![Who said women aren’t good at IT?
If someone was to ask you ‘who are the most influential people in technology,’ who would spring to mind? Steve Jobs? Bill Gates? Eric Schmidt perhaps? There is no doubting that they have all contributed hugely to the technology industry, exceeding expectations and creating platforms that were deemed impossible. They are inventors, developers, entrepreneurs and… male.
I’m sure many people would be shocked to know that the first ever computer programmer was female. Ada Lovelace, known for her work on Charles Babbage’s early mechanical general-purpose computer, recognised the first algorithm processed by a machine, the very algorithms Google uses today. This breakthrough has made her one of the most inspirational females in technology and yet her name has strayed in favour of those more recent.
Another influential woman in IT is Grace Hopper. She is best known for coining the term “computer bug” and her work behind software coding, in fact her findings still dictate application development today. Hopper conceptualised structured language, which led to the development of COBOL and led the way to other such programmes. The chances are that if you have written a line of code then you owe a debt to Hopper.
Know your history
I believe that to be truly successful in any business, one must know the ins and outs of its operations including an understanding of the history on which the industry is built. Women like Lovelace and Hopper are the technology industry’s history; their discoveries lay the foundations for computers and applications as we see them today. Moreover, they pushed boundaries for females, as said by Iain Thomson of V3, the UK technology news website, “[Ada Lovelace] was the world’s first computer programmer, which is remarkable in itself, but even more so considering she was a woman in a time when most of her sex were considered only useful for producing children, preferably male ones.”
Both of these extraordinary women grew up in a time when men still dominated the workforce. Fast-forward to 2012 and women now accommodate 47 percent of the UK workforce, but men hold a staggering 82 percent majority within the IT industry, according to a recent report by e-skills. These statistics in addition to Lovelace and Hopper, amongst other 21st Century female role models within the technology industry have inspired me to encourage and support more women to launch careers in IT. They have been instrumental to the progression of IT, which is why we launched our worldwide Women in IT campaign last year on Ada Lovelace Day.
This ongoing campaign is our way of actively encouraging and supporting more women to pursue a career in IT, and we are proud to be leading by example with a female majority across our management team. With only 18 percent of the IT industry occupied by women, it is our vision to tackle the stereotypical ‘geeky’ persona to promote the diverse roles available within IT.
I wouldn’t say that my previous experiences naturally led me into the IT industry rather it has been a career I fell into, and I have been lucky enough to enjoy a 20 year career within the sector, and I would like to share that experience with women considering IT. After all, if we don’t look after each other, then who will? I say, go for IT ladies!
Source: http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/witsend/2012/04/who-said-women-arent-good-at-it.html](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m1y6xjcGWr1r9bd03o1_400.jpg)
You say there’s a problem getting women into technology? The real problem might be the men.
In the past few days, the tech industry – more specifically the chunk of it located over on the US west coast – has hardly covered itself in glory.
First there was the example of Sqoot, which earlier this week made a rather weak joke in a call for an event called the Boston API Jam: “Women: Need another beer? Let one of our friendly (female) event staff get that for you.” As Betabeat points out, this quite quickly lost them a couple of sponsors. Sqoot said sorry, in a Google doc and on Twitter; the discussion then carried on over to Hacker News, where you’ll find that quite a few commenters … don’t quite get it. Such as this one:
Actually that’s the funny part, this “joke” was in no way belittling women, it’s idolizing them. It was made at the expense of the stereotypical male geek to whom women are otherwise inaccessible. Somehow it was appropriated as being about the female attendees.
Oh, man. How to explain this? Ah, someone did, almost at once:
Yes … it’s idolizing women … as sexual objects offered as a perk to male coders so that they can serve the men. As a female coder, I’d rather not be offered as a perk to male coders. So, yeah, this is belittling.
Let’s understand it again: being female isn’t a disadvantage in coding. If you have to ask, consider that Ada Lovelace was arguably the first programmer, and that Grace Hopper only, you know, invented the compiler, among other things.
