A few folks from my company are working on putting together a ‘Young Women in Computing Day’ next month.  Women are generally under-represented in the software field, particularly in the software development field. I’ll avoid stats here, but will just say that at my last job they sent out an email to the guys in the office saying that they could no longer use the womens’ rest room since there was now a girl on staff. In my career, I’ve seen women in the requirements analysts role, women in the tester roles, women in the project leadership roles, but it’s been very rare to find women in the pure development roles. So very happy to have opportunities to expose girls to fields that are harder to expose them to then the teacher that they see in school every day or the doctor who helps them get better when they’re not feeling good.  Those roles are needed – but already have plenty of men and women heading their way.  Want to have a way to more concretely expose them to the fun they can have and the good they can do in software development – and hey, the money in the field’s not bad, either.

The Wall Street Journal recently had a section, Women in the Economy, which was the result of a conference bringing business and government leaders together to talk about what’s holding women back in the workplace.  One of the phrases that jumped out at me was the statement that women are promoted based on performance, men are promoted based on potential.  It occurs to me that part of that may be that by helping young ladies recognize their own potential in the field early, we can help escalate them up both the potential and the performance curve.  What’s more appealing to a recruiter looking to fill their slots with young talent than someone who’s been excited about technology and doing things with it for years beyond their peers?

Hoping someday to look around a technical company or a technical conference and see a better mix of men and women.  Think it’s part of my responsibility to advocate and work to help make it happen.