Women are Geeks (too!)

July 12, 2008 11:13 am | Comments Off on Women are Geeks (too!)

As a father of three girls I watch for indicators of the level to which women are represented in the tech community. I decided to write a blog post about this while sitting at the ACM Awards Banquet a week ago. My experience coming from tech companies, including Yahoo! and Google, is that women are incredibly, and sadly, underrepresented in engineering. That’s why I was pleased to see that so many of the ACM award winners were women. I generated a chart showing the number of woman ACM award winners over the last 30 years. It’s a small sample size, so I plotted the moving average to smooth out the spikes.

ACM Woman Awardees

I’m happy to see the number of woman awardees is increasing, with a real jump in the last two years. But I have two reservations. The percentage of woman winners is low, averaging only 5% over the last 30 years with a spike to 10% in the last two years. Also, most ACM award winners come from academia. I’m concerned that an analysis of similar award winners from industry would reveal even lower percentages for women.

I don’t have a solution for this, but I do have some anecdotes and a plea. My fellow Velocity co-chair, Jesse Robbins, and I were contacted by Systers regarding the small number of women speakers at our conference. Jesse responded immediately and was able to reachout to the Systers and find an additional woman speaker. (We could have probably found more but this was just one month before the conference.) Jesse received a thank you from the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology that I know he greatly appreciated. We’ll make sure to link in the Systers for next year’s Velocity conference.

I’ve been lucky enough to work with some great women performance engineers. Tenni Theurer ran the Exceptional Performance group at Yahoo!, where Nicole Sullivan was also on the team. Here at Google Annie Sullivan (no relation to Nicole) is incredibly knowledgeable and motivated about improving performance. Goranka Bjedov, also from Google, was one of the first speakers I recruited for Velocity.

Finally, I’m trying hard to raise my girls to be geeks. My two youngest girls both did school science projects as Kindergarteners. One daughter, in 2nd grade at the time, did a project on measuring how much electricity is consumed by appliances that are “off” but not totally powered down. I helped her write that up as a web site: Electricity Never Sleeps. I wrote the JavaScript but she did a bulk of the HTML work, learning about tags, etc. A 2nd grader! My youngest is more of a Maker geek – always crafting her own ideas.

My plea is for all of us to pay attention to this situation and work to promote women in technology. It’s especially important to do this at the college level. One study notes that women represented 26% of 1997 graduates in Computer Science, while another study says that percentage is dropping dramatically. We need to turn this around. Women make great geeks, we need more of them!

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