I recently attended the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women In Computing Conference in Orlando, FL. Nearly 1,400 women who were undergraduates, PhD students, faculty, staff, and other working professionals gathered to discuss technology and changing the future through computer science, information technology, research and engineering. It wasn’t so much as a “rah rah” event (as male hotel guest not affiliated with the conference thought), but many sessions touched upon the issues surrounding a career in computing as a female.

The conference materials included a bag of swag, one of which was a mysterious purple box. My colleague and I were discussing it when a woman from IBM guessed that it might be a tampon holder. A plausible, but slightly unbelievable theory. Looking closely, it was indeed a tampon holder (with a pill compartment) from ragtotes.com. What was over the top was the label advertising Northwestern University’s Female Researchers in EECS and how they were “At the Bleeding Edge”. Seriously?

On the other hand, the Yahoo recruiting booth was giving out restaurant table purse holders, a unique, but useful item. The conference was the scene of a huge recruiting event since it seemed like a large percentage of the attendees were undergraduate and graduate technical women. The recruiting motive also influenced the sponsored parties on the last night; a whole section of Universal Citywalk was closed off to accommodate individual parties hosted by Cisco, Google, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems.

It seems as though the sentiment was that more female mentors are needed to guide rising technical females. While the mentors will help, there really needs to be a change in the culture. Reinforced at the conference, more often than not, women in tech need to prove their own capabilities before being seen as tech savvy or technically knowledgeable moreso than the men. Also, women in tech are often commented on their physical appearance rather than their technical abilities. Robert Scoble (former Microsoft blogger) has previously written about this:

The Internet culture is really disgusting… We have to fix this culture… It’s this culture of attacking women that has especially got to stop… whenever I post a video of a female technologist there invariably are snide remarks about body parts and other things that simply wouldn’t happen if the interviewee were a man. It makes me realize just how ascerbic this industry and culture are toward women. This just makes me ill.

Also on more than one occasion, women who speak up about the gender issues are often called overly sensitive (like tantrum-throwing girls) yet at the same time it is often those very same critics who are asking why there aren’t more women in computing? Simply put, the culture isn’t all that inviting. Aaron Swartz (RSS 1.0 specification co-author) observes:

If you talk to any woman in the tech community, it won’t be long before they start telling you stories about disgusting, sexist things guys have said to them. It freaks them out; and rightly so. As a result, the only women you see in tech are those who are willing to put up with all the abuse.

Many of the conference attendees were in academia and it would have been nice to see more women from industry. The first keynote about the work of Numenta was interesting and fit in with the “I Invent the Future” theme, but I would’ve liked to see more on the Women in Computing focus. The session on transitioning from a technical role to a management role (which also included a panel format with two seasoned female managers from Sun Microsystems and Cisco Systems) provided much insight. Bev from Sun, one of the panelists, shared her perspectives and dispensed advice that clearly showed she is good at what she does and has wealth of knowledge on the management experience. I especially liked her way of thinking and took the opportunity to chat with her (she was quite generous with her time).

At the Women of Color lunch (I’m Chinese), in an opening activity, we were asked to classify ourselves into different categories like US born vs. foreign born, academia vs. industry, hardware vs. software vs. other work (of about 100+ women, 4 women were left standing on the hardware side, a handful in “other”, and most on software), and finally ethnicity which became a natural progression to dining with others in our ethnic group. While it was a nice lunch experience, I think the event might have been more enriching if we were to dine with others who were not from our ethnic group and hear about each others’ diverse experiences.

At the lunch, though, I had the opportunity to sit at a table with two tech-savvy high school girls from the Bay Area who had participated in a technology program. I was really curious to hear how they were seen by their male peers and asked them about their experience. Had things changed 10 years later? Although they attend an all-girls school, they shared with us that boys’ reactions are often at extreme ends: either the boys assume the girls don’t know anything or the boys assume that the girls know their stuff and sit back leaving everything for the girls to handle.

Throughout the conference, there was mention about reaching out to girls in middle school and high school and even as early as elementary school. Perhaps the change in culture needs to start there, too.