Entrepreneurs and startups seem to be our new heroes but most of the people you read about are male. This is especially true of CEO’s and other senior managers. Much better informed people than me have written about why this is a problem and how we can go about fixing it.
I thought it would be worth highlighting one of the women in a senior position that have inspired me, Thayer Prime, who beside having just the best name, is currently CEO and founder of Team Prime and Primed.is.
One of the biggest thing that continues to inspire me, is the way she does business differently, giving to charity via her company, not working all hours, spending time with her family. More people should follow her example
In my day job one of things I spent a lot of time on is recruitment. So when I was asked if I wanted to talk at Rail Girls London 7, something around hiring was the natural choice.
MOOC‘s have been a good development for me. Not convinced they’ll be a revolution in education as you still need access to broadband, a computer and free chunks of time but they have provided a good way for me to study.
I didn’t just turn up to other people events: I was part of the group who presented to the head of Microsoft UK, Michel Van der Bel (and the head of the civil service, Sir Bob Kerslake who was shadowing him that day)
Gt day shadowing Michel Van der Bel, MD Microsoft UK. Picture here meeting GLEAM, the excellent LBGT gp in Microsoft. pic.twitter.com/m8WzWNfb1M
Getting the feedback that a number of companies had changed their approach because of the event is properly what I’m most proud of having helped with in 2014.
This led to being a mentor at Rails Girl London (and having to learn rails quite quickly) and a judge at the first DigiGirlz London event (all the 10-12 year old were scary good).
It wasn’t all work. I went to my first sci-fi convention, Nine Worlds (which was great but a little overwhelming), A very posh works Christmas party at the Banking Hall, another party at the very fun Loading Bar (and being reintroduced to how much fun Micro Machines on the SNES is multiplayer) and rounded off with my first #techsmas.
I grew up just as the BBC was coming into schools, we had one at home, my friends had between them most of the 8-bit machines, we all played around with BASIC, programming some simple things. I didn’t do much actual programming at school, my first formal teaching was at University. Instead as we all moved over to ST‘s and Amiga‘s many of use got into STOS and AMOS, a few even progressed to 68000 assembly. Much of this motivated by wanting to create games and demos. This is how most people around my age learnt programming.
Today, consoles are more popular, we have smartphones with apps, PC’s don’t tend to ship with programming languages installed by default, so simply being a consumer is much easier but we have the web, with all free tools for creating applications, so the opportunities are still around, just different. Culturally programming has become more specialist than in the 80’s, not something for the average person, even as computers have moved into more areas of everyday life.
One person helping to increase the number of people exposed to programming is Emma Mulqueeny (aka @HubMum). She is behind Rewired State and the offshoot Young Rewired State for people 18 and under, if that was not enough she is also involved in Coding for Kids. Also she is an advisor to the mayor of London on Digital issues. So she is making a difference to the way computers are taught in school, maybe in the future we will see less of those articles telling us we need more engineers in part because of the work she is doing today.