Yes, Women are Geeks and Do Develop Social Media

I have been asking for weeks, for a list of women who are developing Social Media, (Web 2.0) or Web 3.0, (The Semantic Web), applications. After hitting nothing but dead ends, I was starting to lose faith. Today, I had commented to Robert Scoble on FriendFeed after seeing his great interview on Sliderocket:

Me:

BTW Scoble, when I first read your posts it seemed too much like highschool: who is cool. Also seemed to define geek as male. Which felt strange to me. But this interview is great. Much success with your new endeavor.

And he replied:

terra210: yeah, sorry, sometimes I get pulled into the World Wide Highschool. :-) I do track who is cool, based on their products and services. Male vs. Female geeks are tough. I try to fight that, but truth is most people I come in contact with are guys, so sometimes I fall into that trap. Thanks for the kind wishes! - Robert Scoble

But then...

Later on FriendFeed, Robert Seidman posted an insightful and informed article on women technologists or Geeks; FINALLY...

I loved this portion of the subhead:

"As geeks become chic in all levels of society, an unlikely subset is starting to roar."

"Unlikely subset", is a brilliant but somewhat disturbing description.

The article includes teams of women researchers or Nerdettes, such as Ellen Spertus, a Mills College professor and research scientist at Google, and Leah Culver,  the developer of Pownce, a microblogging platform.

The article also had an interesting paragraph on statistics, regarding women technologists:

Yet there is still a dichotomy between the culture and the workplace. Forty years ago women made up just 3 percent of science and engineering jobs; now they make up about 20 percent. That sounds promising, until you consider that women earn 56 percent of the degrees in those fields. A recent Center for Work-Life Policy study found that 52 percent of women leave those jobs, with 63 percent saying they experienced workplace harassment and more than half believing they needed to "act like a man" in order to succeed. In the past, women dealt with that reality in two ways: some buried their femininity, while others simply gave up their techie interests to appear more feminine. For most of my life I hid my passion for all things scientific and tried to focus on pursuits that were 'allowable'," says Cathy Malmrose, a Berkeley, Calif., mom who, at 38, is now the CEO of a computer manufacturer. "Instead of getting to play on my brother's TRS80 [computer] and study the sciences, I went into elementary education."

To many of you, finding this article this may seem like a minor event. But to me, a lifelong member of the unlikely subset, it was a huge coup. As someone who encounters obstacles on a daily basis for my "active" interest in technology, and who paid, (am still paying), a huge price for taking a faculty position at one of the leading technical universities in the US, it feels like the winds of change are gaining force. You have no idea how good that feels.