Things are already heating up over at the devsource.ziffdavis.com forum where anyone can ask me any question about my interview. The first question was an intense drill down about one of my favorite programming topics: database access in .NET. It would be interesting to hear what some others have to say on the topic. My lengthy response hasn’t shown up yet, but I suppose it will be there shortly.

A warning, it is a big of a PIA to register on that site in order to participate in the forums so be prepared.

Mary Jo did more than just link to my interview in Microsoft Watch. I can tell by the quotes she is pulling out  and a funny comment she made elsewhere that referred to a completely different part of the interview, that she really did read it (or at least scanned well through the whole thing).

That means a lot to me. Thanks, Mary Jo.

This is some story!

Inspired by Ted Neward’s posts, K.C. chimes in with her experiences in Tech and her ideas to add to the discussion. One of the points she makes is not to only talk about women programmers, but women in tech. Yes, the bigger picture is very important. When K.C. was trying to figure out what to do with her interests in tech, she kept getting pushed towards programming – as though that was the only thing in all of computer sciences as a career – or as if this is all there is in C.S. that’s appropriate for a woman (?).

In my conversations, I have  explicitly chosen to focus in on the programmers for a few reasons. First is that “women in I.T.” is an area that is well covered on a more general basis. There are many organizations that exist that address i.t. more generally., or even still with a broader sweep: “women in computer sciences”. This doesn’t mean that the book is closed on that, just that I don’t know what I can specifically add to that particular conversation that his new. Secondly, I am a programmer and that’s what I know, who I know, who my community is and where I think I can personally have an impact. So that’s what happens to work for me. But I don’t think I have total tunnel vision.

This is one of the reasons that the MVP summit was such a great eye opener. Developers only made up a portion of the group of MVP’s.

I definitely have an interest in enabling anyone of any gender into any field that they are interested in.

Anyway, I feel redundant here. I really have said a lot of this in the interview that is online at DevSource. There is even a forum there for talking about some of the things I said if anyone is interested. devsource.ziffdavis.com

”Matthew” who is linkless, comments in Ted’s post and I find this notable:

It’s a simple fact, there are fewer assertive female programmers than men. If you don’t like it change 30,000 years of human biology. Change the fact that men are more likely to be sexual predators. All these factors figure into the likelihood of a woman getting up and getting noticed and becoming an MVP

Definitely part of it…

Also, Avonelle makes a very important point (in the comments of the same post) that she and I have discussed before:

As a woman who has attended conferences with thousands of people where most of the participants are men, I can tell you that this has never bothered me one bit. I don’t feel like I have to work harder to close the gap. Well, let me restate that. I work hard. When I attend a conference – I’m not worried about competing with the men. If there is any feeling of competition, it is with other developers – their gender is not really an issue to me.

Her take on this is very different than mine, but equally important – though I agree with Avonelle in that I don’t feel that I am competing with anyone – men, developers or other women. I have met a number of women who are also wondering “so what’s your point? It’s just the way it is.“

I think that the more people are willing to discuss the question with no answer, not just say what they think and walk away, but really discuss it, perhaps eventually we will have some understanding.

I love what I have been seeing in the past few days and the question is being discussed and asked in our blog community.

the question, of course, is why are there not more women programmers? Why don’t we see more women at summits/at conferences/publishing books/writing articles?

Here are a few of the things I’m seeing that are of interest.

1) “Why is this important?”  I wonder if Rob knows that I am not the only chick who actually counts how many women there are every time we walk into a room filled with programmers. It’s a totally fair question, Rob, and an important question to start a new round of discussions. I call this the Libertarian argument. I dated a guy who I had endless discussions with on questions like: “Why do women need a ‘Women in Business’ meeting? There isn’t a ‘Men in Business’ meeting!“

2) “Imagine how you would feel if…” Ted totally gets the “damn! I feel like an alien here” part of this.

3) “Why is the industry turning women away?” again from Ted. I also like to add to this “IS the industry turning women away? Actively? Passively? Is there something about women that keeps us away or at least on the outer edge?“

4) “Historical fact and the chicken & the egg theory” I love how Alex Lowe thinks in essay form. He is correct, in my mind, about the chicken & the egg theory, which I talked about in the interview that set off this latest dicussion.

5) “Tech is for the unemotional” Jason Mauss talked with his wife about this after thinking about it for a while himself (I love that…yeah Jason) and this was her instinct on why there aren’t more women in tech.

6) “12 men named Brian“ Nothing against Brian’s , really (btw, did you know about this re-release?). It was just that I tried to count how many women I could identify by trolling the list of speakers at TechEd. Granted, I bet I missed one or two. But I counted 12. And since the list was sorted by first name, I happened to notice that the largest collection of guys names was Brian (including one Bryan) and that, too, was 12. Which is where I came up with the statement that there are as many Brian’s speaking at TechEd as there are women.

Why do I care? Am I hoping to see pure equality in the tech field? 50/50? Heck no! I just want to make sure that there aren’t any misconceptions that actually prevent women who want to program from doing it. I think we hold ourselves back when we perceive that this is just not a field where women can be successful. Why do we perceive that? Well even if you don’t read my entire interview that was published on DevSource yesterday (where I talk about a lot of other things besides women in computing, by the way!) , at least read that last question and answer. I have already said what I think, there.

It looks like people are a suddenly little curious about either why there aren’t more women coding or why we aren’t aware of all of the women out there who are coding or some who just don’t understand why this is even an issue for many of us.

So, maybe this is a good time (or maybe a bad time?) to bring this up (heh heh) but I just HAPPEN to be running another Women who Code BOF at TechEd 2004. Why don’t you all just come to the session and we can talk just about this ONE topic for a little while. I would love to see some people who are wondering *why* we even care about this issue come to this session. Or just understand what some of us think these issues actually *are* rather than reacting based on something different.

It looks like they have worked out the the hiccups of dual servers, so go see all of the great BOF sessions so far and vote as you wish.

Thom Robbins is lovin’ this very cool new clock he got as a present from his parents.

…and I thought it was only us chicks who worried about this stuff! I actually wore my first geek t-shirt ever in public at PDC – the “I’m blogging this” shirt. I even wore a t-shirt from the .net 1.0 shipping celebrations to my user group last month because it was kind of funny. It says “Ship, Shower and Shave. Well, the last two can wait”. It was a gift from the BCL team — I think in thanks for my .net namespace poem I wrote in January. That was a result of having the WinFX Developer PReview poster hanging on my wall for a while.

I think this should be the next meme! Let’s all learn from each other’s mistakes.