Recap: Duchess BOF at Devoxx 2008 – Women in IT

3 January 2009 in articles, duchess events by Clara Ko

On December 10, 2008, Linda and I did a BOF at Devoxx. BOF came from the phrase Birds of a feather flock together. BOFs are perfect for gathering a group of people who care about a certain topic. At our BOF, about 30 women and a few guys gathered to hear about Duchess and to discuss the issues around women in IT. Due to the large volume of research that I wanted to share, we only had a short time for discussion. I would like to recap what we had talked about and perhaps continue the discussion here online. If we were to ever do this in the same format, I would like to keep the talk short to leave more time for discussion, and have a organized meet-up for dinner and drinks where we can continue the discussions in a more informal setting.

Introducing Duchess
First, Linda talked about how we started Duchess and why we, as female Java developers ourselves, would like to see more women as colleagues. As introduction, she told that Duchess is a community of female Java developers with over 100 members world-wide, created to support and promote women in the Java industry. We provide a platform for professional and social networking that allows our members to connect with each other. Our short term goals included organizing social outings, technical sessions, study groups, and discounts for events and courses. After coming back from Devoxx, we finally became a foundation, so we can better arrange our activities for our members. Our long term goals include establishing local branches world-wide, starting outreach programs to reach other women and girls and get them to become passionate about IT. We also need to reach out to existing organizations that promote women in IT to possibly collaborate with them on our similar goals. Here at Duchess, our policy is to make visible the successes and challenges involving women in IT. Hopefully, through our collective passion and effort, we can help to change the image of IT into a great career choice for women.

During the second part of the presentation, I talked about the challenges that women face in entering and pursuing a career in IT, gave reasons why more women should be in IT, and proposed strategies to tackle the issues.

Discussion
After the presentation, we got in a circle for discussion.

Encouraging Girls
Someone (please let us know who you are) mentioned the role of parents in showing girls the choices they have by not limiting them. From a US-based education website, I found some practical advice for encouraging girls in maths and sciences. This includes:

  • Ability is Expandable – Teach students that the brain grows when they practice and learn new material.
  • Prescriptive Feedback – Provide prescriptive, informational feedback on strategies and effort.
  • Female Role Models – Show students female role models to counter gender stereotypes.
  • Sparking Curiosity – Spark initial curiosity and foster long-term interest in math and science.
  • Teaching Spatial Skills – Teach students spatial skills such as how to visualize and manipulate forms and shapes.

As far as I’m concerned, these ideas also apply to software development. Ability is definitely expandable as long as people are curious and willing to learn. Feedback is an essential part of modern development methodologies and are instrumental in motivating people. Female role models show us what is possible in our careers. The ability to think abstractly while being able to produce concrete results is essential to software development.

Women with Passion for IT
Next, a professor who teaches programming in Estonia (again please let us know who you are) mentioned that in her class, the girls are less passionate about programming than the boys and therefore, they are not as good as boys. Perhaps the question here is: Why are they not passionate about IT? This means to me to be a case of self-fulfilling prophecy. If they think they’re not as good, then they’ll be not as good. Although girls on average perform better than boys in math classes at all levels, girls are more likely to feel less confident about their answers on tests and often express doubt about their performance. So, it’s perception issue – self-perception, as well as perception of parents and teachers. Furthermore, stereotypes (even subconscious ones) have a great affect on performance. When girls were told before a test that boys were better in math, their test scores suffered. So, in my humble opinion, confidence is the key to passionate learning because confidence allows one to try new things and this can come from risking and failing in a safe environment. With positive feedback leading to a sense of accomplishment, passion can be built and nurtured.

I did get the feeling that not everyone who had something to say had a chance to speak at the BOF. So, please feel free to comment.

In this series:

References

Tags: , ,
3 Comments »