"Geek" Girls

I felt that I needed to explain my position against attaching the word "Geek" to every women focused group in IT. Now, a few years back when I was programming full time I wore that geek badge very proudly and I know lots of other women in IT do too - and that's cool - I understand that. But I can be technically great and not feel that I need to call myself a "Geek." I personally love fashion and art and whenever I tell anyone I work in IT they tend to do a double-take. When we talk to girls in schools I don't want to just appeal to the quiet, perhaps socially awkward girl who excels at Maths & Sciences. I want to appeal to the dreamer at the back whose life is about art and music. I want to appeal to the overachiever at the front that excels at both sport and school but feels that with her guaranteed OP 1 she should go into medicine or law. I want to appeal to the slightly rebellious girl who isn't sure what she wants to do, but knows it will need to change all the time to be exciting for her. I feel strongly that if you talk to a group of a young women and only present this "geek" personality you will alienate more than half the room. I get that "Geek Girls" etc. is fun and cute and tongue in cheek, but we just need to avoid creating a stereo-type that will ultimately defeat the purpose of many of those groups - to attract more girls into IT.

Tech Ed - Day 1

I attended four sessions today as well as the women in IT luncheon and the ask the experts dinner. Relational Engine SQL Server 2008 Improvements was an interesting topic, but unfortunately the presenter lost quite a few of us - not because the concepts were too difficult to understand but they weren't presented clearly. However, the new merge capability will be useful for our developers. Merge allows you to compare new data with existing data in a table. If a portion of the data exists you can choose one option (e.g. update) and if the data doesn't exist you can choose another path (e.g. insert). The art and science behind creating a great user experience was a great session with Deep Zoom providing some very cool visuals. The basic message there was simplify the functionality in your applications. Unify Your Communications! was presented by Eileen Brown, and was both useful and incredibly entertaining. Eileen relied on a live demo of office round table where we got to meet some of her team in the UK plus their laundry. She also used the following to demonstrate unified comms - check it out:

How to get Social in the Office with Office talked social networking using the Microsoft tools. They are obviously trying very hard to be leaders in this market but I am still not sure why you would pay for some of these tools when there is so much available for free. Microsoft has obviously conceded this and joined the open source universe with http://www.codeplex.com/ . The women in technology lunch was great - there are more than 6 of us! It should have been at least half an hour longer as there was a lot to talk about. The one thing that concerned me was the continued promotion of "Geek" girls. As I have blogged before, I think that this approach alienates quite a number of girls that would be interested in IT if the "geek" idea wasn't part of the promotion. Again, the focus was on maths and science, which ignores the holistic nature of the IT profession. Girls that are a great at art and design are needed by the IT industry just as much as those with more traditional technical skills.