Hey, ladies!!!

Put the words ‘women’ and ‘computing’ in the same sentence, and what is the image conjured up?

Some of you might think of ‘female geeks’ – short-sighted, bad skin and teeth, surrounded by empty caffeinated drink cans and pizza boxes. But even the male version of that image is a stereotype long laid to rest.

Women are most definitely ‘out there’ in the tech world, and a few of them are rising to the top.

Marissa Mayer (pictured), for instance, is a senior executive at Google and a recent online profile described has “one of the most powerful women in Silicon Valley”. She was Google’s first woman engineer, joining it back in 1999 when it had only just moved out of the garage. Today she manages the development of Google’s key products, and she says one of the reasons the percentage of women in the tech industry remains relatively low (less than 20%), it’s that negative ‘geek’ stereotype that actually puts off some women from pursuing a career in IT.

"The stereotype of what being a computer scientist means really hurts people's understanding and ability to identify with the role,” she told The Huffington Post, which has been profiling women in technology recently. Mayer believes the proliferation of user-friendly technology, from social media to smartphones, is helping to dispel misconceptions among women about computing.

As the ‘Venus vs Mars’ scenario postulates, women think differently from men. Men love to play with things, and computers are favourite toys. Women aren’t so interested in the technology per se; they care more about what it can do. A lot of women, Mayer believes, don’t yet see how computer science touches people.

"One reason I think this will improve in coming years is that girls are experiencing a lot of computer science and a lot of technology on an everyday basis," she says. "When you use those things every day, you become curious in terms of how they were made.”

Try Googling “women + computing”. One of the first results that comes up is a page in Wikipedia. It examines the tech industry’s gender gap and suggests ways of encouraging women to study computer science. It also notes that the person dubbed ‘The World’s First Computer Programmer’ was a woman named Ada Lovelace (1815-1852), a mathematician who worked with Charles Babbage, designer of the ‘analytical engine’. She was a titled lady (wife of an Earl), and the mind boggles at the social pressures she must have endured in the Victorian era.

That stereotypical thinking persists today irks successful women like Marissa Mayer. “I was always good at math and science, and I never realised that that was unusual or somehow undesirable,” she says. “So one of the things I care a lot about is helping to remove that stigma, to show girls that you can be feminine, you can like the things that girls like, but you can also be really good at technology.”

Mayer is not alone, however; the job market culture is changing. To help foster female techies, a company called womenintechnology (www.womenintechnology.co.uk) was launched on International Women’s Day in March 2005. It works with companies “to put diversity at the forefront of their recruitment and employment policies, in part by helping them recruit more female technologists”. It runs a growing recruitment consultancy, along with training courses and networking events.

Even the guys are waking up to the notion that girls can crunch code just as well – although their attitudes still need some refinement. A recent posting on guy website AskMen listed its ‘Top 10 hottest women in tech’.

Ah well... at least the beauty of their minds is acknowledged too.

Further reading

Meet Greentree’s female techies
Teresa Hooper: http://www.greentree.com/latest-news/my-leg-its-got-me-by-the-leg
Trish Hall: http://www.greentree.com/opinion-pieces/beware-of-data-overload
Women in Technology organisation: http://www.womenintechnology.org
Women in Tech: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/women-in-tech
Women in computing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing
Hot female techies: http://au.askmen.com/top_10/dating/top-10-hottest-women-in-tech.html
Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg profiled: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/07/11/110711fa_fact_auletta?currentPage=all

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