Author: Jo Murphy

While compiling our Women of WordPress list, we came across many touching tributes to Kim Parsell – a woman whose influence on the WordPress community was so significant that a memorial scholarship was established in her name by the WordPress Foundation after her untimely death earlier this year. This is what we found out about the woman affectionately known as #wpmom, whose legacy continues to pave the way for and inspire other women working with WordPress.

There are a lot of great “Women of WordPress” or “women to follow on WordPress” posts out there; for the most part, the selections are based on the author’s personal preferences/favorites. If you amalgamate all these lists, you’re likely to get a pretty good picture of who’s making waves in the WordPress-sphere – or at the very least, who’s the most popular.

Karly Nimmo is one of our featured Women of WordPress because she’s not only used WordPress as the foundation for her own incredibly popular podcast; she’s using WordPress to encourage and enable other women to create great podcasts too.

Women and WordPress is a topic that’s been covered from many angles, across multiple platforms. There’s Twitter lists, blog posts and news articles about it; some argue that we desperately need more women in tech, others feel that “where are the women” or “hire more women” incentives are actually counterproductive when it comes to equality.

In July this year, a group of hackers claimed that Ashley Madison, a site designed to facilitate affairs between married individuals, retained users’ data even after they’d paid 19 dollars to have it completely scrubbed from the database. They released a small sample of the data they claimed to have stolen, and said they would release the rest of it if Avid Life Media, the owner of the site, didn’t take it (and its companion site, Established Men) down. Avid Life Media said it was a bluff, and Ashley Madison stayed up.

It’s not just people living under oppressive governments who get arrested and imprisoned for what they post on social media. Even your “friends only” content can end up getting you in trouble; your contacts might report your post to the authorities, and Facebook will get in touch with police if they believe someone poses an immediate threat to themselves or others, or if someone has uploaded criminal content.