women

Resources To Support Female Geeks

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com  Steve’s Tumblr)

After posting about chanting tech culture’s attitude towards women, I wanted to list the resources I found to support female geeks while working on my civic geek project (which I should update).  Find something for you and give them your support!

  • Computing
    • Anita Borg Institute – A historic institute to assist women in technical careers, fostering innovation by ensuring a broad range of people in technology. Provides a variety of services and ways to get involved.
    • Girl Develop IT – A nonprofit that provides accessible programs for women who want to learn coding.
    • Girls Teaching Girls To Code – A Bay Area program where women in CS teach Bay Area high school girls to code.
    • Grace Hopper Celebration – Produced by the Anita Borg institute, this is a celebration of women in computing.
    • Ladies Learning Code – A Canadian non-profit that focuses on helping people learn beginner technical skills in a comfortable, social way.
    • Made With Code – Promotes women in coding with projects, events, and mentoring. Has several alliances and supporters.
    • Mothercoders – An organization focused on helping mothers get tech-savvy and up-to-date for this economy
    • National Center For Women And Information Technology – Focuses on correcting gender imbalance in technology, and bringing the balance of diversity to the industry.
    • Rails Girls – A worldwide group that works to empower women with technology.
  • STEM
    • Geek Girl Dinners – Promotes geek girl friendly events, resources, and connection.
    • She’s Geeky – An SF Bay organization that provides events and and conferences around the USA for women in STEM.
    • Tech Girls Canada – Provides national leadership for the various industry groups in canada encouraging women in tech careers.
  • Video Games
    • Girls Make Games – A series of international summer camps encouraging girls to explore the world of video games.
  • Writing
    • Girls Write Now – Supports future female writers with mentoring, advice, and more.

 

– Steve

Linkus Maximums

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“If” is a pretty powerful tool for financial planning.  A good bit of advice here “ifs” let you find what you need to do to reach your goals.

Generational Spaceships are an awful unlikely proposal according to Kim Stanley Robinson, though there may be some interesting solutions to the challenges discussed.  Very thought-provoking reading, though for me I say head for the stars no matter what.

Women face barriers to leadership – and we make it too easy to put incompetent men in positions of power.  The Harvard Business review exposes paradoxes of becoming a leader versus being a good one, cultural biases, and more in a thought-provoking piece.

Leaderless resistance is usually doomed to failure – if not a sign of it.  Intriguing piece period, but also relevant if Daesh is shifting to a more distributed network of malcontents – as it seems to be loosing.  Also?  They’re also very, very unpopular among Muslims of the world.

Google Takes On The Gender Gap With “Made With Code”

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The demographics of tech are pretty white and male, but Google and a huge alliance are looking to get more girls coding, reports the Mary Sue.

You can see more at the Google Blog and of course the website.

I strongly applaud this.  Coding is literacy of a technical age, and everyone should know something about it.  Addressing demographic issues in distributions of knowledge is part of having a functional society and civilization.

A few things you can do:

  • Host an event.
  • Be a mentor
  • Invite these people to your con or club.
  • Promote this!

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.