On Twitter, judgement is swift–and vociferous. Minutes after Jack Dorsey tweeted out a photo of lunch with Square’s summer interns, users (of the service he cofounded) notice a glaring absence of any XX chromosomes at the table. “Looks more like a sausage party, than a ham & cheese party,” quipped designer Jody Ferry. Read More
On its blog today, Twitter announced a new partnership aimed at changing that ratio. The company will be investing “time, energy and money,” to partner with Girls Who Code, a intensive program designed to get New York City high schoolers comfortable with software development.
Girls Who Code was launched by Reshma Saujani, a former deputy public advocate under Bill de Blasio. Ms. Saujani, who is running for Public Advocate in 2013, has strong ties to the tech community both here and in the Valley. Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey and Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes both came out to support her (ultimately unsuccessful) bid for a Congressional seat from New York in 2010. She also recently married LocalResponse founder Nihal Mehta. (Mazel!) Read More
In the debate over the dearth of women in technology—just 11 percent of startup founders that take venture capital are women, as an example of one of the many lopsided statistics—one solution inevitably comes up: get ‘em while they’re young. While there are outliers, most of the tech greats got into technology early. Bill Gates went to one of the only high schools in the country that had a time sharing computer in 1968, for example.
As guest columnist Sarah Kunst wrote on Betabeat, women need to get into the pipeline in order to get to the top. This idea, often raised during debates over the gender ratio in tech, makes Stuyvesant High School an interesting case study. All students at Stuyvesant are required to take a year of computer science. As it turns out, the advanced computer science classes skew mostly male anyway. But for a year, boys and girls get exposed to computer programming together.
We asked Mike Zamansky, the head of the computer science program, to share some stories from his female students. They did us one better. Eight students sent in first-hand accounts of what it’s like to learn computer programming as a teenage girl.
Check out these stories of learning computer science as a high school girl. Special thanks to student Ellie Abrams, who coordinated the project. Read More
Upon navigating to the front page of the New York Times website this weekend, we were happily surprised to discover that a piece about women in technology occupied the feature spot. “Nurturing a Baby and a Startup Business” chronicles the difficulties of juggling motherhood and a booming business, through the lens of a handful of New York’s lady-driven startups: The Knot, Rent the Runway and Gilt Groupe, to name a few. Read More
Just because wisdom is conventional doesn’t mean it’s right, and just because dudes 18 to 25 are considered the prized tech demographic doesn’t mean it’s true. The Atlantic dug up a recent talk by Intel researcher Genevieve Bell, and it turns out that women are pretty much the customers you want to have on lock. And people wonder why Pinterest has a great big Scrooge McDuck-style cache of venture capital cash.
Ms. Bell has shared several interesting nuggets, including that women in Western countries use the Internet 17 percent more per month; they spend more time talking on their mobile phones (hold your stereotyped jokes, please); and they’re the biggest users of every social networking site that’s not LinkedIn. Also, “Women are the vast majority owners of all internet enabled devices–readers, healthcare devices, GPS.” Read More
Yesterday Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg returned to her twice-over alma mater (undergrad and grad degrees) to give a commencement speech at Harvard Business School. And no, she did not deign to discuss the company’s rather messy IPO, thank you very much. Instead she talked about, among other things, the tech world’s gender imbalance. Perhaps she also caught the livestream of yesterday’s venture capital panel at TechCrunch Disrupt?
If you’ve ever been to a hackathon, you’re probably well-acquainted with the fact that the majority of attendees and participants are usually dudes. The paucity of gender diversity in tech is a controversial issue, but one that probably won’t be solved by responding to the over-saturation of Y chromosomes with an all-female hackathon. That’s where Hack’n Jill comes in.
Sponsored by Appnexus and hosted at the company’s headquarters, Hack’n Jill is a weekend-long summer hackathon that will bring together 50 men and 50 women in an effort to “create an environment where both genders feel welcome to build cool things together.” Read More
The rain was really starting to come down hard, but the female CEOs at Internet Week appeared undaunted by the passing storm. Birchbox’s Hayley Barna, Learnvest’s Alexa von Tobel, Nest.io’s Caren Maio, Mashable’s Sharon Feder and Artspace’s Catherine Levene joined CNNMoney reporter Laurie Segall for a discussion about gender in tech.
The panel was entitled “Why Being a Good CEO Has Nothing to Do with Being a Woman,” but it was clear from the first question that the women on this panel were more concerned with talking about their businesses than how being a woman has hindered their growth in the tech sector. And who can blame them? After all, the panel was specifically about how gender had nothing to do with their success–though almost all of the questions revolved around their experience as women in a male-dominated world. Read More
New York may have double the female founders, but that statistic refers primarily to fledgling startups. What about the ladies leading large technology companies?
According to a new report by technology recruiting company the Harvey Nash Group, the number of women in top-tier IT positions has decreased since 2010. “Nine percent of U.S. chief information officers (CIOs) are female, down from 11 percent last year and 12 percent in 2010,” reports Reuters. Read More
On quick glance, the list of people named to the digital advisory board for Women at NBCU–NBCUniversal’s lady-friendly ad network–contains roughly every female startup founder and techie maven known to Startupland. At least it sorta feels that way.
As PaidContent reports, the digital board includes TaskRabbit founder Leah Busque, IfWeRanTheWorld founder and CEO Cindy Gallop, Rent the Runway founder and CEO Jennifer Hyman, Google’s Marissa Mayer, One Kings Lane cofounder Alison Pincus, Twitter’s VP of media Chloe Sladden, New York City’s Chief Digital Officer Rachel Sterne, LearnVest founder and CEO Alexa Von Tobel. Read More
