The Past and The Future at Bay Area Geek Girl Dinners

I am stunned and amazed. There are many technical, geeky women are out there in the bay area (and beyond who were visiting) that participated in the Bay Area Geek Girl Dinner. The third one in the series.

There were themes listed on each table. I sat at the cloud computing table. There was not much discussion on the topic though, rather who each other were and how we ended up at the dinner, what we do, and our thoughts about technology and its role. I did not even have time to tweet about the event, during the event.

The crowd is a younger crowd. Things are different, but also a lot the same. I was involved with systers mailing list very early on. No social media, no facebook, no twitter, no websites back then. Plain email. Word of mouth. I saw today the video circulating on the web/twitter about the birth of internet news http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/29/you-need-to-see-this-video/ and realized there is a similar analogy here. It is like an old Virginia Slims ad that stuck in my mind. "You've come a long way, baby". There are many tools, many communities. Technical women like to connect, but there are many other channels, now including She's Geeky unconference, as well as subinterest groups from technie women in SF to Linux geeks, women 2.0.

Systers mailing list is still there going strong. There were attempts to put the discussion on the web, but resorted to the simple "push" solution, email. Many many years later, the contrast reminds me how a younger generation is embracing different tools for the same purpose to create communities. The word of mouth is no longer in a single email, or with a friend, it is also on Facebook, it is on a news tweet, it is everywhere. The need to link up and feel part of the community is the same.

Just this week, my company is nominating me to be one of the Anita Borg Institute of technology ambassadors. I am looking forward to it. To my surprise, there are women in my table who did not know about ABI, the systers mailing list or the Grace Hopper Conference, YET. I am glad that there was a lineup of introducing the existing organizations geared towards technical women. Thanks to BJ Wishinsky who introduced ABI and distributed systers stickers and people had the chance to learn about it.

The internet, the way we work, connect, and communicate are changing. One wonders though whether the challenges that technical women face in the industry are, though. The technology is different, but
the road to success and recognition is still uncertain. Despite this new wave and energy, we have not succeeded in making more CTOs out of the talented technical women. YET. The problem is well documented in this study, Climbing the Technical Ladder: Obstacles and Solutions for Mid-Level women in Technology by Caroline Simard. The problem is real. Still real, after all these years.

My hope is that our new advanced ways of communication spread the word about this problem and get corporations to acknowledge it. Our collective thinking and cooperation may then allow us to help solve it, attracting more and new generation "sisters" who then in the future, hopefully, would not even know that such a problem ever existed.