To bring things up to date, the UK has a couple of women making a big difference in our access to coding and data – Emma Mulqueeny, who runs Rewired State, and Emer Coleman, who was very influential in getting the London Datastore opened up and is now working away inside government getting data pushed out in the same way.
But while being a woman in programming isn’t like living under the Taliban, it clearly carries its own frustrations. This morning I followed a link on Twitter to a blogpost by The Real Katie, expressing her annoyance as a female coder as being told to “lighten up”:
Let me tell you, I love coding. Been doing it since before I hit puberty. I did it when I barely had the money to keep a server up. I do it on the weekends and evenings, and I’m teaching my kids how to do it. I’ve spent thousands of dollars to go to conferences so I can learn more about it. Why would I ever leave the profession where I got paid real money to do what I love?
In short, I got tired of being told to ‘lighten up.’
This industry is one of subtle sexism. I almost prefer outright sexism, because at least that you can point out. The subtle barbs are usually dismissed as something I need to not care about. It was a joke! Sheesh. Why are you so sensitive?! All I did was make a joke about you needing to be in the kitchen!
There’s plenty more; it is a story of the frustration of being female in a role where gender should be utterly unimportant and yet weirdly is. It’s a sort of background hum of sexism; the sort that can drive people out of promising careers, and leave the “brogrammers” looking at each asking “where are all the women?”
Having read that I followed a tweet by Kevin Marks which plunged me into what seems to me a quite amazing Twitter conversation, where an initial trigger – a video that really objectifies women – leads quickly down a dark path of implications, accusations, excuses, sidestepping and lines like “I have a family!”
It was kicked off by a tweet from @shanley – Shanley Kane – towards Christian Sanz and Reuben Katz, who run a company called Geeklist.
@csanz @rekatz why the ads with a woman in her underwear dancing around to dupstep? — Shanley Kane (@shanley) March 22, 2012
I compiled the whole back-and-forth over at Storify. (I’d embed it here, but it’s really very long.) If you’re male, the real question to ask when you read it, is: how much of this behaviour goes on which you just don’t notice? (If you’re female, please tell us.) I’ve no axe to grind here; I’d never heard of any of the participants before today. I don’t have any animus towards anyone; I don’t want to see startups fail. But if you read it, the two men handle the objection from Kane poorly.
The backlash has been quite dramatic – so much so that Katz hasquickly moved to apology mode, with a post entitled “public apology” which says:
We never meant to offend any woman and are very sorry as we clearly have.
We did not create the video at question. It was created out of love for Geeklist by a great Woman entrepreneur. Support for her company. Design Like Woah. She makes shirts and made awesome ones for us. She also goes way out of her way to help us ship to our men and women alike globally who love our brand.
They’re trying to take the video down, though it’s complicated as it’s actually owned by the videographer friend of the woman who sells the T-shirts.
Katz continues:
As for our handling of the twittersphere. We could have handled it better. I know Shanley personally, have skyped and emailed her many times and interviewed her for a job at Geeklist. She is an awesome candidate that as a startup I was very sad the timing was not right to work together. Of our 5 person team 2 are women and I am certain they can speak on our behalf as respectful gentlemen in the workplace who create a welcome environment for all. I also own a business with my wife where we have over 350+ women employees. I’ve built my career over 15 years working to make this world a better place for women, mothers, and children.
In my wildest dreams we would never wish to offend any woman. The initial request made sense and we were discussing finding Gemma to take it down, when we got taken off guard a bit by her continued comments. We handled those poorly, but felt we had to defend ourselves. We apologize as well if our handling of the tweets offended anyone.
It’s good that Katz (and, one feels sure, Sanz too) have recognised that they handled the whole thing badly. In some ways this could be looked at as a “brand management” issue – if the person who had complained to the Geeklist duo had been male, how would it have played out? If you’ve got an example, please point us to it. (You can generate a conversation from an original tweet by plugging the tweet’s URL intotwitter.theinfo.org.)
And meanwhile ask yourself whether there’s really no sexism incomputing – or whether the answer to “why aren’t there more women in technology” might have anything to do with the people who are already there.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2012/mar/22/technology-women-sexism-question
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