One Panel at the South Sound Technology Conference

I just went to the conference today and I can say it was enlightening in many more ways than one. The first one doesn’t really have much to do with business but I can say it was the most important. For some reason, I’ve been viewing the University as more like a high school than as the academic powerhouse that it truly is. What I mean by that is when I found out that the conference was happening at the school I was a little disappointed. In my head it went from this collection and forum of the top technological minds in the South Sound to a bunch of half-educated students and their very proud parents. When I got there (late) I was pleasantly surprised to see student led projects that are well deserving of recognition on any scale, educational or not.

Because of the nature of the end of a quarter at a college, I wasn’t able to stay very long due to all of the finals I have to study for and all of the projects I need to finish but I was able to sit through one panel at least. That panel was the “Recruiting and Retaining Women in the Technology Industry”. I’ve known that the lack of gender diversity is a very noticeable thing but I never thought about how it would produce a self fulfilling prophecy. One thing that I took away was that girls are told growing up that they probably won’t like the tech industry because of how male-dominated it is. This causes the women who decide to push through it anyways to step into the major with doubt clawing at the back of their mind. After some of the challenging academic struggles that we all face while surrounded by mainly men, the doubt starts to take over so they understandably leave due to the difficulty compounded by the lack of feeling like they fit in. Once they’ve left the major they go on to tell other women how male dominated the industry is. I think a great potential solution is something that was also talked about on the panel. We need to have more mentors for these women, male or otherwise, to have them feel less alone and more comfortable. I think the inclusion of the women into as many Computer Science clubs as possible is a great first step but I doubt it will solve anything especially since even the most confident students are intimidated by the difficulty of the projects in the HUSCII club.

Also, I want to point out that the soldiers sitting at the table next to me were talking, giggling, and playing on their phones the whole time and I think that was horrendously rude and inappropriate. I don’t know why they were there but I doubt they got whatever that was accomplished by ignoring what was being discussed on the stage.