Technically Women

Posting to Technically Women provides an opportunity to share distinctly personal experiences as a female engaged in technology while living and working in the first decade of the 21st century. Participation here also allows for the framing of those experiences in the broader historical context. As a child of the 50’s it has been my privilege to witness momentous shifts in the way we perceive age, race and gender over the course of the last half a century. These shifts represent milestones in the journey toward equality but not yet a final realized achievement of equal representation. Perceptional changes have indeed occurred in the last 50 years but after five decades of observation we might conclude we have progressed toward parity but not experienced an absolute demographic transformation and it is obvious our representation in this sector remains weak.

Robert Kennedy said “Like it or not, we live in interesting times” “everyone here will ultimately be judged – will ultimately judge himself – on the effort he has contributed to building a new world society and the extent to which his ideals and goals have shaped that effort.”. (The gender emphasis is mine).

Kennedy spoke these words in South Africa in 1966, while delivering a Day of Affirmation Address. Kennedy’s words were meant to empower youth and people of color. This was the same year I entered high school in a suburb of New York filled with the knowledge and hope that a relatively young person could be president of the US, that people of color might and could enjoy equal opportunity for education and betterment. It seemed inconceivable then that actually reaching all of those goals simultaneously (being young and a person of color and achieving the presidency) would take decades more to realize in the United States.

I graduated high school in 1969 when the word ageism was first coined, when “discrimination against individuals or groups because of their age” was being examined and discussed for the first time in the US. That same year the gender barrier for women’s undergraduate entry into Princeton and other exclusionary US centers of higher learning was breached. Two of the very first women to gain admission to traditionally male institutions of higher learning were not only from my own high school class of graduates but also belonged to my immediate class of 30 gifted and talented young high school students. One of these women was Carol Kellerman who later served as executive director for Learning Leaders, the oldest school volunteer program in the US and Carol was also a lawyer and chief of staff for a NY senator.

I would summarize my formative high school years as a time of recognition of barriers, with steps (in retrospect often fledgling) taken to redress inequalities of race, gender, and age. These were times of high hopes that those barriers would be permanently and swiftly removed. Many of my generation were/are actually fairly dumbfounded that the progress we saw launched back then has taken so many decades to realize.

So although some have questioned why the need for a blog that highlights women in technology, to them I would say: “collaborating in a woman’s environment is an empowering experience rather than an isolating one”. And seriously, if we think women in technology have achieved full equality, we’d better think again.

I would maintain that little has changed since Anita Borg (1949-2003) penned this article in 1993. She wrote:

“Increasing the number of women in computer science and making the environments in which women work more conducive to their continued participation in the field requires the active involvement of both women and men. In particular, there must be ongoing and productive communication throughout the field concerning the unique problems that women face when they enter the field and as they progress and advance. The fact that women are a small minority in the field results in two impediments to this communication. First, women work almost exclusively with men and so have few opportunities to create and then participate in a “community of women in computer science”. Second, men work almost exclusively with men and have limited opportunities to communicate with more than a few professional women. Open electronic forums can improve communication by introducing us to a larger community, but do nothing to reduce the disparity in numbers. On the other hand, exclusively female forums, such as Systers, are a particularly effective way to connect women in our field with each other. They also ultimately contribute to improved communication between women and men.”

So here’s to mentorship, improved communication and a speedier route to closing the gender gap in technology.

Image from Flickr Creative Commons http://www.flickr.com/photos/smcgee/2245932396/