New research shows the earning power of women is on the rise – something that, the Most Powerful Woman in Television, Disney’s Anne Sweeney knows all about.

There’s good news for female workers this week with the news that the earning power of young women has now surpassed that of their male counterparts.

News of the shift, driven by the growing number of women attending college and moving into high-earning jobs, comes in the same week that MeetTheBoss.tv broadcasts an exclusive interview with Anne Sweeney, Co-Chair and President, Disney ABC TV Group: the so-called Most Powerful Woman in Entertainment.

According to The Hollywood Reporter (THR), the magazine who gave her that title, Sweeney presides over an “unrivalled magic kingdom of properties and more than 19,000 employees.”

In fact, according to THR’s 2009 Power List, Sweeney “remains an island of calm at the center of the entertainment industry storm.” And Sweeney exclusively told MeetTheBoss.tv the key to her success herself: “Don’t put barriers in front of you.”

While times have certainly changed for female workers in terms of pay equality, the concept of the glass ceiling hasn’t totally been eradicated. Yet, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data by Reach Advisors, a consumer-research firm from Slingerlands, NY, 2008 saw single, childless women between 22 and 30 earning more than their male counterparts in most US cities.

The survey goes on to suggest that women are succeeding for several reasons, including the fact they are more likely to attend college and therefore raise their earning potential.

Sweeney, meanwhile, who earned a BA degree from the College of New Rochelle and an Ed. M. degree from Harvard University, explains that “too many people fail because they think that have to look like they know it all,” before noting how she is always learning, every single day.

“I am so excited about my work,” says Sweeney, “and I tend to disregard all titles, even my formal titles, and just try to figure out what’s next. I never bought into, nor do I acknowledge the whole glass-ceiling thing.”

To learn more about how to succeed from one of Fortune’s 50 Most Powerful Women in Business, head to MeetTheBoss.tv now.  You can find a preview of the interview with Anne Sweeney below.

Key take away’s from this video include, focusing on the work that you are doing and not on creating barriers for yourself. Be the best that you can be and focus on the important work that you are doing. Don’t get drawn into the questions on what barriers are there, just do what you need to do to achieve your goal.

About Sarah Lamb

Sarah is the founder of the Girl Geek Dinners & GirlyGeekdom. She is a lover of gadgets, geeky things and sport! Find out more about her on her website.

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Name: Reene Chauhan

Role: European Resourcing Co-ordinator at Diageo

1. What is your current job and what are the best and most challenging parts of it?
I’m currently on secondment (from a Global Systems Analyst role) to our HR function – Resourcing for England. The best part is meeting a wide variety of diverse applicants and seeing their different motives for changing direction. The most challenging part is compliance when there is a pressing need for speed!

2. What got you into technology, science or engineering? And who inspires you in these fields?
I’ve always been deeply interested in connections and relationships. My real interest in how technology could be used to enhance links was sparked at an Internet class I took whilst studying at an American high school. Every kid had their own laptop and we surfed for an hour a week – wild for 1996! Ah, inspirations – technology – the plethora of social networking that is growing ever-stronger, science – my very misunderstood teachers, and a previous employer, don’t know many engineers. Architects inspire me too.

3. What advice would you give to any young person looking to get into your field?
Don’t be afraid to take calculated risks. If something doesn’t work out, try something else. Persist. Enjoy yourself. This applies to most “fields”. Talk to people. Investigate. Be clear about your goals and focus your energies on reaching them. Get to know yourself.

If you would like to be featured in our three questions articles then please do get in touch and we’ll send you over 3 questions for you to answer!

About Sarah Lamb

Sarah is the founder of the Girl Geek Dinners & GirlyGeekdom. She is a lover of gadgets, geeky things and sport! Find out more about her on her website.

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Today, the Hedy Lamarr film created for BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT’s Information Pioneers campaign, went live exclusively on Telegraph TV.

Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr created a form of spread spectrum communications, making the use of telephone communications, Wifi and GPS navigation possible today.

Hedy Lamarr is currently in the lead on the ranking of greatest pioneers with over 50% of the vote.  Take a look at her story now and see if you agree!  If so, make sure register your vote for Hedy at http://pioneers.bcs.org.  You can also share this film by copying the embed code into your own site or blog!

