I’m a geek!!
March 6, 2008 at 12:43 pm
I attended the first Irish Geek Girls dinner in the Odessa last week with about 40 other female ‘geeks’ and a couple of guys who tagged along for the action. A big thanks to Martha Rotter for organising it - it was a great night with lots of wine (I’ll pretend I indulged), lovely food and plenty of rich debate.
In between dinner and dessert we had a bit of non compulsory stand up and tell us why your here time and it was pretty surprising the diversity of comments that were expressed from the ladies and men present. It even got quite heated which I wasn’t expecting - there was a bit too much ‘I am woman hear me roar’ sort of thing which normally I think is fantastic but is best in smaller doses (especially when you are waiting on a nice slice of peanut and chocolate slice). I think there could have been less (though by no means none at all) debate about:
- female quotas in the work place
- the horribly low percentage of women speakers at conferences
- I’m geekier then you are because I am a programmer and you’re just a blogger
- are enough girls doing maths in school (are enough boys doing math in school?)
- it’s alright to be feminine and geeky at the same time
- hey but it’s also alright not be feminine if you don’t want to and it doesn’t make you less of a woman
- I’m a man and I think women in technology are a great idea… (gee whiz what a swell guy!)
And much more discussion about:
- fave blogs, fave social tools, are you over facebook, do you know this brill little handbag site…
- a bit of a bitch about networking rooms filled with men in suits
- what will we talk about when we get together next time?
- as Maryrose suggested should we have speakers or themes?
- could we set up some sort of networking thing?
- how should us ladies keep in touch?
- enforced mingling for us shy uns
Certainly we touched on a few of these things but they did get lost in the growls of girl power rants and in fairness to Martha I really don’t think this was her expectation either. And despite this fact I did meet some great people and I am really looking forward to the next Dublin outing when hopefully we’ve got some (not all!!) of these woman issues out of our systems and can move on to just being a bunch of cool geeks in room together chatting about what we love best…
(one response)
March 6th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
Welcome back to Blogging Heidi!! And good post too. I’m glad someone remembered all the things that were discussed that night.
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