Where the tech ladies at?

My friend Elizabeth Stark has been on a rampage ( a good one ) about the lack of women in technology. Her recent article titled Mentors Matter highlights disappointing numbers like 6 females of 53 entrepreneurs were featured in a New York Mag article on the NYC startup scene. (BTW, that’s 11.3% compared to the 1.5% of women CEOs at the top 2000 global corporations)

That sucks!

There must be some nefarious old bearded white guy preventing women from getting ahead in tech, right? Errr….

Well, look around you!!!

We have no women currently on our team of 5 at ChallengePost.  – Haha, there’s PROOF!!!!

Not so fast… when we posted for a lead engineer position, no women applied.

How many women applied for the Lead Engineer position?

None.
Zip.
Zilch.

Did the old bearded white guy break the send button on their email?

Probably not. When I was in high school, I was on the fringe of the cool kids (arguably I was never cool) since I was interested in computers and technology. A woman at my school who showed an interest in programming would have committed social suicide.

Well, look where we are in 2010. Tech companies rule the world, and the  captains of those ships are overwhelmingly the male social outcasts who were uncool in high school. I imagine that in the next generation this gender gap will narrow.

I guess my point with all this is that there is no bearded white guy, just social pressures that existed on gen x and gen y during their formative and exploratory years that discouraged women who potentially had the talent for tech to pursue it.

For every tech job, there aren’t an equal number of qualified men and women applying and the women are overwhelmingly rejected. That’s just not the reality. So, forget the stats. Ignore the numbers. Who cares!?

Do what you love, and love what you do. Nothing else matters.

I hope there will be more women in technology applying for jobs and starting companies. However, who cares whether they are women specifically. I want talented people, passionate about what they are doing to work and interact with – regardless of gender.