Susanne Friedrich, the owner of website design company Red Princess Productions, is a German immigrant and current Bay Area resident who has been designing websites for her business for about seven years. PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY EDWIN GANO / ASSOCIATE PHOTO EDITOR
In the WordPress community, Susanne Friedrich occupies her own space.
As a 61-year-old woman and the owner of her own website design business, Red Princess Productions, Friedrich, a Bay Area resident, stands out from the crowd of predominantly young, male entrepreneurs on WordPress terrain.
Friedrich, a German native who has lived in California since 1989, said she believes she is on the older end of the WordPress community. After all, she experienced the birth of computers in the mid-90s, and then she got her first computer in her 30s or 40s. WordPress only became a part of her life six or seven years ago.
She started with photography. That got her into digital design and Photoshop, which pulled her in so much she quit her job as a nurse. She ended up designing her first website, then, years later, got her first client who requested she make a website and do it on WordPress.
She had no idea what WordPress was.
But Friedrich, determined to keep the client, said yes — she did know it. Then she sat down, learned it and never looked back.
She has produced websites for more than a decade now. She's whittled her skills after studying at Massachusetts College of Art, The Art Institute of San Francisco, San Francisco City College and The Crucible, an industrial arts institute.
"I'm interested in the beauty of a website and the functionality," she said.
She specializes in making websites with portfolios because she made her first portfolio websites for photographer friends.
Friedrich is not what you would consider a heavy-duty coder, but she understands CSS and PHP, she said, and regularly tinkers with tweaking the latter.
"The WordPress platform is intuitive, it's easy to understand," she said. "You look at the interface and it's become more and more beautiful and accessible, visually."
And for Friedrich, intuitiveness is important, particularly for users who do not code or code very little.
"I think WordPress has made it easier for people who are not coders to make a website and maybe that has attracted more women to it," she said.
It is no secret that female programmers are the minority compared to male programmers.
Of all the individuals from 157 countries who volunteered answers for Stack Overflow's 2015 developer survey, 92.1 percent identified as male. The average American male programmer is 31.6 years old.
Although the survey found the programming world is not outright hostile to women looking to break in, it could afford to do more.
And that is where WordPress comes in — it is a no-cost, or relatively low-cost enterprise. Users can work with it on their schedules. Most importantly, it has an open trove of information and a community willing to guide the perplexed user.
Yet where WordPress enthusiasts have occasionally fallen short is with WordCamps, WordPress-centric conferences for the casual or professional user with a universal thirst for open source.
Stories of WordCamp sexual harassment have been shared — take, for instance, WPTavern journalist's Sarah Gooding's account of being propositioned by another WordCamp attendee.
Fortunately, organizers for certain WordCamps have developed conduct. Still, not all WordCamps have conduct codes yet and even for the ones that do, victims of sexual harassment are still reluctant to report the violations.
The reasons for keeping quiet are fairly obvious — people don't want to churn drama. They're afraid. They're worried they overreacted. And the list goes on.
But there's also another explanation: the concept of "the missing stair."
"Have you ever been in a house that had something just egregiously wrong with it? Something massively unsafe and uncomfortable and against code, but everyone in the house had been there a long time and was used to it? 'Oh yeah, I almost forgot to tell you, there's a missing step on the unlit staircase with no railings. But it's okay, because we all just remember to just jump over it.'"
"Some people are that missing stair," blogger Cliff Pervocracy writes.
Friedrich said she has always been treated well at WordCamps. But absence of her mistreatment does not reduce the experiences of the individuals who have experienced it.
WordPress propels itself on its community. That community has yielded an extraordinarily productive subculture, one that is birthed countless entrepreneurs and their successive ventures. But productivity means little if it has achieved by way of insult or intimidation. That is a lesson worth knowing far before anything else.
Source: More than just a blogging platform, WordPress is home to entrepreneur Susanne Friedrich
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