I think I was waiting in line for the restroom at the Webby Awards back in 2001 when I was rendered cognizant of the fact that I was somewhat of a novelty in the then-budding internet industry: a girl. The line to the men’s room was about a mile long, but I was able to swing right in to the women’s. It was a little disorienting, especially having recently graduated from Wellesley.
It got me thinking: Was it the preconceived notion that computer science was a boy’s-club secret language that pushed the glass ceiling lower – or were women innately disinterested in all things tech? The former probably applies to most industries. And the latter, well, didn’t make much sense. But it did cross my mind that women might not have been as diligent about sufficiently spinning our own web around, well, the web.
Girls in Tech is our opportunity to do just that: Tie together a growing powerhouse of enterprising, tech-savvy women to rally around what interests us most. (Woah. That’s a mouthful.) But seriously, we’re not a soapbox (not that we’d shut you up), but rather a means to exchange ideas and opportunities. And maybe even a little gossip and champagne.
So welcome! And, by all means, take advantage of our upcoming networking functions, round-table discussions, social engagements, and recruitment events. And there’s a lot more where that comes from, since, y’know, it all comes from you (well, that’s not completely true; without the marketing and PR mojo Adriana and LaurieAnne throw in, we’d just be a bunch of women hanging out, which isn’t all that bad, but still).
In case you’re wondering, we’ve been around since Feb of ’07, but, hey, we won’t hold it against you if you’ve thus-far referenced us as the hot new thing. Because we kinda are.
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Yay! More info (we know you love it, you wicked smart ladies):
Created in February of 2007, Girls in Tech was founded by technology, marketing and PR mavens Adriana Gascoigne and LaurieAnne Lassek. GIT was born to further support girls in an industry that, traditionally, has been primarily, well, mostly full of guys. GIT believes that we’d all be better off by developing improved resources, cultivating stronger relationships and celebrating our achievements more often.
Girls in Tech is an organization which caters to intelligent, professional, and influential young women working in the technology industry. The organization is membership driven and aims to provide tools and information to empower, as well as encourage innovation, inspiration and involvement among, its members. At the same time, GIT seeks to collaborate with like-minded men in the industry.
Girls in Tech offers a variety of resources to women to supplement and further enhance their professional careers in and around the technology industry. Some of these resources include networking functions, round- table discussions, social engagements, and recruitment events.
Posted on Behalf of Adriana Gascoigne, Girls in Tech!
GIT. Tee-hee!
Okay, immature moment over. I’m sure it can only be a good thing to combine forces.
Hi Kaisa,
Thanks for your comments, they have been noted and I’ll send you an e-mail with details on how to contact Adriana and her team. Girls in Tech have been working offline for about 6 months and that had been working for them.
Unfortunately they don’t work in the web design field so creating a full blown website can, for anyone without experience of such things, be more than a little challenging.
When I did the London Girl Geek Dinners site I had never ever designed a site in my life. (no need really) which is why we have a very basic site and are looking to re-design and make it whizzy and get everything nicely integrated within one site.
The blog is a simple way for me to drop info out without doing any coding or having a huge great CMS to do it all. (thank goodness for blogs!)
Feel free to put any suggestions on what you would like to see on Girly Geekdom in the future, we love to hear from our readers about things that interest them!
Sarah
OK, it seems the missing code is there again, so the index page doesn’t fail. Turns out to be a form for filling in my email address so I can get a notification when they launch their site. (Seemed it was an error because the form was hosted on a completely different web site, which was offline last time I tried accessing the GIT site.)
Haven’t this organization been operating for almost half a year? When are they going to launch their web site, which should be THE most important element for an organization geared against a techie audience?
Guess this upsets me so much because they claim to be all about tech and girls. Well, being a girl techie, I don’t want to be “represented” by someone whose skills seem a bit lacking. I think the web site is horrible from both a PR, design and a tech perspective.
* PR: because it’s pretty hard to find any info about GIT on their web site (had to google to get a direct link to their bio page on the site in order to get past the index page.) And it doesn’t seem to be updated since some time in May. Come on, a web site is the face of an organization, you can’t neglect it with this audience.
* Design: Low contrast between colours used, pages that are “coming soon”, busy background image etc.
* Tech: Having a form on some other web site just doesn’t cut it. It also makes me very sceptical about adding my e-mail-address to their list, even though they are saying they won’t spam me.
And why am I writing all these negative things about GIT here? Because there’s no way of contacting GIT on their web site.
To finish my rant on a slightly more positive note, I just want to express a gratitude to Sarah, Maz and Nicole for having a proper tech web site with usefull content.
You might hate me for writing this, but it’s so ironic that an organization called “Girls in TECH” has an index page with a piece of embedded code that just fails miserably in IE 7… It’s basically violating every rule in the web design book when you actually get inside to read it. I really hope their events are better than their web site! They’re probably sincerely interested in women in technology, though, which is a good thing.