experienced a 6% decline in women workers between 1997 and 2005."

And it's not as if efforts aren't being made. Deb Richardson founded LinuxChix in 1999 "as an alternative to the 'locker room atmosphere' found in some online technical forums". Today is has over a thousand members and fifteen regional chapters on five continents. BlogHer was founded three years ago by Jory DeJardins, Liz Stone and Eliza Camahort, and has grown steadily ever since. ShesGeeky.org is a new unconference founded this past year by Kaliya Hamlin and nine other women, and it also looks to grow rapidly.

But the problem isn't stats, and the solution isn't .orgs. At least not alone.

As I see it, there are three problems, all of which run very deep.

The first is tech business culture, which puts a premium on "winning" at everything (including job performance evaluations), and a "bottom line" mentality that subordinates everything else (including the creative missions of the organization) to making profits.

The second is a financial value system that has turned business from a human pursuit to a quarter-by-quarter rat race to "win" favorable regard by a "public marketplace" overpopulated by gamblers betting on scores in the form of stock prices. Even new companies in Silicon Valley subordinate doing great work to an "exit strategy" geared to make a blessed few winners wealthy. Guy Kawasaki, a veteran VC, says he makes sure business plans are run past women in his company because too many proposals are written by men whose main motivation is "killing other companies".

The third is our whole culture's failure to value women for advantages that business, and civilization itself, increasingly require -- especially now that the Internet has put us at near-zero distances from each other. For too long we've viewed business and markets through the prism of transaction, assuming that the only purpose of either is to maximize profits for stockholders. Yet no tech invention was ever created for that single purpose. And transaction is just one point on a market triangle that also includes conversation and relationship -- two activities at which, let's face it, women in general excel.

In "The Book of Guys", Garrison Keillor writes, "Girls . . . were allowed to play in the house where the books were and the adults., and boys were sent outdoors like livestock... Boys ran around in the yard with toy guns going kksshh-kksshh, fighting wars for made-up reasons and arguing about who was dead, while girls stayed inside and played with dolls, creating complex family groups and learning how to solve problems through negotiation and roleplaying. Which gender is better equipped, on the whole, to live an adult life, would you guess? Is there any doubt about this? Is it even close?"

He goes on to say he looks forward to women running the world. I often think the same thing. But that's the kind of thing a man would think: Who runs stuff, who wins, who's in charge. In "The Chalice and the Blade" (Unwin, 1987), Riane Eisler says we're coming to the end of what she calls the "dominator" era. This was the twenty thousand year-long period when might made right, winners got the spoils, and men ran things because they were good at that kind of stuff. Then, starting around the end of World War II, the pay-off of might and zero-sum thinking began to decline. Might made trouble, and winners only got responsibilities. What began to become evident was that something else -- partnership -- would have to succeed where domination could not.

Renee Lloyd, an attorney and tech industry veteran (and now a colleague of mine at Harvard's Berkman Center) says "Women are relationship experts". She also says that smart organizations are only beginning to understand how large an advantage this is in a networked world.

The Linux community has been ahead of many curves. It's time to move ahead on this one too. And if we make mistakes, let's make sure they're new ones.