What’s your idea?

I want encourage more girls to enter computing through positive role models. The idea is to create a website showcasing inspirational videos of women talking about their technology careers; detailing the excitement, the passion and the variety in their everyday work. I think short videos provide an engaging medium to convey the passion and excitement that women have about their work.

One great recent example is “Dr Thrill”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OZ7ATDj-G8

What is the social need or challenge your idea could address?

The average percentage of women working in IT has been historically low (on average, 10%) and recent statistics shows that this situation is not improving [1]. The debate panel at Geek’n'Rolla [2], as well as discussion surrounding Matt Aimonetti’s presentation at the Golden Gate Ruby conference [3] show that this issue is one at the forefront of the computing community.

This site aims to inspire the next generation of girls to pursue technology careers through positive role models. It aims to challenge gender stereotypes of the IT industry; as well as increasing the visibility of female leaders in a male-dominated sector.

[1] http://www.katescomment.com/women-in-it-scorecard/
[2] http://uk.techcrunch.com/2009/04/23/just-a-girl-why-we-put-on-the-balancing-tech-culture-debate-geeknrolla/
[3] http://dyepot-teapot.com/2009/04/25/dear-fellow-rubyists/

What’s really new about your idea?

Instead of providing text-based profiles and a-day-in-the-life-of stories, I want to create a more engaging way of telling the stories of real women actively engaged in the technology industry through videos. The point is to emphasise that technology careers do involve collaboration, creativity and variety. I think this can be more effectively conveyed by having the women speak directly to the girls (well, almost directly).

Ultimately, the website could become a resource for careers advisors and high school computing teachers to show the wide variety of jobs that are available in computing.

What inspired you to come up with your idea in the first place?

Personally, I really enjoy listening to the journeys and experiences of IT leaders, particularly female visionaries as they have faced similar challenges to me.

When I was in High School, I had never heard of any women working prominent positions in technology and the situation remained through my undergraduate degree. Even during my four years at university, I only had two female CompSci lecturers. As a postgrad, I’ve been lucky enough to gain access to go to events to hear women that have ‘made it’ talk and could see the positive impact it had on other women as well. So I thought that being able to capture this, and making it easily accessible to younger girls would provide a great resource to help inspire them.

From 1-5, what stage of development would you say your idea was in?

1 - very early stage.

What can we do you?

I need a Geek, Mentor and Funder in that order.

Also I’d probably need someone with some video recording and editing skills to help edit the first set of videos.

If Social Innovation Camp is able to help push your idea forward, do you have the time or desire to take ownership of it?

Yes - definitely.

This idea was submitted by Kate Ho.

Kate is a PhD student doing research on requirements engineering for computer-based scientific tools and infrastructures. She is based at the Social Informatics Cluster at Edinburgh University.