I do a lot of griping and complaining and bitching about how the tech industry and tech conferences are so gender unbalanced. I’ve been using computers since I was a young girl and been attending plenty of tech conferences for the past 15 years.
My first computer
Some of my griping comes from my experience in college where I was often the only girl (or one of 2 or 3 girls) in a math or statistics or computer science or other geeky class. Some of it comes from my work experience of often being the only woman in a meeting or on a team or being asked if I’m the assistant when attending a meeting with a male colleague or employee (I’m not the assistant – I’m the head muckracker, a.k.a. Chief Scientist). I discovered Systers (and other women-in-tech listservs) in the early 1990′s when I started my first job out of college (working on a mostly male team) and I’m still subscribed to the Systers email list. My grandma worked in math and science her whole life and was often the only woman in a room, on a team, and was always horribly unfairly underpaid. Basically I have a bit of history with my cynical feeling towards the lack of gender balance in tech.
A few years ago my wife went to the Grace Hopper Women in Computing Conference and loved it. I’ve been trying to go to it ever since (they provide free childcare!). Last year I applied to be a Hopper (volunteering in exchange for free conference registration) and was accepted. I declined because marriage became legal in California and my wife and I got married right around the time of last year’s conference.
This year I applied again to be a Hopper and was accepted and now I have a plane ticket and a hotel reservation and a list of devices and power chargers and cables to bring and I’ll be on my way next week!
I idealistically believe and hope that the tech industry will join the current millenium and catch up to other professional industries, like medicine and law, where there is a gender balance. I also hope that people who are leaders in the tech industry, particularly men, will continually point to and try to eradicate this inbalance instead of shrugging their shoulders and saying not much can be done or that they don’t know what to do.
In my ideal world, I would always attend tech conferences that had a decent gender balance, but that mostly doesn’t exist … yet. My favorite conference, so far, that has a good balance of people and has a bit of geekiness to it is the Gel Conference each year in NYC.
I’m thrilled to be going to a tech conference with the gender pendulum swinging the other way for once – where the conference will be mostly women instead of mostly men. I’m not super comfortable with any gender imbalance, but if I had to choose, I’d rather swing back and forth between “mostly men” and “mostly women” to try to obtain a balance, and not always be with just men or just women.
Lucy with her great-grandma in 2006
Our daughter Lucy, currently 5 years old, wants to be a scientist when she grows up. She came up with that on her own (and I do my best to modulate my excitement about her interest in science). My wife and I tell her she can try to be anything she wants, including a princess who rides on a unicorn (this morning, “Mommy, I hope unicorns are really real in real life. I don’t want unicorns to only be pretend”).
I hope my daughter is never the only woman on a team or in a meeting, and I hope she’s always paid for her worth and skills and experience, not for her worth+skills+experience with a discount for her female gender. My grandma would be so proud to know her great-grandaughter wants to be a scientist, and my grandma would’ve loved something like the GHC and Anita Borg Institute if groups and conferences like that had existed in the 1930′s when she was looking for her first job after finishing grad school.