You can also view the Ada Lovelace film exclusively on the Financial Mail Women’s Forum - for further details click here.  The other three films will be available to view on the Information Pioneers site from tomorrow.

About BCS Pioneers

BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, is sharing the stories of five Information Pioneers who truly enabled the information society. Videos coming soon!

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Name: Rebecca Caroe

Role: Business Development Consultant

1. What is your current job and what are the best and most challenging parts of it?

My current job is marketing and business development and I am self employed. The best part of my job is the flexible working and good money for good work and success fees. My biggest challenge is continuing to find new clients and projects that allow me to ‘push the boundaries’ for new marketing, esp online / digital / social media.
2. What got you into technology, science or engineering? And who inspires you in these fields?

I got into IT by mistake, a boyfriend bought me an early PDA and I loved using it. I found that I took the time to learn how to use the functionality of software at work and enjoyed databases – building, managing and outputting insightful information. Every new job I took enabled me to find new databases, new gadgets and new software to achieve what I wanted to do for the marketing programme.

3. What advice would you give to any young person looking to get into your field?

Advice – speak to older people about what they did, keep your eyes open for new tech and find out about it or go try it in a shop when it arrives, find yourself a mentor who will give you advice for free once a quarter about your current studies / project / job. Use the full resources of the internet to find like minded people and inspirational people’s blogs to read. These give me my best ideas which when I present them to clients they think I’m marvellous!

If you would like to be featured in our three questions articles then please do get in touch and we’ll send you over 3 questions for you to answer!

About Sarah Lamb

Sarah is the founder of the Girl Geek Dinners & GirlyGeekdom. She is a lover of gadgets, geeky things and sport! Find out more about her on her website.

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Name: Vicki Kolovou

Role: Web Entrepreneur at netWire

1. What is your current job and what are the best and most challenging parts of it?

My current job is in website development. I have recently added mobile app development to our projects. The best part is that it’s a completely new and challenging media (Internet) where the roads are still being paved. Hundreds of things are happening at every moment and you always have to try to keep ahead. Meeting new people and trying to convince them that they need all this technology they have no idea about is a lot of fun

2. What got you into technology, science or engineering? And who inspires you in these fields?

My ex-husband got me into computers 20 years ago and I am here to stay. I’m inspired by where this could lead us. I believe we live in the beginning of a completely new era (something liek the industrial revolution). Sometimes I understand how it must have been for Ford at the beginning of the previous century.

3. What advice would you give to any young person looking to get into your field?

Be willing to work hard, read a lot, listen plenty and be innovative. Don’t be afraid to dare.

To find out more about Vicki and her work please see her LinkedIn Profile.

If you would like to be featured in our three questions articles then please do get in touch and we’ll send you over 3 questions for you to answer!

About Sarah Lamb

Sarah is the founder of the Girl Geek Dinners & GirlyGeekdom. She is a lover of gadgets, geeky things and sport! Find out more about her on her website.

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A while back I got the opportunity to catch up with some great people at the Beam Presents event, and chat to them about their technologies, what they do and how young people might be able to get into something like their jobs.

The second of these video’s to be released out into the wild is the interview I did with Timothy Hill who is the designer behind Ferguson Hill.  It was really great to find out about the face behind the beautiful designs of the hardware!

So here you go!  Enjoy!

About Sarah Lamb

Sarah is the founder of the Girl Geek Dinners & GirlyGeekdom. She is a lover of gadgets, geeky things and sport! Find out more about her on her website.

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At the Beam Presents event a few weeks back I got chatting with Ella from I Want One Of Those where she gave me a gadget tour of their latest geeky gadgets that they have been selling this Christmas holiday!

Ella is the buyer for I Want One Of Those… She possibly has one of the best jobs out there… being paid to find the coolest geekiest and most useful of gadgets!

If you love gadgets then this is for you!

About Sarah Lamb

Sarah is the founder of the Girl Geek Dinners & GirlyGeekdom. She is a lover of gadgets, geeky things and sport! Find out more about her on her website.

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There are few opportunities for women to progress to the highest levels in IT Management. True or false?

This was the question I decided to pose, after much delibertation with my tutor, as the focal point for a 3000 word research report I had to complete for one of my year 3 degree modules. Full report here

It’s quite a question and was likely to raise a few strong points. Doing research on this topic turned out to be a rather large learning curve that I hadn’t really anticipated and it exposed me to so many different thoughts and ideas.

