Girl Scouts of the USA
420 5th Avenue
New York, NY 10018
V 212-852-5049 F 212-852-6515
rfarmer@girlscouts.org
www.girlscouts.org
What influenced you to pursue a career in information technology? What could we learn from you and other women working in IT that will increase the number of girls and women who are interested in the field?
The K-12 Informal Education Hub of the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT), led by the Girl Scouts of the USA (GSUSA), is conducting a three-phase study to determine what experiences or factors influence females to pursue work in information technology (IT). Study results will help guide efforts to increase the number of women entering the IT field.
This 20 minute survey is intended for women who work in IT. For the purposes of this study, IT is defined as all forms of technology used to create, store, exchange and use information in all its forms; the design and use of computers and communications to improve the way we live, learn, work and play. If this describes your work, please consider participating in the study by completing this survey. Your responses are anonymous and the results will only be reported in aggregate form.
Please follow the link to the online survey:
www.erasurvey.org/input/womeninit.htm
We would appreciate your help in disseminating the survey to as many technical women as possible. Please forward this email to other women you know working in IT.
Survey results will be available online at www.ncwit.org in November 2007. If you have technical problems, or have questions about the study, please email cliston@psctlt.org. Thank you for your participation.
Equity
The first Toronto Girl Geek Dinner (modeled after ones in London) is being held on Wednesday, June 27, at Alice Fazooli’s. Sandy Kemsley, a systems architect with 20-odd years of experience, is the featured speaker. I look forward to reports…
Equity
Good post from Tara Hunt (ex-Saskatchewan, ex-Toronto, now doing the Web 2.0 startup thang) about how all the warnings and discussion about the crap women have to deal with online contributes to the climate of fear. Interesting and well-reasoned; comments are worth a read too. (Via Adam Goucher, again.)
Equity
This article from US News and World Report says that men can get into many American colleges with lower grades than are required for women:
The reason for these lower admissions rates for female students is simple, if bitterly ironic: From the early grades on up, girls tend to be better students. By the time college admissions come into the picture, many watchers of the “boy gap” agree, it’s too late for the lads to catch up on their own.
*sigh*
Equity
Via several people in our department, a nice piece from the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing on Beatrice Worsley, Canada’s first female computer scientist.
Equity
Shelley Powers has pointed out that only one of the contributors to Beautiful Code is female. It wasn’t for lack of trying: I contacted fifteen women last spring and summer asking them to write articles for us, and only one was able to make the time. In contrast, the uptake rate among the men I approached was 25%. I’d welcome suggestions about how to improve this the next time around. I’d also like to know how to get more material from people who aren’t reasonably fluent in English: we only have one in that category this time as well.
Beautiful Code, Equity
Via Harald Koch, a post on women in tech communities that’s as interesting for the discussion as for the article itself.
Equity
RailsConf 2007 (a gathering of and for Ruby On Rails developers) is happening right now in Portland. Next-generation web frameworks, Web 2.0, blah blah blah — all very exciting, but the gender ratio among speakers is 71 to 5 (6.5% female), and from the photos, all but one of the speakers is white. Looks like more people need to read Suw Charman’s excellent article from last fall…
Which reminds me of a web site I’d really like to see: one that tracks representation of various under-represented groups at conferences. Side-by-side stats might be a good first step toward fixing some of the things that are broken…
Later: Tim Bray commented on the gender imbalance during his talk, and posted about it here. Another commentator reports attendees calling Cyndi Mitchell the “Rachel Ray of code”.
Equity
Leslie Hawthorn posted some stats about female participation in Google’s Summer of Code yesterday. It’s a case of half-empty, half-full: only 4% of student participants are female, which is much less than the 28% often cited for the industry as a whole (based on data from the year 2000—I suspect today’s number would be lower). On the other hand, it’s double the 2% that was bandied about at OSCON’05, and many times higher than the estimate Michelle Levesque and I came up with in 2004.
Leslie says:
…our community is passionately invested in getting more women into open source development. Each time I talk to members of our mentoring organizations, I consistently hear enthusiasm around having female students working with them. And where organizations haven’t worked with women in the program, they are actively seeking ideas on how to attract more women to their projects… We’d like to hear more from the community on this topic: how can more women be attracted to open source development?
If you have ideas—in particular, if you have ideas about why female participation in open source is so much lower than participation in the industry as a whole, and what can be done to correct that—please let her know.
Equity
Interesting post at Marginal Revolution (a site I hadn’t seen before, and about which I know nothing) reporting on a study reporting that the gender gap among tenured professors can be entirely explained by fertility decisions. What makes the Marginal Revolution post really interesting is the comments, which claim that the Survey of Doctorate Recipients data the study is based on is inaccurate, because doctoral candidates routinely lie when filling in the survey. And around and around we go…
Equity
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