When I was just a young lass, I was excited about math and loved to debate. I loved to figure out how things worked and why people did the things they did. Starting in junior high school, I took every advance placement course my school district offered sans physics and calculus. I wasn't necessarily the smartest kid in the room, but I was a solid B+ student.
When it came time to talk about my post-high school future, my guidance counselor suggested that I become a teacher or a nurse. In his words, "that way if your husband needs you to go back to work after you have kids, you'll be able to get a job." I didn't know enough to be offended by all the assumptions related to his guidance. I did know it wasn't the right for me. I remember saying I think I want to "go into the business world." Honestly, at 16, I didn't really know what that meant, but I knew it sounded interesting.
Why do I mention all this? Because that was a bunch of years ago. I still don't think that kind of "guidance" should have been the standard, but I chalked it up to the timeframe and where I grew up. Flash forward to now. I have a 10 year old daughter. For the last two years, she's evolved from wanting to create video games to wanting to create apps. How much longer will she want to do this? I don't know.
There are still too few girls being encouraged to embrace their geekiness.
Living in the San Francisco Bay Area my family has an advantage. There are a handful of camps and lessons to teach coding within an hour's drive of our home. Also, because of my work, I've been able to expose my child to impressive corporate executives - male and female. Even with all this, I don't know if the desire to make technology will stick. It's fine with me if it doesn't, as long as it's her decision, not an assumption about her role in the world that someone else has assigned to her.
Beyond my household and my community, there are hundreds of thousands of girls that don't have the same advantage as my family. As a global society, we need to make a shift. It starts with encouragement and the access to knowledge.
Two programs come to mind as a good starting place. The EMC-sponsored Women in Technology group has a fantastic program of mentoring female entrepreneurs from Africa and the Middle East. In this competitive program, a group of women from these two regions spend more than a month in Silicon Valley working with female executives and learning about both business and what skills other women have used to become successful. Second is App Camp for Girls, which is now raising funds to start it's first camp location in Oregon, with plans to expand to other cities soon. What will make both these program success is what the participants learn and take forward.
There is a future for women in technology, but like so many other social changes occurring now, the change will happen because we make it happen. It's here for the taking.
