Gender has been in the news quite a lot in recent years with some folks feeling that there technology needs more women involved. The GNOME Foundation has recently run into some financial problems as noted by Phoronix below. I took a peek at the PDF file file that contains some of the recent budget numbers and it was notable how much spending has increased on women’s outreach while spending on hackfests and other things has declined significantly. Does spending so much on women’s outreach really make sense? I don’t think so and I’ll tell you why in this column.