hot child in the city

Ladies in Technology

TechCrunch posted an article recently which seemed like it was just begging for trolls. Entitled, “Too Few Women In Tech? Stop Blaming The Men,”  perennial internet instigator Michael Arrington responds to claims in the Wall Street Journal that TechCrunch (as a leading industry blog) isn’t doing enough to promote women entrepreneurs. Arrington writes:

Every damn time we have a conference we fret over how we can find women to fill speaking slots. We ask our friends and contacts for suggestions. We beg women to come and speak. Where do we end up? With about 10% of our speakers as women… [W]e do spend an extraordinary amount of time finding those qualified women and asking them to speak… A lot of the time they say no. Because they are literally hounded to speak at every single tech event in the world because they are all trying so hard to find qualified women to speak at their conference.

There aren’t a lot of lady entrepreneurs - but on the flip side, there aren’t a lot of lady developers either. I went to the jQuery conference in March and was astounded to see approximately five ladies there. I was sitting in on the twitter hashtag, and noted this, and one of the conference organizers told me that based on the last conference there should have been about 30 women there.

There were 500 people at the conference.

A dearth of ladies in technology is not news - not on any level. At work I’m one of two women on our ten person technology team; and I’m not even doing any heavy duty programming at all. In fact, I’d be hard pressed to name a single female engineer in the entire company— and the technology team accounts for approximately 50% of the employees.

I don’t really have a solution. I just know that there shouldn’t be fields dominated by men where women could do just as well.

Professionalism is HARD

I’m a young, professional lady. Not that I am a lady professionally, mind you - no one would pay me for lady advice. It would consist of things like, “Eat candy everyday!” and “Scales are a nasty source of information, throw them out”, and “10 Reasons Not to Wear Makeup to Work” (Spoiler Alert: all ten have to do with sleeping more).

At any rate, I’m working in Silicon Valley right now, essentially helping in the replication of existing products squished together, but for business people. The idea is that this product should replace a company’s intranet. For example, if you’re starting your first day at a Company X, you should be able to login to this system, and be able to hit the ground running.

Sounds amazing, right?

It’s not really.

Read More