I’m halfway delighted and halfway cringing to announce that the
phpwomen calendar is now on sale. This was a project organised by my friend and colleague
Johanna Cherry, who saw an opportunity at php|tek 2009 to photograph the majority of the core PHPWomen members all in one place and turn it into a fundraising calendar.
If you’re expecting something “Calendar Girls” then you’ll be disappointed. We are all clothed in the pictures!
I won’t share photos from the calendar itself, if you want to see those you can buy your own, but perhaps to give you a hint I’ll share an outtake of myself:

I must confess that I was rather agitated when the photos were taken – as a woman in a male-dominated industry, the risk of being seen as just my physical appearance is ever-present, and I normally try hard at unremarkable, unrevealing clothes with very little makeup and a pair of jeans. Hanging out in the lobby at the hotel during a technical conference in that dress and those shoes was significantly more terrifying than delivering three sessions during my first trip to the US as a speaker (which, considering the problems I have with speaking nerves, is saying something). Even after I saw the photos I was kind of unhappy with the whole experience, although I loved the outtake linked above!
Fast forward 6 months and I had dinner with Derick Rethans, who took the photos in the calendar and arranged the printing, and he showed me the prototype he’d had printed. As I sat and turned the pages, I started to understand why this is so important. The women in these photos are some of the leading lights in the community – respected developers, some of them core developers, key community people, and speakers. Yet I saw them as the women they are … and suddenly remembered that actually, it’s acceptable to be both smart AND beautiful.
So – get your calendar and remember all year that beauties can also be geeks! 10% of every purchase goes to PHPWomen, and we will use those funds to support our women and grow more leading lights like these.