Man?s world: entrepreneur Sarah Parmenter, centre, is a sought-after voice at tech conferences but says she is one of only a few women in attendance
It is a crisp, bright November afternoon in Southend, England, and Sarah Parmenter is finishing her working week before flying off to a conference in Belfast.
The 29-year-old founded You Know Who, a small studio specialising in user interface design ? also known as the ?front-end? experience ? for web and mobile applications.
Living her childhood dream to work with computers, Ms Parmenter is a sought-after expert, with regular speaking engagements across Europe and the US. But she is among a small minority.
Women occupy some of the highest-profile positions in the industry. Marissa Mayer is president and chief executive at Yahoo; Sheryl Sandberg, is chief operating officer at Facebook; and Joanna Shields, vice-president and managing director of Facebook in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, is soon leaving the company to head London?s Tech City investment body.
Women, however, account for just 6 per cent of the chief executives of the top 100 technology companies in the US, and just 22 per cent of the IT workforce overall, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology. In the UK, women make up just 17 per cent of technology professionals, according to e-Skills, an organisation that promotes technology learning.
?Don?t let the blonde fool you,? proclaims Ms Parmenter?s website ? acknowledging that it is not always easy for a young woman to defeat stereotypes in this industry. She started learning HTML web page design at 14 and was regularly pulled out of class to fix problems in the school?s IT room.
Today, her business designs mobile apps ranging from a breast cancer awareness campaign to a consumer discount vouchers website. She hopes that by speaking at conferences she will help encourage young women starting out in the industry. ?When you go to some tech conferences it?s amazing how few women are there,? she says. ?I?ve been to a conference where I was one of seven females out of 300. And that?s quite a daunting place to be.?
The code breakers
A number of groups and initiatives are women to get into tech, including:
?
Girls Who Code: founded by Reshma Saujani, this US organisation aims to equip girls aged 13-17 to pursue careers in technology. Supported by businesses including Twitter and General Electric.
?
Hack N?Jill: organises events, including an annual ?Hackathon?, for the New York technology community, encouraging 50/50 gender participation.
?
Technovation Challenge: a US-wide programme that partners high-school girls with women in technology to create and pitch mobile apps.
?
Girl Geek Dinners: launched in the UK in 2005, it is a network of informal meet-ups over dinner designed to break down stereotypes and support women in tech.
?
CodeEd: an education programme in New York, Boston and San Francisco that partners with schools to teach computer science to girls from underserved communities, providing volunteer teachers and computers.
?
BCS Women: a UK group for women working in computing created by Sue Black after she attended a conference at which she was the only woman. Encourages girls and women to enter IT as a career.
A number of initiatives have been set up to help women in the industry. Women Innovate Mobile, for example, is a New York-based ?accelerator? providing guidance, feedback and connections for female-founded mobile technology companies.
Kelly Hoey, co-founder and managing director, says that in a world where the barriers to starting a tech company have dropped significantly, women need to be adept at networking to build relationships with investors and partners. She says that while the perception might be that accelerators just give free office space, hosting
and some seed capital, ?that?s like the nice wrapping paper. The key is the mentoring and the access to networks: that?s what changes everything ? connections to people who can change your life and change your start-up.?
Mentoring existing female technologists is not enough. Younger women are simply not entering the industry in sufficient numbers. In the US, just 18 per cent of undergraduate computing degrees in 2009 were awarded to women, down from 37 per cent in 1985.
In the UK, just 15 per cent of students on IT-related degrees are female, according to e-Skills.
Wendy Tan White, co-founder and chief executive of Moonfruit, the build-your-own-website business that she sold for ?23m, grew up with parents who both worked in technology, giving her a sense that anything was possible.
But when she went to study computer science at Imperial College, London, she encountered what she describes as ?latent chauvinism? on a course where only seven of 120 students were women.
Ms Tan White says the tech industry needs to engage young women differently from how they have been in the past.
?I spoke at a conference for sixth-form girls and I asked them who was interested in going into technology,? she says. ?In a room of 300, no one put their hand up. So I said: ?How many of you use Facebook?? Everybody put their hand up.?
She adds that young women could be attracted to computer science by thinking about what technology enables rather than technical skills alone. ?It worries me that people think it?s just about coding. Yes, great engineers are important but tech is becoming much more about design and user experience to make it accessible to human beings. That is what has engaged a mass market.?
Technovation, a US programme backed by Iridescent, a non-profit organisation that encourages technology learning, is attempting to show women that technology can change lives by teaching high-school girls how to create mobile apps and launch a start-up.
Launched in 2010 in Mountain View, California, the programme has since expanded to Los Angeles, New York, Boston, San Francisco, Berkeley and San Jose. It has taught more than 800 girls to date.
AnnaLise Hoopes, Iridescent?s director of educational and corporate partnerships, hopes it will help to break down stereotypes. ?Many people picture computer programmers staring at a screen in a lonely cubicle all day, doing work that has no impact on the outside world,? she says. ?We teach girls that programming is fun, creative and collaborative, and show them tangible examples of the impact technology has on the world.?
Ms Hoopes adds that having female role models is key for support and inspiration. ?Most of the girls who participate in Technovation have never met a woman in technology before joining our programme and they have never even considered taking a computer science class, let alone pursuing a career in technology.?
Jocelyn Goldfein, director of engineering at Facebook, says getting more women into computing is also one way to help alleviate a shortage of engineering
talent.
?The fastest way to get major increases in the number of new engineers is to engage the major demographic groups that have been sidelined: women and ethnic minorities. We have to start here to get a real pipeline of candidates,? she says.
Back at You Know Who, Ms Parmenter knows she was lucky: her father got her thinking about a career in computers at an early age. Yet, while girls remain big users of technology products and social media, many still don?t think of these as a job opportunity.
Ms Parmenter?s 18-year-old assistant, Kathryn Pringle, for example, had never considered working in the technology industry until her now boss gave a talk at her school. ?Before that, I wasn?t even aware of it as a career option? she says.
2012 oscar predictions jim jones tony stewart kurt busch kurt busch nba dunk contest 2012 act of valor
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.