More Women to Speak at Dev Conferences?
Why do we have so few female speakers at IT conferences? I’m not talking about SEO / Social Media / UX conferences. I’m talking about hard-core programming conferences. I have been organizing conferences since 2006 and no matter how hard I tried, I ended up with nearly no proposals from women.
It starts with the lack of females in this field. Prejudice or discrimination don’t prevent women from choosing IT, but they can certainly make life hard. These problems exist in every field though…
The real issue, in my opinion, comes from how parents stimulate their kids. We buy Tonkas and Legos for our boys, Barbies and winged ponies for our girls. If the girl never developed her spatial-temporal reasoning because she didn’t have the right tools, then she will have a hard time with software analysis and design. She will probably not be attracted to it at all.
Don’t most girls dream of being a doctor or a teacher? They were caring for dolls all their childhood. Don’t all boys dream of being a detective or an astronaut? They were building spaceships with their Lego. They were certainly not discriminated into choosing these fields at the age of 5.
I see a simple and lasting solution: stimulate both genders with the full range of toys early on (as soon as they are born). I had all kinds of toys in my youth, and so was not stuck in a limited range of possible careers. I chose programming when I was 11 and I still love it. That didn’t prevent me from having a keen interest in health, psychology and child education either.
Do you have other solutions?
I found it especially odd that instead of helping you out by spreading the word about the conference, you would be criticized.
Also, you may want to link here in the blog post to the research you mentioned elsewhere (I probably saw it in your Twitter stream):
http://www.aauw.org/learn/research/upload/whysofew_execsummary.pdf
The assessment in the research and the recommendations are interesting to me.
Looking forward to seeing you again soon, and good luck with Confoo!
Josh
I am a software engineer. My two daughters are 5 and 6 years old. Bought them tons of Lego (develop fine motor skills, creativity), a large toy train set (stimulate spatiotemporal reasoning), logic and memory games (abstract thinking), robots and what not. They still prefer their Barbies, cooking, and cosmetic sets. Can’t help it! Walk into a toy shop and they pick a doll or a figurine nine out of ten times. It must be something deeper than education.
Cheers, Thomas
What I recommend is not a magic pill. At 5 and 6 they have many external influences from television, kindergarten, school, friends, family, etc. What they see around them is perceived as the normal behavior for a girl; everything else is considered abnormal and is thus avoided. I remember that even my mother criticized my father for letting me chop wood. She had no problem with my brothers doing it at the same age.
Such stereotypes are very deeply rooted in our society, and I hope that we can one day weed them out. A variety of toys is a counter-measure and the first step towards a chain reaction that will break stereotypes. The home environment is the only one that we can truly control and it is where we should seed the change.
I do plan on writing a separate post on media and social influences on gender.
It depends on the child. Just because you do or do not provide them all of the tools doesn’t force it one way or the other.
I have two girls (and one boy) and they are all allowed to play with whatever they want (with a couple minor and obvious exceptions for my little guy — like dude isn’t playing dress-up, sorry).
That being said, my girls are both very different. One runs track & field and plays soccer while the other loves playing dress-up and is much more of what one would “think” of as a typical girl. On the other hand, they both get excited when I review with them how to count in binary and write Ruby classes/methods on their computer (sometimes they even get to use mine).
So, the point is, you give them the option and the resources, then let them decide what they like. If you provide the right resources, they have a better opportunity. Further, don’t expect over-night results. Many children (boy or girl) can be introduced to something, take little or no interest in it, but later on find that they really enjoyed that activity and make a career out of it. This is how it happened for me with software development. I was sure I wanted to do something completely opposite, but since I had the tools early I ended up coming back to it after it “clicked” for me.