She's Geeky

At She’s Geeky we are going to see the movie about Ada Lovelace on Friday evening January 30th.   For those of you who don’t know she was the first computer programmer.

This pledge was born around the same time we launched this 3rd She’s Geeky (our 2nd in the Bay Area)

Pledge says: ‘I, Suw Charman-Anderson, will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same.’

It has succeeded – so on Tuesday March 24th I and everyone eles who pledged will be writing about women in techonlogy they admire.  I invite the She’s Geeky community to join the pledge too.

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognized. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Whatever she does, whether she is a sysadmin or a tech entrepreneur, a programmer or a designer, developing software or hardware, a tech journalist or a tech consultant, we want to celebrate her achievements.

It doesn’t matter how new or old your blog is, what gender you are, what language you blog in, or what you normally blog about – everyone is invited to take part. All you need to do is sign up to this pledge and then publish your blog post any time on Tuesday 24th March 2009. If you’re going to be away that day, feel free to write your post in advance and set your blogging system to publish it that day.

We will gather as many of the posts together on the day as we can, and we’ll let you know exactly how we’re going to do that nearer the time. For ongoing updates about Ada Lovelace day, please follow us on Twitter, join our mailing list or see our blog.

I went to visit the Ada blog and this post by Suw about why she was inspired to have this day.

I’ve mainly stayed away from the discussion of gender issues in technology. I didn’t think that I had any real expertise to share. But over the last six months, after many conversations, it has become clear that many of my female friends in tech really do feel disempowered. They feel invisible, lacking in confidence, and unsure how to compete for attention with the men around them.

from Suw really struck me because I have had a very similar experience.  I didn’t start out work in the industry with a strong “gender consciousness” and the  particular tech niche I work in user-centric digtial identity has been consistently fair to the women that work in it. However as I spent more time in neighboring tech fields and talked to more women I knew that this was not the case everywhere and that an event like She’s Geeky could be part of the solution of supporting women finding support and confidence to pursue their dreams and do technology.

Suw points to this research – Psychologist Penelope Lockwood discovered that women need to see female role models more than men need to see male ones.

It again higlights why this event is so important.