aNewDomain.net — IT Girls are a fighting minority in Silicon Valley. Stereotypes are leading many to wonder there is some beauty and the geek mentality going on.
Is Silicon Valley really just Brogrammer Valley? Do women even care?
update
EU hackers decided to demonstrate girl hacking power see the keynote all SHE++ list
http://www.dailydot.com/news/hacking-conference-haxpo-female-keynote/
According to the Center for Women’s Business Research, about 41 percent of private companies in the U.S. are owned by women — and only three to five percent of them get venture capital. Women are also more likely to go into personal debt getting their businesses off the ground.
But the number of women starting tech companies nationally has doubled the past three years, according to an informal poll by Women 2.0. According to USA Today, between 2000 and 2009, there was a 79 percent drop in the number of first-year undergraduate women considering computer science, even as products such as Facebook, Twitter, Angry Birds, took off in the mainstream.
Does the gender gap matter. Women like our ed director Gina Smith have argued that talking about girl tech at all is a kind of underhanded way of ghettoizing women. We don’t talk about what percentage of IT folk are Jewish, Pakistani, East African, or whatever. It’s true the biggest companies in the Valley are run by men, but define “run.” Such powerhouse women as Oracle’s Safra Catz hold a tremendous amount of power and influence at most huge tech firms. Who do you think calls the shots day to day at Facebook?
That said, she++: The Documentary (12 min: TV-14 DL) is a documentary well worth checking out. It energetically proclaims, ‘Hello, World,” as it follows creative and trailblazing female technologists hard at work in hi-tech. This short documentary collects research and inspirational pieces of Silicon Valley’s unsung heroes to galvanize us to explore our potential as ‘femgineers.’
Written and directed by recent Stanford University good girls gone geek, Ayna Agarwal and Ellora Israni, she++: The Documentary encourages the future CEOs, the innovative engineers, the techies and the fuzzies, the sisters, cousins, and daughters, to break away from the stereotype into a revolutionary field. As technology is becoming increasingly ubiquitous, all demographics must harness new ideas to transform and empower technology. Think of what more ‘femgineers’ could do.
The macho media culture usually focuses on the “Beauty and the Geek” reality shows. The geeks have their communication and dating skills put to the test. The beautiful ladies will have to get their hands dirty in a zoology test where they have to guess the animal behind a the black curtain by touch and feel alone. Hilarity and high-pitched squealing ensues …. It is difficult to fight these stereotypes.
Check out this infographic — It’s She-Geeks: Women and Girls in STEM. STEM, of course, is Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.
Credit: Visual.ly
