A few days ago, I received an email congratulating me for being a mentor in the next Women Go Tech initiative here in Lithuania. If you are not familiar with this initiative, here is a link. I will be mentoring two new amazing women who are starting their careers in tech!
I always sign up for these volunteering initiatives, as I started a career in tech 10 years ago and I never really had a lot of female around me. I am not complaining, I was really happy surrounded by all the people I ever met, but for me if we want to advance further in society, we need different perspectives and new ideas and research have shown that we can achieve this faster with more diverse groups.
One of my favorite quotes in life is from Melinda Gates at the David Letterman's show on Netflix. It goes like this:
When I was in college in the 1980s, we thought women were on the rise in computer science, just like medicine and law. Computer science was on the rise, and we got as high as 37%. It peaked right around the time I was in school, and then it took a precipitous drop and we're now at 19% of computer science graduates are women. And I started to use my voice a few years ago to speak out about this in the US because I think it is so vitally important that women and people of color have a seat at the table and are designing our future. When I think about how pervasive technology already is in society, I mean, we never dreamed when I was at Microsoft, back then, you know, of having that much computing power in our pockets. We can't even imagine, honestly, where it's going in 30 years. And so if women and people of color don't have a seat at the table of designing our future, we are baking into our systems bias without even realizing it. So I could name for you the women who are in artificial intelligence right now on two hands in the United States and yet, that's going to be our system by which we are passing information and making judgments, even about people or their health. Doesn't make any sense.
When working in Sweden, I attended a presentation on ‘How to attract female developers’ which was aimed to educate managers on how to reach women developers and attract them to work with their development teams.
I mean, Did you know that about 50% of women in tech leave the industry? (USA data) 👩🏼💻
I am sure most of my female developer friends would agree with me when I say “I am tired of getting surprised faces from random people whenever I speak about what I do” or the typical phrase “You don’t look like a developer”, which I honestly don’t even know what to answer to that...
In my opinion, women quitting their tech careers come with many different reasons: from not feeling that they can grow in their career (as most top positions are covered already by men), the lack of role models (this is actually an important factor because we don’t have a lot of female representation out there where to get inspiration), the environment they are getting into, or simple psicological reasons by not feeling like “they fit”.
Ever since I started my tech career, I have encounter myself with many different situations ranging from extremely negative to positive. I have been exposed to situations that I don’t wish any women in tech would ever had to experience... but for some reason I had hope that I would find a place where I was going to be accepted and recognized for my capabilities and not for the way I look or the way I was born. I did now and I feel grateful for that, because I can keep pursuing my dream without any type of obstacles but my own decisions.
Not all of us are lucky enough to be in that position, and not all of us have the strength to keep fighting every day against inequality. I ask all of you to reflect on this matter and I ask all of you who have or had any female developer in their team to make her feel welcome and valuable, so we can keep building a more innovative and better future, that can only be achieve through an unbiased world.
I hope the girls I will start mentoring will have the same mindset as myself and will mentor other girls in the future!
