I’m sitting here at the Exceptional Women in Publishing annual Women’s Leadership Conference and the keynote panel this morning was all about “women, technology & the female brain.” While I enjoyed the session, I learned nothing new. I’ve been to so many women’s conferences, worked with so many women’s organizations, written and edited so many articles about women’s issues, worked with so many other women in tech on these problems and potential solutions that I feel like it’s time to take the conversation to the next level in those communities. But for women in media, it’s a new conversation and it needed to happen here.
The reason it’s important – other than the fact that women in media can report on the inequities in technology, etc. – is that media companies are becoming far more technology-dependent, on the front end and on the back-end. So while those of us who have been living these problems for 20+ years know all of the arguments and sub-levels to the conversation, a lot of the topics like how girls are educated about math may be new to them.
So I sat there and listened and was reminded about how far we still have to go in this important area. I applaud the EWIP organization for taking on this challenging subject. Just because some communities are talking about it doesn’t mean that we don’t need to keep on talking about it. It just means that 50 minutes won’t do the trick. This is just the beginning, and the more women and men who understand that it’s a problem when only 13% of software engineers are men (or whatever the stat was that they cited), the more discussion we can have on how to attack this problem.
