July 2009 Archives

A couple of days ago I wrote a post about Tomorrow's Web, the UK's first technology conference aimed specifically at teenagers. Their speaker page was wholly male at the time, and has one girl on it now. It's something I find a little disheartening - not necessarily the organisers' fault, but a depressing illustration of the way technology *still* attracts and nurtures too few women.
It's a view that Grant Bell, the 17-year-old organiser, appears to share. I met him this week and he said he's had trouble finding enough girls. He wants to hold a panel discussing the issue and is trying to find 3 or 4 girls who are under 21 and willing to take part.
We're hoping to be able to help, so if anyone knows of any young women who are into technology, please email me at Rebecca.thomson@rbi.co.uk or leave a comment. The panel will probably be on why technology doesn't appear to attract girls (and perhaps why the speakers are attracted to it), and what can be done to tackle the problem. It's a debate that's been heard a thousand times, but until things start changing there's no reason to stop repeating ourselves. It would also be great to hear the perspective of a younger audience.
It's encouraging when conference organisers even acknowledge the lack of gender balance in tech as a problem, so it would be good to take advantage of this opportunity - the furore created by the panel at TechCrunch's GeeknRolla event just goes to show how strongly people feel about the issue. It would also be great to see girls who are doing well in the tech space stand up and be counted, and encourage others to join them. So please nudge the nearest 16-year-old whizzkid near you and send her to me or Grant.

We've decided to link to and promote a few women in technology sites, because there's so much great writing around that it's worth doing. We'll put everything on a blog roll as soon as we can, but for now here are the sites we like and why. We're also looking for further suggestions, so let us know if you think we've missed anyone.
-First up is Bitchbuzz, founded by Cate Sevilla. Technology is just one aspect of what's covered, but Cate's passionate beliefs on the need for more women in tech makes it worth reading from an IT point of view. There's also plenty of gadget reviews.
-Silicon Stilettos organises get-togethers, publishes blogs and provides a social networking service for women in tech. At the hub of it all is Zuzanna Pasierbinska-Wilson, also of Huddle.net fame. Why did she set it all up? According to her profile, it's, "Because I am fed up with rooms full of men." Enough said.
-Women Who Tech organises summits and discussions and provides masses of resources on its site for women involved in the industry. Its founder Allyson Kapin can also be found over at the Rad Campaign, where she blogs about the latest trends in technology and online marketing and how it impacts non-profit organizations.
-Blogher.com has writers tackling anything and everything on its site, but you can go straight to the technology and web section. There's such a wealth of material it can look a bit daunting at first, but it's easily navigable and contains lots of useful posts.
-Sarah Lacy, a technology journalist for Business Week and Tech Crunch, may have seen her fair share of controversy, but that just makes her all the more interesting. She's a successful author and a big name in the start-up scene.
-The Girl Geek Dinners continue to grow in popularity and influence, and their blog feed encompasses just about everything related to women in technology. Although I personally find the white-on-black hard to read!
-Women 2.0 is specifically for female entrepreneurs, launched after the Silicon Valley-based founders turned up to a few local networking events and found hardly any women. It runs informative events and although they're all, naturally enough, in the US the site is still worth a look if you're based elsewhere.
-The Next Women is certainly ambitious - it aims to be the female Business Week, the female Tech Crunch and the business Red magazine. It focuses on businesses founded by women, provides news on technology from a female angle, and interviews with "female business heroes".
-Girls 'n' Gadgets covers web and technology news and reviews, while Inma Martinez and Penelope Trunk are both business focused and great writers.
-Ciara Byrne is a software developer turned technology entrepreneur - who doesn't have a concrete business idea yet. She's charting her move from employee to CEO, and her account is interesting and entertaining.
-Josie Fraser is a social and educational technology consultant with lots of interesting opinions on her blog SocialTech
-And Suw Charman-Anderson is another social technology expert. She blogs in her own right and runs the brilliant Ada Lovelace day, which aims to increase awareness of successful women in tech.

Why has Computer Clubs for Girls, one of the few initiatives energetically working to get young girls interesting in technology, decided to include boys as well?
Ask just about any woman in IT today what needs to be done to increase numbers of female tech staff, and the answer will almost always include, "Get them interested at a young age".  

The club did just this - it was run by e-skills, the council that champions IT skills in the UK. And it was a real success story for the organisation, with over 100,000 girls involved and evidence that it was changing lots of attitudes.
So the news that it was being changed to include boys, with the CCG now standing for the slightly vague "connect, create, go" wasn't received all that well in some quarters.

