So there we were, serenely existing in our own little worlds, what with the sun continuing to rise in the East and set in the West and all, until one fine day it occurred to us that there is no fun site dedicated to our fairer sex working in technology! Well, ok, if you want to be all exact about it, there are many sites for women working in engineering/technology fields, but here’s how they are generally classified:
(i) the sites that are dedicated to the “causes” of women in tech. Great people. Want to really help increase the number women in engineering/technology fields, help us out with common problems and all that sort of stuff, but having fun doing it is not their top-most priority.
(ii) and then the odd blog post here and there that assumes women in tech are nerds who wear old sweat pants and generally spend most of their lives hunched over a soldering iron or laptop or petri dish!
There is no site for the not-so-nerdily-dressed tech-chick hunched over her soldering iron, laptop or petri dish to hang out! Where is the hood to hang out and diss the rest of the populace from? Where is the lair to hatch our world domination plots from? Where is the turf we can use to play with our own rules?
This being the state of affairs at the time of discovery of this grave injustice, we decided to jump in, ready, fire and aim style, and start rambling on this blog. Here’s what we think is going to be this site’s future:
(1) create forums for us to brag, diss, discover and discuss ideas
(2) blog posts to attract google’s attention and be found (and perhaps be helpful once in a while?)
(3) a catalog of gifts for the woman engineer/technologist. Kind of like the museum gift store where everyone wanders in to take a look at the novelty stuff. If people buy, great! If not, it’s ok.
And, oh, just to clarify, even though we’re engineers, we know there are a lot of women working in technology fields (like IT or biotech) who are in the same boat, hence the engineer/technologist.
And yes, another important note, we’re not serious enough to have mission/vision/ideals/values etc for this site. “Just chill with the sistas” will be our unofficial motto.
That’s the plan as of Oct 29, 2010. We’ll leave this out in the ether and watch with curiosity how it unfolds.