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I’m the programme chair for the BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium, a one-day conference for women students of computing. We’re coming up to the deadline for undergrads to enter the poster contest, so this blog is by way of a plug for the event. Hopefully it’ll help you, dear reader, to encourage any undergraduate or taught masters women students you happen to know. It’s the only event for women computing undergrads in the UK, with speakers from industry, careers advice, recruiters, and networking opportunities. A unique event. The centrepiece of the day is a poster contest for women students, with real prizes (as an example – theRead More →

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The gender imbalance in computing is awful. I think this should be better, and here’s why – 9 reasons for women to study computer science 1. Computer science is a very interesting subject. If you’re the kind of person who likes to combine logical thinking and creativity, computing is great. It’s full of puzzle solving, systematic thinking, lateral thinking… If you sometimes look at a design or a puzzle and think “ooh, that’s elegant” you’ll find that, too. In school, my favourite subjects were Maths, Art and Psychology; the work I’m doing now involves something of all three. Yes, it’s got its dull bits; everyRead More →

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BCSWomen are holding a “Blog Carnival” in January. To enter, all you have to do is write a blog post on women in tech, and submit it to us. The best posts will be featured in a carnival roundup on Sarah Burnett’s blog over at http://sarahburnett.blogspot.com/. The idea is to get people blogging about women in tech, and to build a collection of people and links that are interesting to read on the topic. Here’s how to take part and to help out… Publish a blog post which has something to do with women in IT on your own blog during January. Send an e-mailRead More →

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Earlier this month Gillian Arnold (BCSWomen chair) and I went to the EU Gender Summit in Brussels. This was the first ever gender summit, concentrating on gender issues in Science, Engineering and Technology, and it was absolutely fascinating. The real take home message to me was the power of diverse teams. I’ve heard this before in a business context, but the message coming loud and clear from the Gender Summit was that monocultures are simply not as efficient as mixed groups in any sphere. So your all-male science teams and your all-female nursing teams? Huge mistake, in the same way that all-male boards are inRead More →

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On Friday 7 October, BCSWomen and the organisers of Ada Lovelace Day put on a couple of events in London. The aim of these was to celebrate women in tech by having a women presenters doing lots of cool geeky stuff – this is the second blog post about the evening and you can read all about the Android dev stuff here. In the evening of 7 October, the Ada Lovelace Day events really started to warm up. We sold out so there were 90 people there, and there was an amazing buzz right from the start. Lots of the daytime attendees had chosen toRead More →

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On Friday 7 October, BCSWomen and the organisers of Ada Lovelace Day put on a couple of events in London. The aim of these was to celebrate women in tech by having women presenters doing lots of cool geeky stuff. This is the first of a pair of blog posts talking about what we got up to. During the day, Karen Petrie (of Dundee University) and I ran an Android workshop – this was a mixture of talk & play, with the attendees building apps using AppInventor and learning about the basics of Android development. I was in charge of the talky bits (five shortRead More →

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Ada Lovelace day is a worldwide day of blogging and celebration of women in tech, and I’m sat in the BCS London offices, having co-presented an all-day android workshop for ALD and waiting for the evening ALD celebration to start, so I guess I ought to write my ALD blog post! My choice for this year is Sarah Winmill. Sarah’s just started as director of IT at UCL, having worked as CTO at the V&A museum, at the Royal Academy of Arts, and in the Royal Palaces. She seems to specialise in doing hard IT stuff in beautiful and interesting settings. She’s chair of theRead More →

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BCSWomen AGM happened a couple of weeks back – on September the 8th. We elected officials and carried out the official business in the first part of the meeting, AKA “The Boring Bit”. As usual, the treasurer’s report said that we’ve got a little bit of money and we do quite well at stretching it, and the chair’s report (given by me in the absence of the chair, who had work committments) said that we’re doing well with more members and lots of cool activities. After electing the committee and thanking those who were standing down we had a fab talk from Elizabeth Harrin, who’sRead More →

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As keen followers of this blog will know I started it back in 2009 for Ada Lovelace Day. Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging about women in computing (and in broader science) – where people all over the world write an article about a woman in tech who’s inspired them. This year Ada Lovelace Day (ALD) falls on Friday October 7th, and we’re stepping it up a notch by putting on some events to celebrate women in computing in a big way. These events are in London, and are open to all (not just women). BCSWomen are hosting these two events atRead More →

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Yesterday I was in London for a BCSWomen Committee meeting, followed by an evening workshop called “My Brilliant Career“. It was a change from the normal BCSWomen workshop format (talk, drinks & networking, talk, drinks & networking) as we started with a very hands-on workshop on career planning from Christine Alexander Smith (who was high up in IBM and is now running http://www.diversity-coaching.info/) & Gillian Arnold (who was high up in IBM and is now running Tectre). This workshop was great – properly interactive, with NO POWERPOINT!!. They got us to consider what we actually wanted from our careers and how we might go aboutRead More →