Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing

Oh my, sure do wish I could attend this conference. Love the title of the I Invent the Future: The Grace Hopper of Celebration of Women in Computing in 2007. For others with the time and dollars to attend, the conference will be held in Orlando, Florida, October 17-20, 2007. This conference is "designed to bring the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront."

Connected to the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (ABI), which is a not-for-profit 501 (c) (3) charitable organization. ABI Partners: Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft Corporation, Sun Microsystems, Google, IBM, Intel, Cisco and Juniper Networks-- this conference appears to be a great one that would allow its attendees to network with leaders and innovators from all over.

Women: Overlooked and Not Missing

Started looking and reading late this evening, but I found a good blog post written by a woman on technology and that led me to another, which leads me to another, and so on and so on. So found several new websites and blogs today devoted to women in technology worth writing about.

Willow Cook of the TechSoup Blog wrote, that women aren't missing from the ranks "technology sector" they are just overlooked. Willow's blog post led me to Tara Hunt's ,Women Who Risk: Making Women in Technology Visible.

Hunt believes "that part of the answer to the question "Why aren't women in technology?" lies in our mistaking the answer to the former question, "Where are the women?" She then goes on to provide an impressive list of women in technology, their blogs names, and the companies they work at or founded.

Women exist in good numbers, so why Hunt asks, can't we be found? Some of her reasons include the following:

-Women choose family first
- Women are cloaked in invisibility ( she provides a personal example of this)
-Masculine measures of success don't fit most women's career paths

So here I am in 10+ months into my action research project, making the invisible, visible by starting a project connected to seeking and finding women in technology. Will continue to work on this as I wrap up between now and the end of the year, but more about that later.