Around one year ago I subscribed to a newsletter for girls working with IT called “IT-tjej”. A couple of weeks ago after meeting a former employee at Mozilla I signed up for the mailing list at WoMoz. Two weeks ago I went to Geek Girl Meetup.
The subject of women working and being involved with web technology has always intrigued me. This doesn’t have anything to do with genders or me preferring women to men. I love working with people who are passionate and enthusiastic regardless their gender or age. But still. Girls working with web development are exciting. I mean the majority of great people in this field are men. That’s just facts. So sometimes it gets to you. One way or the other. Especially when you have experienced situations where people just expect you to be not just as good simply because you are a girl. I guess a guy working in an area dominated by women know what I’m talking about and can relate to this as well.
To be honest to you all I need to admit that I actually most of the times do prefer guys company. This is simply cause the majority of girls I know hate listening to me getting excited about the latest stuff in jQuery. Well anyway. Enough about genders. What about GG Meetup?
It was mainly three things that drove me to the event. Free drinks, the main theme was frontend and it seemed to be lots of geeky girls. Girls somehow involved with the web. I mean. Wow.
The event was held at Wyatt. I got there after finishing work. I guess I wasn’t that early cause I didn’t really had a lot of time to mingle before the speeches started. Three girls held one speech each. First one was Maria from Vinnovera who talked about CSS. Now I’m gonna be straight forward and as a frontend developer maybe the degree of difficulty wasn’t that great. In one way I understood it. We were a mix of people and I have no idea of what the other people were doing and at what level they were. I guess I was comparing too much with GeekMeet where they invite great speakers talking about the latest in web technology. On the other hand I should not complain. I had been warned in the invitation and why start by scaring people off with something complicated that maybe only a few geeks (like myself) would find interesting? And if this would’ve been, lets say five years ago, I’m sure I would have enjoyed it a lot.
Second speech was by Kim from Valtech. She spoke on the subject of Firebug. She was nervous but I think she did great and also props to her being so well prepared. Last speech was by Alicia, an UI designer. That was for me interesting. I’m a frontend developer and I’m really interested in every area touching my own. UI design as well. She was speaking pretty general about how we perceive things and how we can apply this knowledge in our design.
The meeting ended with us putting up post-its on what Geek Girls has been, is and what we would like it to be in the future. Good idea and I hope they will make something nice out of that feedback.
It all ended up being a pretty cool evening even though it was in the middle of the week and lots of people had to get home and get their (beauty?) sleep. (People keep telling me that I will get there one day too and that I can’t continue to skip sleeping for an eternity. But I hope I’m still far away. I love late nights too much.)
I found out that Geek Girls exist in Malmö as well and I got to say hello to one of the main southern girls. After googling some I found out that there are Geeky Girl-events going on all around the world. It’s pretty cool.
If you are considering going to an event or want to read more on women and web here are some links for you:
Womoz.org
GeekGirl Meetup
IT-tjej
I will tell you straight away that the newsletter at idg was and still is a disappointment to me. It’s more on girls using the internet and working in the web industry than it is about women actually doing development which is the part that interests me.
So what I really wish with this post just to encourage people to go to events and meet others. This is not about girl-stuff or being totally hyper-social. It’s about meeting cool people who are interested in the same things as you. The stereotype of people working with technology is still strong. They sit alone in dark basements surrounded by junk food and geeky gadgets. That is quite far from reality.
/Ida
Ps. Thanks to Caroline for letting me use her photos. See more photos from GeekGirl Meetup at Carolines Flickr.
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