Hello, empowered and amazing readers!
First of all, I would like to thank so many wonderful comments in my LinkedIn profile and sent by email about my last Digital Business Women article. What a great start in this e-magazine sharing ideas with you, people who are rocking projects which are changing the world. In this issue I would like to invite you thinking about something that has become one of the greatest concerns in my PhD research. We are living a fast and revolutionary gender equality change in technology. After participating in so many women in tech events (online and in person) and having interviewed international references, among other methods of investigation, I came to a question that I consider fundamental to all of us: Will women in technology ever develop unique female ways of working, researching and thinking about IT from a literacy that is perhaps being formed in this revolution?
I´ll make things clear. To start this discussion, I need to put this subject in historical, sociological, technological and business perspectives. Technology was always produced and consumed by men. There were very few female developers. STEAM careers and Academia were a very distant dream for young women, not options. Computing software and tech devices became close to women since the World Wide Web release, between the end of 90´s and the beginning of this century. Manuel Castells, University of Southern California professor, pointed out how minorities - especially feminist groups and women in general - benefited from the Web to access technological artefacts which provided access to the experience of technology in personal and professional routine. In The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture trilogy, the researcher contextualizes how the emergence of digital platforms, virtual connections between people and the flow of information increase around the world allowed individual immersion for topics of interest.
What came next was an immense awareness among women about new personal, academical and professional opportunities in STEAM careers. This magazine can be considered one of its results. Technology also became a domain where women not only had developed skills but also form new gender and identity relations. It means women started a social, political, economical, sexual empowerment from and through this biggest patriarch field. Here we are talking about our IT achievements, sharing business cases and experiences. Aren’ t we doing it in a masculine way and perspective, reproducing old models which are living inside ourselves? Are we prepared to teach next women generations how to perform in technology from a female business and scientific canon and perspectives?
Developing female IT business models, coding, teaching and lead teams might seem awkward but Science has been proving that we have different and special skills. The results of a GitHub study were published in The Guardian two years ago: “Women considered better coders – but only if they hide their gender” 1 . “The researchers examined several different factors, such as whether women were making smaller changes to code (they were not) or whether women were outperforming men in only certain kinds of code (they were not). ´Women’s acceptance rates dominate over men’s for every programming language in the top 10, to various degrees, the researchers found”.
Literacy happens after achieving technical and procedural masteries dealing with electronic devices and computing programmes. It occurs when we interiorize specific IT skills and become able not only to deal with them but also to share and teach them to other people. Is it possible to work, teach and study technology in a specific female cognitive path and literacy? How long will we take to have our own voice, manners, procedures being women in tech? As I said before we are living in the middle of a revolutionary transition. Now we are occupying and owing tech companies and academic researches. I leave you a suggestion: start paying attention in your daily relation to technology in personal and professional perspectives. See what you needed to learn with woman and man and what you discovered by yourself. Make a list of it and be disruptive: develop your tech model and discuss it with other women. I think it might be a really good start having you in this conversation. Send me your ideas, perhaps they can turn to be a continuation article about women in tech literacy. I´m really looking forward to hearing from you.
Renata Frade is a PhD candidate in Doctoral Information and Communication in Digital Platforms Universidade de Aveiro and Universidade do Porto programme. I´m also a Portuguese and Brazilian entrepreneur who have been working, researching, developing and teaching Communication, Transmedia, Digital Marketing and Technology in the last 16 years in Brazil, USA and Europe. She has been working with NGO institutions as a volunteer and consultant since 2004, such as Girls in Tech.
My PhD thesis is a new, disruptive and unprecedented research: building a organizational, communicational and transmedia of empowering and entrepreneurism model to help women in tech become more representative with equal social and economic rights.
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