Today marks International Girls in ICT day, a day dedicated to encouraging women and girls to consider a career in STEM industries and work towards eliminating the discrimination against women intechnology.
To celebrate, we want to draw your attention to one woman in the industry who has created her own way to encourage girls to enter computer science and technology: Her blog, Women of Silicon Valley.
Women of Silicon Valley is based on the hugely popular Humans of New York, which tells the stories of ordinary people living in New York City through interviews about their experiences and daily lives.
Lea Coligado, a junior at Stanford University majoring in Computer Science, loved reading Humans of New York so much that she decided to create her own version of the publication, but with a different purpose – to encourage and inspire women to overcome the discrimination they face in the tech industry. So she created Women of Silicon Valley, a publication profiling women who’ve pushed past the roadblocks in science and technology and who share why they think the career is fulfilling and worthwhile.
The blog asks women to describe the discrimination they’ve experienced, but then also asks them to explain what can be done about it and what they have learned from persevering with the industry.
Coligado introduces the blog in a ‘letter from the editor’ and explains why she decided to launch it. She describes an experience during her university years in which a male classmate overtly devalued – based on her being a woman – an internship at Facebook she had worked hard to get. Coligado writes that since then she has been determined to stamp out sexism in the industry.
“It’s been two years since that moment, and these two years have brought an entire suite of more negative, almost comically sexist behavior,” she writes.
“I’ve been told at work that ‘girls don’t code because they’re, you know, artsier’; I’ve had married and middle-aged co-workers literally GChat me pickup lines (that aren’t even clever) to the point I’d avoid certain portions of the office altogether; and I’ve been cornered by a stranger at night outside Gates Building when leaving office hours.”
“But these two years have also brought personal growth, as I’ve come to realise just how unacceptable this behavior is. I’ve come to be more and more confident in my own ability, in taking ownership of my accomplishments.”
She explains that her growth is owed to strong female role models in the industry, and that she decided to share the stories of these role models in order to inspire growth in other young women like her.
“I want women who are sitting on the fence about Computer Science to get as inspired as I was by these role models, and hopefully, to see that at its heart tech is exciting, immensely powerful and so, so worth it.”
The stories on Women of Silicon Valley certainly fulfill this goal.
“One of the engineers on my team flat-out refused to talk to women. So if I ever needed anything from him—which I did, regularly, as we were a small team—I’d have to ask the guy right next to him who would ask him directly and then the intermediary guy would relay the answer back to me,” writes Ellora Israni, a software engineer at Facebook.
“Obviously this is an extreme example, but I’ve also seen the day-to-day slights that make life more difficult, a thousand tiny paper cuts.”
“They say that female engineers have two full time jobs: being an engineer and being a woman, and we only get paid for about 77% of the former.”
The blog is filled with stories like this, of discrimination that is sometimes overt and sometimes subtle, but always present. But it is equally filled with stories of overcoming this adversity, of personal development and of carving out a rewarding and fulfilling career.
Women of SiliconValley was launched in January of this year and has acquired a sizeable community and following on social media. Read the stories of the Women of Silicon Valley here.