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For all the ladies out there who are making it in tech, who are the only lady in the room, or have been the only lady in the room, or who have always wanted to talk to the only other lady in the room.

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September 10, 2012 - 2:37 pm KMD

Try some SWE chapters? They may have alumni who would be interested. I’ll probably ask some people I know when I have some better constraints on what you’re looking for. Industry? Academics too? Also, “Tech” suggests to me engineering, or computers. It doesn’t suggest to me physics or chemistry, although maybe in industry it would. What about biology?

“All stars” is kind of a loaded phrase, as many women tend to downplay their accomplishments. It brings to my mind people who at least in upper levels of tech, not someone just starting in industry or someone who didn’t quite “make it” in the usual definition.

So I guess my question really is, what is the scope of this project?

Also if you haven’t seen it: http://lookslikescience.tumblr.com/ is fun, though clearly not the same thing you’re doing here.

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September 12, 2012 - 9:16 am Diana Cappiello

I work in IT, but came in through the side door- I’m a taxonomist and information management specialist. My background is in library science and records management. I can’t code, don’t consider myself especially technically skilled, and my work and education experience has always been within a woman-dominated environment, so I’m not sure my experience is within your scope. But do consider looping in some of the techier people from Library and Information Science.

One of my professors at the University of Maryland, Dr. Jen Golbeck, might be an interesting person for you to profile. She’s brilliant, still quite young, and she just started heading up their new Human-Computer Interaction Lab. She was also briefly a colleague- my employer contacted her to build an experimental ontology using a taxonomy I had worked on. She’s a great teacher and great to work with, and while this may sound counterintuitive, I always admired that she did it all while dressing well. I think the implication that women who enjoy dressing in a traditionally feminine way can’t be serious about science drives a lot of girls away, and a lot of that comes from within the field, both from women and men. Prof. Golbeck demonstrated nicely that you can be dead serious about computers while still looking elegant.

Also, I highly recommend looking into this network of young female IT entrepreneurs in Africa- they face challenges in their field that none of us in the West has to deal with, and they seem to be sponsoring some cool mentoring and hacking challenges. Maybe you can interview some of their founding membership:
http://www.asikananetwork.org

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