Last week, we held our quarterly Girl Geek Dinner at Google. These dinners were first started in London in 2005 by the original Girl Geek, Sarah Blow. As a software engineer, Sarah was sick of everyone at tech events assuming that she wasn’t an engineer; after brainstorming on the train home one night, Girl Geek Dinners was born. These dinners are an opportunity for women who are passionate about tech to meet each other, hear about new ideas and generally to geek out together.
Aside from everyone receiving a “I'm a woman in tech. That doesn't mean everything has to be pink” sticker, which was a big hit, we enjoyed a tasty sit-down dinner with drinks, fun icebreaker games and as always, interesting talks. The event held together by the brilliant MC skills of Amaya “that goth chick that works at Google” Booker.
The keynote speaker was Mary Gardiner talking about her work for newly-founded non-profit organisation The Ada Initiative which supports women in open technology and culture. Mary’s talk engaged the audience with some surprising statistics about the participation of women in open source communities and she discussed why it is important to increase the proportion of women in open technology and culture, before focusing on the Ada Initiative’s plans for addressing the problem. For more information, and to find out how getting women involved can change the culture of the open source community, check out her talk on the Ada Initiative website.
After dinner, we moved into our lightning talks section - talks of (roughly) five minutes each, on a variety of topics. The first talk by Kirsti Rawstron discussed gender streaming and the way it is affected by course costs. Googler Alice Boxhall followed, with a general introduction to website accessibility. Alice demonstrated a couple of websites through ChromeVox to show how hard it can be for a blind person to navigate the web. To wrap up, Googler Katie Bell spoke about the National Computer Science Summer School, and Girls Programming Network, demonstrating that it does pay to get girls into programming from a younger age. All of the talks are available here.
After dinner, we moved into our lightning talks section - talks of (roughly) five minutes each, on a variety of topics. The first talk by Kirsti Rawstron discussed gender streaming and the way it is affected by course costs. Googler Alice Boxhall followed, with a general introduction to website accessibility. Alice demonstrated a couple of websites through ChromeVox to show how hard it can be for a blind person to navigate the web. To wrap up, Googler Katie Bell spoke about the National Computer Science Summer School, and Girls Programming Network, demonstrating that it does pay to get girls into programming from a younger age. All of the talks are available here.
Girl Geek Dinner continues to grow here in Australia with other groups in Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne, and Perth. Our next Girl Geek Dinner will be held on Thursday 8th September. For more information please sign up here and follow us on Twitter here: @GGDSydney.
