Her Code: Engendering Change in Silicon Valley report and video launched

Pascale Dianie from Orange Labs hosted a great event yesterday evening to launch Her Code: Engendering Change in Silicon Valley a video and published report about women in technology.  I annouced to the crowd gathered that we have a tenative date for the next Bay Area She’s Geeky for the last weekend of January and are in the early planning stages of both a DC and Chicago event for the fall. Stay tuned for more information.

Pascale attended the Bay Area She’s Geeky in January and interviewed several women attending including me.  My line that  got laughs when they played the video was “if 1/2 the developers were women the world would look a lot different”.

The report is great – I don’t se a link online for it yet. It opens with pages of statistics.

Miss-ing
11.8% of computer science bachelors degrees are awarded to women.
25% of proprietary software developers are female.
8.5% of Silicon Valley companies have a female board director.
4.3% of venture funded companies are run by women.
2% of Open Source developers are female.

Miss-understood
70% of girls age 15-17 have a profile on a social network.
of web users 12-17: 75% more girls blog then boys. 45% more girls create web pages then boys.
Facebook’s fastest growing segment is women over 55 years, up 175% since september 2008
56% of Facebook’s 200 million users are female.

They have a great timeline of women’s leadership in technology from 1842 to the present and then touch on work life balance.

One of the most interesting things is the perspective of three generations of women
“the makers” – the boomers built the informational web
“the connectors” – Gen X built the relational web
“the amplifiers” – Gen Y built the emotional web

And talks about the convergence of these three generations.

One of the reasons that we (Mary Hodder and I) saw a need for She’s Geeky was explicitly to support cross generational learning and sharing. We had women in their 70’s who were retired that came to our first event after reading about it in the Mercury news. In NYC we had women in their teens attend.

Silicon Valley is famous for its endless and “always on” networking activity, but most of the time the male-female ratio is incredibly low. Nobody really knows why there aren’t more women in the local tech industry but whatever the reason some individuals have decided to change that.
Networking events specifically targeting women have recently become more popular and women are encouraged to break the stereotype of the geek with think glasses and a pocket protector. Several organizations are trying to promote women in technology, encourage them to join the world of entrepreneurship and provide a support network to build the confidence needed to follow through in a tech career.

They cover the work of Women 2.0, Girls in Tech, SD Forum, & She’s Geeky.

They look to the future and Gen Z (those born after 1995). Little Miss CS-Shine, GenZ and social content. It is an interesting perspective and one that give me a lot of hope that more young women will become interested early tech.

They conclusion of the report is a great graphic articulating the the solutions.
* leverage social media
* help educational & information
* manage career & support
* anticipate impact & future

In the middle that does all of the above is -
Look internally and externally to find creative ways to support events, camps, workshop, and conferences that encourage the participation of women in tech. We gave it a try!

This conclusion validates the premise we had for She’s Geeky to bring together women in the unconference format to connect and learn from each other.

Orange Labs got involved and gave space to the Ruby on Rails Outreach Workshop for Women – this was organized after the Golden Gate Ruby conference where there were only 6 out of 200 people were women. Sarah Mai and Sarah Allen decided to address this by offering a Ruby workshop for women and men could attend if a woman brought them. By all accounts it was a great success.

I am headed to the Women in Tech meetup tonight at Orange Labs and will write about it tomorrow.