I believe in asking for help, for being vulnerable about the things we don't know, especially if we've been in industry a long time. We can't possibly know it all, and it's important to normalise that.
So I wrote a blog post about the thing I was struggling with. Yes, it also had the lovely positive of asking The Internet to solve my problem.
Shocked I was, shocked (no, I was not) to receive responses suggesting that perhaps I was a bit rubbish as a developer.
Now I've been speaking at (mostly Java) conferences for a while (six years now), I get asked to present at a lot of conferences. Obviously all these conferences are mostly interested in my terribly educational talks, but it's also because I'm a technical woman and there aren't very many technical women speaking at conferences.
In my experience, conferences want to do the right thing - they want a diverse line up of speakers, they want to attract diverse attendees. Often this is not as easy as it may seem, and frequently conferences are Twitter-shamed for not having enough women speakers. When it gets to this point (and often before), conferences frequently ask me for advice on speakers they could invite, and how to attract more women.
So, I wrote a long email to the London Java Community in answer to an excellent question: "What can men do to support Women in Technology?".
It's a bit of a brain dump, by no means comprehensive, and is in answer to a specific question in a specific context, but I've been asked to make the information public so it can be useful in a broader context. So here it is.
Off the back of yesterday’s post, I received a number of comments and questions around blind CFPs (Call For Papers – usually to get into a conference you submit to a CFP) for conferences. I often hear it said that a blind CFP will fix, or at least improve, the diversity imbalance at conferences. I … Read more
We work so hard to promote equality, to fight for the rights of people who are not middle-class white men, and time and again it just feels like we're not getting anywhere. International Women's Day highlights the issues that face women all around the world, and make our women-in-tech problem look like a genuine First World Problem, and yet we can't even get that right.
So, following on from my observations of being an outsider at FOSDEM because I'm not an open source developer, I do have another story to tell where my female-ness is actually relevant.
You know how I keep banging on about attracting different types of people into programming? You know how we say we need to get them young?
I was flattered a couple of weeks ago to be interviewed by Google as part of their women techmaker's series, as it moves over to Europe. In this video I talk about going to Mars, education, planning your career, being a developer, and the impact of technology on our lives. So, not much...
Yesterday dawned, with a sense of foreboding (actually it dawned with me coughing my lungs out, but we've heard enough about the sub-optimal state of my respiratory system this week). On this day, I was giving the talk I was dreading when I got asked to do it. It's the talk I actually put more work into than any of the other sessions I was presenting at this JavaOne. It was the Women In IT talk.