The problem is, despite the club's good work, it hadn't been going long enough to start having an impact on the number of women applying for IT-related degrees or jobs. By changing the clubs to be gender neutral it almost seems to suggest e-skills thinks it's dealt with the gender problem.

Josie Fraser, a social and educational technology consultant, disagreed with the change. She said, "Neither CC4G or any other agency are currently able to demonstrate significant impact of publicly funded initiatives on the numbers of girls engaging with ICT, or on the nature and potential long term impacts of that engagement. There is a necessary role for initiatives which focus on girls and women."

She added that, while the work CC4G has done so far is no doubt valuable, we need to see some research on its impact before changing its remit.

"Given the current industry figures and evidence of gender segregation, I strongly believe in supporting programmes and activities which focus exclusively on issues around girls and young women. We simply have not done enough yet."

We asked e-skills' for its reasons for the change, and they were three-fold. It wanted the club to fit into the national curriculum, and this, it said, "naturally meant making it gender neutral". Second, it said teachers had asked them to allow boys to get involved.

And thirdly, it said, "With the overall decline of students going on to study IT at university we wanted to help change attitudes and perceptions among all young people - and the success of CC4G with girls clearly indicates that there is demand for activities which present IT in an exciting and inspirational way."

Hopefully the new clubs will be successful, and get more young people excited about technology. But there are far more social influences working on girls than boys, pushing them away from technology and science - the numbers still prove this. While e-skills' new venture sounds like a good one, it's a shame it had to come at the expense of a much needed female-focused initiative.

I don't want to take anything away from the teenagers organising what they say is the UK's first technology conference aimed at teens. Tomorrow's Web will no doubt be a great event and organising something like this takes impressive drive and skill - and they're doing it at an age when I was expertly juggling A-levels, sofa time and trying to get into pubs.
But I have to admit my heart sank a bit when I looked at the site. Every single speaker announced so far is male, although the organisers say there will be some female speakers announced soon. After decades of campaigning, awareness-raising and arguing, it would be good to have at least a few up-and-coming girls featured at an event like this.
If you're holding a conference, whoever you are, make sure the speakers you use and promote reflect the make-up of the people you are trying to reach. Especially if you're holding a conference purporting to represent the future of the technology industry - it has to include women, and preferably would have a section or discussion aimed purely at girls (at least while they're still a minority).
This conference is pitching itself as (and probably is) an exhibition of some of the technology high-flyers and influential thinkers of the future. Unless the organisers really think about the diversity agenda, and actively push it forward, it looks like they think we're heading for another generation of the same white, male dominated technology industry that we've already got. That we're, frankly, bored of.
The people organising this are obviously very clever and driven, but I think they have a responsibility to think about the message they're sending out and the role they'll play in shaping the industry.

According to ComputerWeekly.com's sister site, Electronics Weekly, 2009 has proven a record year for women at the Royal Academy of Engineering, with four receiving the honour of being elected Fellows of the Academy.

Among them was Sophie Wilson, who co-developed the ARM microprocessor, developing its instruction set. ARM is now the best selling 32-bit microprocessor in the world.

According to Acorn CEO, Hermann Hauser, quoted in the article: "While IBM spent months simulating their instruction sets on large mainframes, Sophie did it all in her head."

Now that's impressive!

Wendy Tan-White is in a unique position - she's a former programmer, with a computer science degree from Imperial College London, whose parents both worked in traditional IT roles. But she's also the founder of a fast growth internet-based technology company which has just used Twitter to run a hugely successful marketing campaign.

While she comes from, and understands, the traditional IT industry, she is able to look forward and adapt to change in a way that corporate IT often isn't.

Her company, Moonfruit, allows people to build their own websites for free. She and her husband and business partner Joe White realised back in 1999 how important communities would be to the web, and Moonfruit's aim is to allow people to "share their passions online" and build communities with other web users.

She says the corporate world needs to take social media and the internet far more seriously, but instead is allowing bureaucracy and uncertainty to slow its response down. "We're seeing the statistics now and they're showing things like Twitter can have a real impact on businesses. Even the mistakes, like Habitat, are getting talked about a lot. It's something they're going to need to take much more seriously."

There's one more change the IT industry has been slow to improve its performance on - increasing the number of women it employs. But she says women in technology have it easier than women in other sectors.

"It's a general problem for women at work. If you put it in a hierarchy, technology is actually not that bad compared to banking, for example, where men tend to be a lot harder on women.

"Working in the technology industry, you tend to get a suspended belief - they're a little bit skeptical and suspicious of you. You have to win them round. But I prefer that to out and out sexism, men asking 'why are women at university?'"

