Photos taken by Caitlin Cabanas
On October 11, 2016, an event about women in the tech field was held. Now according to the United States Department of Labor, the most common occupations for women are nurses, teachers, and secretaries/administrative assistants.
When it comes down to the computer and information technology field, those numbers are low. A career such as computer programing and others within these fields have a total percentage of women employed between 20 and 30 percent. Considering the statistics though, why are there very few women in the tech field?
October 11th marked date for Wright’s first celebration of Ada Lovelace Day and celebrated it with Women in Technology. Ada Lovelace was born on December 10th, 1815 and was a mathematician, but is mostly known for basically writing the first computer program. A few other women who had contributed to computer science was Grace Hopper, who designed COBOL which is a computer programing language.
Currently, Dr. Laurie Alfaro, the co-chair for computer information systems and organizer of the event, answered the question: why or what do you believe is the reason we don't see many women in the tech field when there are plenty of women who have contributed to it?
Dr. Alfaro said, “Traditionally programming was considered "a woman's work, like a secretarial job, and if you look at the earliest programmers, they're all women…if I had to guess, I'd say that this stems from the sciences (such as computer science) being a primarily male-dominated field, this is something that has been ingrained in our culture.” She also cited a Harvard study where they found that people equate science with males and art with females.
Dr. Alfaro continued, “When something has become so much a part of our culture, it really requires much effort to change. It can happen, and it will happen, but not overnight.”
There were a total of three speakers, however, two shined within this event. One of these speakers, Sarah Sexton, works at Microsoft and showed off what she has been working on at Microsoft: the HoloLens which is basically a virtual computer with Windows 10. It allows people to build their own apps, simulators for flight and the medical field, play games, and can even Skype and watch Netflix. It’s a powerful piece of hardware.
The second speaker was Gabrielle Crevecoeur who also works at Microsoft. She was essentially the motivational speaker. Crevecoeur gave the crowd her background on her education, experiences while working at Microsoft, her job as a bot builder, helpful advice on being successful, and how we should not doubt ourselves. All in all, this was an interesting event and a good way to look at the tech field within a different light.