Yesterday I attended the TechFlash Women in Tech event that recognized women working on tech. For those who don’t remember, TechFlash put a list five months ago of the “100 Top Women in Tech” and there were all kinds of passionate comments. From those calling the list sexist to those asking why an HR person has to do with tech. Independent of how you feel about the list, it worked to stir up the question “why aren’t there more women in tech?” The event yesterday was not only to recognize those 100 women, but also to try to answer that question.
The team at TechFlash turn up the volume on this debate and they should receive all kinds of praises for putting it together, both the list and the event.
However, the event fell very short of my expectations.
I’m not new to diversity debates since I was a member of the Diversity Advisory Council while working at Microsoft. I won’t bore you explaining what that is.
The first and biggest problem with this event was a lack of men. I was there, and so were another 10-12 men – out of 200 people! Ok, this is what most women have to deal with when they go to a tech conference, 200 man and a few dozen women. But this was not a tech event, it wasn’t even a CRAVE-like event. This was an event about Women in Tech, an event about diversity that shutdown any opinion from men. If the opposite had happened, there would have been an outcry from women. I think there were two mistakes: First, a marketing mistake since I got several comments on Facebook from men saying they thought the event was a women-exclusive event, and second, they should have had at least one man on the panel.
The panel wasn’t very good either. Trish Millines Dziko was probably the only one who put some serious thought into the root cause of the problem (problem being why there are so few women in tech) and her argument was (poorly transcribed by me) the K-12 approach to motivate girls to go into getting a tech degree. The other panelists where all successful and very smart women, but the arguments, explanations and discussions where the same from 20 years ago, without either explaining the root cause of the problem, or giving good suggestions on how to fix it (sorry, but part-time work is not the answer).
Another of my issues with the list and the event was: How do you define Women in Tech? I mean absolutely no disrespect to all the women recognized, but I hardly believe an HR person, an Accountant, a Journalist, a PR person are “Women in Tech” for me. My definition would have been “Tech Women” -- a woman who got a Computer Science or Engineering degree, or, someone that doesn’t have one of those degrees, but are working in a position where their careers are knee deep into the tech space with a tech focus, i.e., someone who got a business degree and is the General Manager of some product group at Microsoft.
I could add a lot more to the list of things that I didn’t like about this event, like the lack of food or Christine Chen men-bashing stats, but the debate continues and it will continue for a few more decades (maybe a few more centuries): How do you get more women into tech?
By the way, the networking was very good and it was very refreshing to see so many new faces, particularly women that are interested in tech. I could write a whole another post about the difference about a 90%-men event vs. a 90%-women event, but the Seattle 2.0 is about startups and entrepreneurship, so I might do that on my personal blog someday.
I hope TechFlash takes the lessons learned from the first edition of the list and event and do it again next year.
Oh, and I almost forgot, but I think the lack of women in tech is a result of the lack of role models. Who are the Women who founded their company, IPO-ed and became a billionaire? Or, who are the serial entrepreneur women in town? Or, on this country? There aren’t that many.