That's no reason to get complacent, though - it is IT's image problem that is putting girls off the subject at an early age, and the low number of women in IT speaks for itself. "In India, technology is a popular choice because it's seen as a good career. There's something about how we talk about it, and how the media portrays it, that needs to change. Somebody needs to go to girls in schools and show them how many degrees are a combination of technology and business, or technology and something else. Even if they're not into computer science, there are a lot of hybrid degrees."

E-skills UK, for those who don't know, is the Sector Skills Council for Business and Information Technology. It's licensed by government and tasked with the mission "to ensure the UK has the skills for Digital Britain, to secure Britain's place at the forefront of the global digital economy"...

As part of that mission, it's been associated in the past with work to help ensure that women's talents aren't wasted or lost to the IT industry. In March, it published research in the form of a Women in IT scorecard so that you can benchmark how your organisation is faring in terms of diversity and equality - or just get your facts straight ready for battle with the cynics who say we're fussing over nothing when we look around a tech conference or an IT department and see very few female faces. So, some pretty good stuff there then.

It was also a backer of CC4G - Computer Clubs for Girls - which aimed to encourage girls aged 10-14 to think about the possibilities of an IT career.

But recently, it's begun to look like they're giving up the fight...

CC4G has rebranded as Connect, Create, Go, with a shifted, now 'gender-neutral', focus. (See CC4G: Why we've changed for the full story straight from them.)

@josiefraser challenged CC4G on Twitter about this, receiving this response:

 

So, I guess given the claim from CC4G that applications to IT related courses are dropping overall, and so boys, as well as girls, need to be encouraged into IT, then perhaps the change to the CC4G mission is fair enough...

But how the ruddy hell can e-skills or its associated organisations explain away the "boys' own" tone of its new video campaign?

 Watch the video and judge for yourself...

 

Yes, I know it's a Harry Enfield take-off (although I never found him that funny in the first place). And yes, I can appreciate a whole lot of work has gone into this, with the Pythonesque animations and all...

But gender neutral? I don't think so. The roll call of imagery includes: Lord Kitchener; geeks called Dwight, Dilbert & Duane; a teenage 'Pantsman'; a joke sex-magnet app that draws scantily clad women to the said-y-front-clad youth who is then urged to 'get a room!'; loads of robots*; the phrase 'Who's the Daddy?'; a "CHAP"; a shed; Superman; a fast car; and last but not least a couple of pathetic adolescent sight & sound gags about YouTubies and Titter. There are a couple of women pictured in the midst of some dull 'IT at work' shots, but that's it as far as representation of women's actual or potential involvement or interests are concerned.

If this really is all 'the ruddy future' has to offer, frankly, we're all doomed.

Ho hum. Let's hope they pull this campaign quick in favour of something more genuinely gender-neutral. The money might have been better spent directing people towards the parallel project 'Big Ambition'. That site includes a diverse range of individuals - male, female, different ethnic origins - discussing their varied IT careers under the banner 'Inspirational People'. Now that's more ruddy like it...

(* Actually, I'm quite partial to robots myself. But you get the point.)

Business magazine Management Today has published a list of "35 under 35" women in business - good for a quick spot of role model hunting...

The women featured in MT's selection include web hosting and IT provider Memset's co-founder, Kate Craig-Wood (32); web search marketing and SEO optimisation expert Lisa Myers (31); and notonthehighstreet.com etailer Holly Tucker (32).

I (34) feel quite humbled after reading through the list!

 

Apparently Kate Winslet's role in the WWII code-cracking film Engima was bumped up compared to her character's presence in the novel, presumably to add increased interest for female film-goers. But if you've ever wondered what it was really like to be a woman working in the Bletchley Park complex at the height of the war effort, now's your chance to find out.

On Sunday 26 July, Suw Charman-Anderson and others involved with Finding Ada have organised a specialist tour of Bletchley Park and the National Museum of Computing, focusing on women's involvement. The tour guide will be WWII Bletchley Park veteran Jean Valentine, and there's also a chance to see a short film on the Women of Station X, and the Enigma Machine itself.

For more information and to book, go to: Women of Bletchley Park Event

@Rebecca_Thomson just alerted me to some blog posts about a session at the OpenTech conference held this Saturday where Suw Charman-Anderson and others reported back on the success of Ada Lovelace Day and other women in tech initiatives. Worth a visit:

Judith Townend: Where are the women in tech?

Kathryn Corrick: Finding Ada at OpenTech 2009
(includes a list of living female tech role models)