Sarah Blow is a very well known individual in the UK and international tech scene. She has been working in the industry since 2004 as a software engineer and .net developer. Currently, she is community manager for Tweetmeme! Her passion for technology and innovation together with her determination to assist women in the tech industry led her to found London Girl Geek Dinners in 2005 and ever since, the events have been growing.
What inspired you to set up Geek Girl Dinners back in 2005?
In 2005 I'd pretty much just started my technology career plans. I was about a year into it and was feeling slightly isolated. I'd been to a number of technology events in the industry and found them to be slightly unfriendly towards females and they knew that there should be more females at the events. After going to a Geek Dinner I decided it was about time to do something about it. That's when I decided to start Girl Geek Dinners.
Sarah from Girl Geek Dinners Image credit: Computer Weekly
The idea of the event was to create a comfortable and safe environment for females to share ideas, learn from each other and generally get to network. However, I didn't want to exclude men as I also believe that men have a role to play in getting more men into the IT industry and out to more events. As such, men may also be invited to join by the females attending.
GGD now has 58 groups (soon to be 90) in 21 countries (soon to be 32) with an estimated 25-45,000 members and these figures seem to be growing constantly. What do you think have been the key contributing factors to GGD's success?
I believe that there have been a couple of key areas that have contributed to the success of Girl Geek Dinners. Firstly, the openness and simplicity involved in creating the events have made them easy to reproduce around the world. The centralisation of all the events with a central location for support and advice has also added to this.
You are setting GGD up as a registered charity - why have you decided to go this route?
We are currently looking into setting Girl Geek Dinners up as a registered charity. The process is long, arduous and at this point ,very complicated with the changes to the education section of the charities status. We have decided to look down this route because many of the large corporates in the UK are accessible only to charities, and of those companies, many want to work with charities relating to technology as this is their industry sector.
We believe that by formalising the structure of Girl Geek Dinners and combining it with a registered charity status we should be able to access more funds, provide more support and be more effective than we have been to date.
Since you started GGD do you think that the digital space has changed for women working within it? Is it getting easier or more complex? If more complex, then why do you think this is so?
The digital space has changed for women working within it across the last 3 to 4 years. How could it not! Technology moves on, as do the attitudes. The technologies themselves are getting more complex and the ways that we interact with them are becoming more intuitive. A lot of roles relating to technology these days appear to have more aspects relating to multitasking, management, multiprocessing, logic and complex algorithms. Whilst these areas are not specific to women, it certainly doesn't negate them from being included or even excelling in these areas. As such, I see the next few years, as well as the last few, being positive for women in the industry. The last few years have seen positive steps.
The GirlyGeekdom blog you describe as being a 'site aimed to fill the gap between those women and men's magazines that assume social stereotypes in the articles and move away from this. It is all about fun tech stuff, from gadgets and games through to serious studies on Facebook and the latest web 2.0 softwares (and more!)' Could you expand upon your thoughts on this?
The GirlyGeekdom blog is a personal project of mine. It initially started out as a personal blog, however the time I had available to write on it became less the more I got involved with Girl Geek Dinners. I've always had a passion for technology, gadgets, blogs, education and general geeky stuff. As such, my vision for this site is to make it one very geeky place for women in technology.
I also want to make the site accessible to young people, which is why it has the fun dynamic design that it has at the moment. I suspect the site will go through a number of iterations over time. At this point I have no idea where it will go next - as I say it's my personal project. I have a few friends who write for the site and if it turns into something more then that would be great!
As GGD is international, do you notice that the position of women within the digital space varies from country to country or do women face the same issues globally?
At first I thought that it was just the UK that had a lack of women in the technology space along with the lack of support for them. However, since starting Girl Geek Dinners it's become more apparent to me that the need for such events is not just UK -wide, but international.
Once I realised it was international I started looking at patterns; after all with that much information coming at you from around the world, how could you not? Something that does seem very apparent is that the communist countries don't seem to have the same issues surrounding women in technology. It makes you wonder how much the media, press, magazines and comic books influence the parents and youth in today's society. There do seem to be some patterns, but at this point without further research I couldn't add anything more to this comment.
Role models in the industry are very important and there haven't been many around - but do you see this pattern changing?
I believe there are more women putting themselves forward as role models in the UK and internationally. This is a big step in making a change. We see much larger percentages of women being identified as top technologists, top entrepreneurs and top business executives. These are steps in the right direction, however I do believe that we can still identify more.
Having organisations like GGD is of course a huge support for women within the industry - but are there any other key things which you would love to see happen that you think could really make a difference?
A few things that I think would help encourage more people to join the technology industry include teachers being more informed about technology - what it is and how it works. People do realise that technology is pretty much in everything they use. Technology is all around them and yet they aren't showing an interest in understanding what it is, or how it works. I do wonder whether the government in the UK should consider including technology as part of the core syllabus in the UK education system.
An additional barrier to those students that do wish to start a career in the technology industry is accessing University. Most universities these days require A-level maths and as such you must have done a higher level paper at GCSE in order to be considered for A2 level maths. This means that many students who could have gone to university to study computer science were rejected due to not meeting the grade requirements. I would like to see the grade requirements change or for all students to do A2 level maths as a minimum, to ensure that any student who wishes to go into a science subject at university gets the opportunity to do so.
And finally Sarah, I have to ask: What is your favourite colour?
Blue.
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