I arranged to interview three different subjects, all involved with the technology industry in a large way but in a variety of different roles. All of the interviews highlighted some points I’d never really considered and have posed questions that I’d like to find some answers to. Such questions as, “What are we doing to make all domains of IT exposed?” and  “If women are doing HE in a technology related subject and have seen and dealt with the fact there has been a lack of information available and that the sector is dominated predominately by males why do they then take a different career path?”

My report conclusion states that the results indicated the originally posed question to be false. There are no fewer opportunities for women in the higher levels of IT management than there are for men. On interviewing Alan Dean. He brought up that

“There are few opportunities for anyone, male or female, to progress to the highest levels of IT Management in my experience. This is largely because the top of any ladder is usually attained via dead shoes and IT management is relatively youthful”

I believe this to be true. It is not a gender based problem, the reason you see fewer women in higher levels of management in IT is simply because there are less of them to start with, it would be quite incredible to find a higher percentage of women in high level IT management roles than in the industry as a whole.

We are losing a lot of women between Higher Education and pursuing working in the sector and I am confused as to why this is happening, if they are doing HE and have seen and dealt with the fact there has been a lack of information available and that the sector is dominated predominately by males why do they then take a different career path?

Awareness of the different roles within IT is a large issue and I feel it needs to be addressed to entice females into IT. IT is perceived as being ‘Techy’ but that is not all it involves and there are some highly communicative roles within IT which until undertaking this report I myself was not aware of. So what are we doing to make all domains of IT exposed?

There does seem to be a underlying communication issue between the genders. This I believe is down to a number of attributing factors, the difference between the genders as a whole; males often perceive things differently to females and although this can create a positive impact on the productivity of a team it can cause communication issues to arise and as such I question “Do women need to be more direct when communicating or do men need to be more sympathetic in their approach to communicating with women?” “Is this just a cultural based issue or is this something that is a genetic trait of males and females?” “Do other countries have these issues?”. These would be areas I would be interested in researching further.

I think that the lack of confidence females appear to have could attribute to the communication barriers they are experiencing. The articles and interviews mentioned in this report relating to the confidence of females within the industry suggest that they feel less confident in themselves not their abilities and that they air on the side of caution, although it was interesting to find that when interviewing a male on the topic he felt women were more confident. So is this an example of communication failure or has the research just not been done on a wide enough scale?

If you are interested in reading the full report with statistics and graphs you will find it here.

About Sara Stephens

I'm a Web Developer. I work for a media company in London while I study in my spare time at Essex University for a BSc(Hons) degree in Computing Solutions. I enjoy most aspects of development and I am always on the look-out for new technologies to experiment with and master.

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Whilst over in Amsterdam for The Next Web Conference I decided it would be a great idea to catch up with the Amsterdam Girl Geeks. Also whilst over there I came across a couple of Belgium Girl Geeks too so we all got together with Chippy who I sort of accosted after meeting him at the coffee stand in the conference. Who is Chippy I hear you say… possibly one of the most gadgeted up Guy Geeks that was at the conference! On his person he had a whole host of gadgets. So to make our Girl Geek meetup fun he got invited along to lunch with us.

I bet you’re now curious about what devices we got talking about now… well anything from MID devices through to batteries an a brand new mobile hardware piece that is fully open source!

I have a feeling I’ll be after that external battery (u20 i-up battery) for my IPhone and my laptop! And I don’t think I’d be disappointed if any of those deviced landed on my desk either!

BTW do watch all the way through to the end of the video as the last 5 mins are on a great new piece of hardware!

About Sarah Lamb

Sarah is the founder of the Girl Geek Dinners & GirlyGeekdom. She is a lover of gadgets, geeky things and sport! Find out more about her on her website.

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As many of you know, writing conference notes can be dull and distracting, however when I was at The Next Web conference over in Amsterdam I came across Esther Gons, aka Wilg/ Wilgengebroed. She did some wonderful sketch notes whilst at the conference and I managed to borrow her for a few minutes to give a brief overview of what she did at the conference in terms of her notes.

You can find more of her sketch notes from this and other conferences on her website!

About Sarah Lamb

Sarah is the founder of the Girl Geek Dinners & GirlyGeekdom. She is a lover of gadgets, geeky things and sport! Find out more about her on her website.

Web | Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | More Posts (289)