Helen Faulkner wrote:
Hi all, I just read this: "Women valued for technology roles Dr Edwards uses a robot dog to make technology approachable A woman who uses a robot dog to get others excited about technology and its potential as a career has been named best woman in technology for her work. " From: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4384432.stm An interesting article. I'm not sure I'm so impressed that the winner of this award has her contribution described as being mainly about a (cute) robot dog. But maybe that's not fair. Maybe the point is that women do contribute to technology in different ways to men? What do others think? Helen
Hi Helen & Debian Women,I've been reading this list since I heard Hanna Wallach's talk at FOSDEM earlier this year. I'm also from the UK, from Oxford, but there doesn't seem to be many of us! Anyway I thought I'd add a couple of comments about the inaugural "2005 Women in Technology Awards (UK)" [1]. The BBC article will be seen by lots of people so it does raise the profile of women in technology in this country. I was interested to find out which organisations had winners because I didn't have much idea about who was best, only that most tech jobs seem to prefer men. The competition shows that there are several successful women out there.
There is another article [2] that tells you more about the overall winner, Jackie Edwards. She started IT age 40 by taking a "Women's Access to IT" course. The robot dog may be a novelty, but she has managed to encourage lots of women, of all ages, to try. My impression of FOSS, Debian and Debian Women is that most people get involved when they have a computer science degree or have been working in programming for several years. Maybe we should be looking for FOSS developers in different places?
Thanks, Suzanne Winder [1] http://www.womentechawards.com/// [2] http://www.dmu.ac.uk/faculties/cse/news/news_women_technology.jsp