The tech industry’s rather extreme gender disparity comes up every once in a while. Most recently, an even-handed Wall Street Journal story prompted TechCrunch‘s Michael Arrington to write that women are actually given preferential treatment and have only themselves to blame, which triggered a storm of commentary from all sides.
Much of that commentary was inane, but one point emerged repeatedly: the problem starts early, with math and science in grade school and computer science in college. “The problem lies at the base of the tree,” one TechCrunch commenter wrote simply.
Sarah Chipps, self-styled “Girl Developer,” is a freelance coder based in the New York City area and Mashable recently named her one of 15 Developer/Hacker Women to Follow on Twitter. Chipps thinks the answer to the dearth of women in tech is to create “rockstar women programmers.” She co-founded Girl Develop IT, a series of 16 classes designed to teach women how to build their own projects with HTML/CSS, JavaScript and JQuery, and Ruby On Rails.
“We think it is important to create a place where ladies would be comfortable learning concepts, and tools, and mainly ‘how to code,’” Chipps says. “I think the first step in closing this gender gap is to get women shipping software.” Sigue leyendo
