Invest in diversity: Why encouraging women to go Tech matters

As any human being I have vested interest in the success of the women in my life. It has deepened for me significantly in recent times with my two daughters joining the Kincaid clan.

I am making deep investments in their dreams even this early on. I am quickly approaching mid career. I have had the chance to see women continue to join the tech community in larger numbers. I have also had the chance to learn from, mentor, and collaborate with women in my daily work on a number of different teams. I think we are making good strides to encourage more gender diverse teams. This has only improved the output of projects I have been.

As a culture Americans are becoming more enamored with geek/nerd interests. It is exciting, as a parent, to imagine my kids seeing a more progressive society that embraces leadership won by results over status based leadership such as patriarch favored systems human society has popularly embraced for centuries.

The Internet is the catalyst of this progression. I remember reading 'Being Digital' during college. I am a barely when Negroponte's book was first published. At 9 years age the book was clearly showing it age. It was fascinating that even then I could see his vision of a segmented web unfolding. It is all but reality today of the ability for people to form Godinesque tribes on the web. Its quite empowering.

This progression also has its negative aspects. With the power to nurture comes the power for members to damage a community. As the community becomes more diverse it can become difficult to accept that some contributions may offend some and be seen as useful to others. One of my social media friends pointed out their offense of one such contribution.

I am conflicted about whether I should be offended by this site. It could be positive or negative for the community depending on the site owners' agenda. On one hand its easy to wave the objectify women/ booth babe flag. It is obvious the content is taking queues from mass media we see everywhere here in the US. If it makes people think programming is cool there may be some benefit. Maybe it is a terrible way of going about that. But I think there is room for everything in the spectrum of interest on the internet. I prefer my kids program than quite a number of negative activities encouraged by sexualized marketing.  I think I will keep my pluralsight membership especially with the recent infusion of investment money they received. But if Code Babes encourages others to deepen their programming skills its easy to quickly forget they even exist. I can instead focus on what interests me.

I would also argue there is significant content available from a diverse group of people from all demographics.  We have already seen the gender bias blur to a significant extent in our industry. There are people in fact concentrating on making technology more cool for women as well.

Some great example organizations for women include but are not limited to:
http://www.womenintechnology.org/
http://girldevelopit.com/
http://www.ladieslearningcode.com/

I think it is positive to see a saturation of content from many perspectives. Please get involved in organizations like these. This is what will propel our industry forward. I like close by mentioning a quote on women in the country of Saudi Arabia:

“Well, if you’re not fully utilizing half the talent in the country,” Gates said, “you’re not going to get too close to the Top 10.”  *applause* -Bill Gates

Source of quote: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/magazine/23Women-t.html?pagewanted=5&_r=0