I recently had a chat with my MVP Lead – the awesome Esther Lee – and in my chat with her, I realized that I had some frustrations with the tech industry as a whole. My biggest frustration is with the images that the women in tech movement has been creating. We see problems that have happened in various tech communities – problems that honestly aren’t unique to a community or even unique to tech but happened to happen in those communities. We see a lot of negative portraits coming out – and very few positive pictures. And we wonder why women aren’t getting into tech?!?!
If you paint a picture in a negative light, that’s what people pick up on. Not all people can see the light in the darkest rooms. Some people are afraid of the dark, and the dark will keep them away.
At StrangeLoop 2013, I spoke to a crowd in the theater of the Peabody Opera House in St. Louis on the History of Women in Tech. Looking back on that talk, there’s a lot of the positive pictures, with a lot more that haven’t been covered in my talk because of time constraints. To combat my frustration with the negative pictures, I’m bringing in the positive… the positive influences, the women in tech who have been successful despite being in the minority, the women who haven’t let their gender get in the way of success.
Starting October 30, I’m introducing Women in Tech Wednesdays, talking about some of the women in my presentation plus many other women outside of my presentation who are making waves or leaving footprints on the moon (or the tech career equivalent). I’m bringing back the positive, because honestly, I’m sick of all of the negative with an imbalance of positive. Time to shine the light through the darkness and show others that if you look past the darkness, there’s all sorts of cool lights!