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 in our own communities. 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. GnomeWomen, Debian Women, KDE Women and other efforts are also out there — along with many I insult by not listing here.

But the problem isn't stats, and the solution isn't .orgs. At least not alone. Let's start with four problems, all of which run deep.

The first is tech culture, which no less a men's locker room than the ones used by high school football teams.

The second 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 financial performance.

The third 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 all 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 inventor ever went into business for that sole purpose. In fact transaction is just one point on a market triangle that also includes conversation and relationship -- two activities at which, in general, women excel.

In The Book of Guys (Random House, 1995), 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, who has "power". 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, but taking full advantage of both its constituent genders is not one of them. Changing that, however, is not just an organizational challenge. It's a personal one. The geometry of gender equity is a fractal one. The small and the large look the same. To change the whole we need to change the part that is our self.

For men that means looking for and respecting what women bring to the Linux table. For women that means getting past old male crap when it shows up.

Think of the process as debugging and patching. There's a lot we can all contribute there.