LadyCoders 2012 -- a Kickstarter project to help more women in software

1) First, I am speaking from an assumption I hold that hiring people to work for you of all stripes, which means moving beyond the cis-white-males that are more common, leads to better teams, better products and better execution.

2) I usually think about non-standard channels for hiring, or assistance/boosting programs such as this focused on women (as one example of minorities in the tech field) because almost all of industry is subtly or not so subtly biased towards the majority. The ways you relax with coworkers, the non-programming personal attributes that are assessed in interviews, the similarity bias interviewers have to pick people like themselves. These are not intentional acts of sexism, but are nonetheless prevalent.

Women and men are raised differently. Things that come natural to you, having been raised male, do not come naturally to a large number of women. Examples include how to make eye contact in an interview and how to shake hands properly. It is very common for women to be raised with an attitude of quietly waiting to be noticed, rather than pointing out their good traits and skills. This can leave them a bit lost when it comes to an interview, which is essentially the time to brag.

Aside from childbirth itself, women are far more likely to be single parents than men are, and are normally the ones to stay home with sick children, especially when there is a long-term disease involved.

Many women end up dealing with multiple name changes, across degrees and sometimes projects.

Of course not all women lack these skills, we would never pretend that to be the case. But the ones that do are at a distinct disadvantage, and there are more of them out there than you realize.

Who would you turn to if you didn't even know that your handshake felt like a dead fish and you never once made eye contact with the hiring manager? That kind of feedback doesn't exist after interviews.

They have to target a sympathetic group or they probably wouldn't get donations. Hardly anyone gives a crap what happens to men, especially other men. I'm actually unsure whether or not I would want my rivals to be better at negotiating and interviewing (driving market rates higher but closer to unsustainable levels, and schmoozing into positions that few of any gender are qualified for).

>Unfortunately, all continuing to enforce how special women are (either positively or negatively, in this case) is to keep women thinking they need specialised tools to succeed.

It emphasizes it to you. As a woman, it painstakingly obvious I am "special." At the last tech event I was at I was one of three women; one was the girlfriend of the organizer, one was a non technical person looking for technical help for a start-up, and the other was me. I felt awkward and stood out like a sore thumb. There's nothing that a bunch of women trying to raise money to encourage women to be in tech could do to make me feel MORE awkward at events where it's obvious I stand out.

Look, I think the project itself is kind of silly. But it could bring more women into tech. And more women in tech won't make me stand out more; it will make me stand out LESS. That's the only way it's going to shake out.

We will not turn men away, and they are of course welcome to the information that we're going to put out.

We chose women because that's what we are and because we wanted to target some of the issues specific to women. A LOT of the information we will be putting out will apply to both genders.

That's what we'll be talking about at GeekGirlCon. We can't fit everything cool into every project :)