DemoCamp14
I had my first DemoCamp experience tonight. It was absolutely wonderful. What it is is a bunch of small startups or cool individuals showing off their latest software/book/gadget in a short 5 min presentation. Tonight’s event was the 14th gathering held in Toronto and it was completely sold out (sold out = full capacity, it is free). Out of 10 presentations, 3 stood out in my mind: Zoomii.ca, Beautiful Code book and OLPC (of course!). I have become a real nitpicker when it comes to watching another person’s presentation and I feel like there should be a standard out there. No less than 20pt font, please.
Ultimately, the best part was meeting Leila Boujnane, CEO from Idée. Quite an outspoken women when it comes to discussing why there are a lack of women in CS. She described herself as the biggest women’s advocate and feminist, but her conclusion about the gender minority was the opposite- “I don’t care”. I have to admit that at first I was slightly shocked, but she made a good point of saying that women in Western society have the choice and just because they didn’t choose CS we should not be concerned. We should be concerned with those women that are being suppressed and don’t have the ability to choose. She went on to say that with confidence, a woman can do whatever she wants. But I didn’t feel like that answered my questions, so I pushed more…
I still wanted to know why there is a lack of interest from women in the field. She declined to answer, she did not care. I respected that and agreed when she said any woman with her confidence could make it in any field she wanted. That was the key point, not many women have her confidence and it is a shame. If every woman had as strong of an opinion, working solely with men would not be intimidating. I have never felt it was, though I hear grumbles from my girlfriends. It was nice to hear her perspective; almost like a social experiment, I am determined to find out why a trend exists. Of course more firefighters are men, but I think that is an easier “why” to answer.
My hunch for one cause of the discrepancy would social skills.
I believe that there is an identifiable trend where many people in CS tend to have weaker social skills than the general population. Specifically they tend to be less communicative, or at the very least more tentative in unfamiliar situations (essentially introverts). I suspect one reason people get into computers (and thus CS) is because it gives them a way to communicate on their terms.
In general I think that men are more likely to be introverted than woman, at least with respect to communication, I suspect this might have something with our hunter/gatherer roots, men hunting would do well to be uncommunicative as to not scare away prey or attract predators (but that’s just a hunch). Either way the pool of communication introverts, predominantly male, tends to be attracted to computers thus accounting for at least part of the imbalance.
Lilian, I enjoyed meeting you yesterday! I will put together a follow up post about our discussion in light of the fact that I am the speaker tomorrow at the Toronto Girl Geek Dinner http://torontogirlgeekdinners.pbwiki.com/ Would love to see you there so we can publicly continue the debate! I think the title of my presentation tomorrow is going to be: Why I don’t care about the lack of women in CS and why *you* too should not!
I asked my favourite (female) Microsoft recruiter about this. This is what she said:
And that I should read a book called “Unlocking the Clubhouse” for details.