This week I was lucky enough collect an award at Red Magazine’s Hot Women Awards 2011 which celebrates successful women in industry. What made the experience all the more rewarding was being able to spend some time with a group of women at the top of their fields. We even got to shake hands with Sam Cam.

I was particularly pleased to chat to two women who are leading the charge for female technology innovators everywhere: Cary Marsh, who founded MyDeo, and Kate Burns, the outgoing Senior Vice-President of AOL Europe and former head of Google UK. Both are smart, impressive women who have trail-blazed their way to the very top of the tech industry and should serve as inspiration to all aspiring Lady Geeks out there.

Yet while their progress is heartening, it only puts into perspective the uphill struggle women face in an industry where only 18% of employees are female (e-skills uk). The passing of Steve Jobs last month made me wonder how long it will be before a woman reaches the same exulted status. Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg, Page and Brin, Bezos: all the technology giants of recent years are men.

Of course questions need to be asked as to what the industry needs to address the imbalance, and first instinct is to assume that, like many things, it’s merely too used to being one big boys club. But I believe the problem goes deeper than that.

These days just as many women as men count themselves as tech users (see my previous blogs) and teenage girls and teenage boys have almost identical internet usage statistics. Yet when it comes to careers boys are five times more likely to go into technology (ComputerWorld). Why is this? At what point are we losing our girl geeks to other industries?

The problem is largely one of perception. Girls tend to want careers that lean towards what they deem as ‘creative’ – advertising, PR and publishing all remain popular choices. Why should they take an interest it tech when all that’s on offer for a teenager is a choice between an Information Technology class (spreadsheets, databases, powerpoints, zzzzzsorry what were you saying?) – and a games console at home (made by boys, played by boys). It’s seen as nerdy, dull and – dare I say it – male.

Frustratingly those of us in the tech world know that it can be one of the most creative places a person can work. Instead of boring them to death we should be introducing our young women to exciting cutting edge skills like coding, software development and games design at an early age and showing them that a career in technology is more about creating and building than it is about number crunching. Only then will we start to see a much needed influx of bright young women in the industry.

Until there is a real overhaul of the relationship between tech and women from childhood on up then the Carys and Kates of this world will remain an endangered species. There is a huge opportunity to make sure our daughters and young girls are creators and leaders of technology as well as consumers.

It’s a great time to be a woman.

Belinda Parmar is the founder of Lady Geek TV. Please join the Lady Geek campaign to end the stereotypes and cliches towards women in tech and Like us on Facebook (image in post by Joana Pereira).

Here are a number of assumptions that I have encountered so far:

1. Young women don’t think IT careers are cool, and still imagine the industry to be populated with uncool ‘geeks’ and ‘nerds’.
2. High schools struggle to present up to date, interesting IT classes and fail to engage the interest of young women.
3. Women want creativity and meaningful human interaction in their work, and they don’t feel that IT careers provide either.
4. Women enjoy using gadgets (eg mobile phones) but are not interested in the technology behind them.

These seem fairly reasonable, and widely held theories, but while so few people in education really know what women find rewarding or off-putting about IT careers, and while they base their recruitment drives on assumption it is no surprise there are so few ladies entering IT careers.

On June 22nd I spoke with Anna Liu, Associate Professor at UNSW. Anna’s career in IT spans 15 years. I will be posting more from my conversation with Anna, so watch this space.

When asked how she first became interested in IT Anna says that it was in the third grade when she chose to go to a Computer Summer Camp. She also sites an earlier episode, when her father identified her interest in mathematics on a first-grade enrolment form. Did she really stand out as a mathematician so early on or did she respond to proactively live up to her father’s expectations? She doesn’t know for certain, but it seems that she certainly had her parents’ encouragement from an early age.

“But what,” I asked, “about the coolness factor? Were you not worried about what your peers would think?”
Anna laughs “Well I think I was already classed as one of the geeks!”

We chuckle; neither of us were trend setters at school. But does Anna still see the coolness factor as an issue for female high school students with the potential to enter IT studies and careers? Is there still a perception that IT is uncool and does that really prevent women from pursuing IT studies?

“I think that perception has changed a lot” she says, “IT is the cool thing right now, and I can see women getting into it, particularly the social networking aspect.”

We decide that coolness is not so much the issue at the moment, but Anna raises another point:

“We don’t see enough female participation in the IT industry because we are failing to attract the hardworking female with good HSCs…”

“Generally speaking, girls who get good marks and who enjoy science and maths go straight into medicine. Those who enjoy the communications and English language aspects go straight into law. I don’t know if it’s a matter of dollars or that we haven’t publicised and marketed top IT executives.”

It seems a valid point; most of us know lady doctors and lawyers, and I dare say could name a few fictionalised TV characters in those professions too. But there are fewer recognisable people, in real life or TV who demonstrate the success and enjoyment that women can achieve in technical roles.

So how can we encourage women in technical roles to come forward and share their experiences?

Veronica is a successful software developer. Here she shares some of her experiences in the gender-stereotyped world of IT:

“During the first year of my Computer Science course at USYD, there was no shortage of female students — the ratio was about 50/50. Most of them Asians, very few of Anglo-Saxon background. I think in Asian culture, “geeky” girls are not classed as uncool at all (at least not in Hong Kong, where I grew up — they are often viewed as well informed and thus cool).

“After the first semester, numbers of females started to drop drastically. I have asked a lot of friends why they dropped out, and they generally say how they don’t really care about IT as much as say Economics or Commerce, or Law, so they switched. Of those, there are also many that felt like it’s hard to compete with people (mostly guys) who grew up programming and full of “techniness”, while they are just starting to take an interest and learn for the first time.

“My Computer Science course in uni was full of guys who were proud of their hard core programming abilities, and often they would paint females as ‘noobs’ and ‘wannabes’ — in a group work intensive uni course, this is a big disadvantage for female students who are generally interested and want to do well, but were labelled as lame and pretty much ostracised from the group.

“Many I found, dropped out thinking “I don’t have to put up with this crap”, and end up in other courses where they felt they were taken as equals.

“I also think fewer females start being interested in IT when they’re young because of that mental image of a computer nerd with thick glasses who can’t communicate — can’t help that, it’s a popular stereotype.”

Thanks to Veronica Luke for sharing her experiences.