Ada Lovelace day was created in recognition of her contributions to technology, It is observed on March 24, and it encourages bloggers to write about current women in various technology fields. If I can quote from her page on Wikipedia:

The Melbourne Tech Heroine I would like to focus on here is Donna Benjamin.

Donna is a passionate contributor to the Australian ICT community. Too often we can be easily carried away by the hype, glitz and gloss that is used to polish the technical toys we let ourselves become carried away with. In spite of this distraction, Donna is quick to spot a creative opportunity or application, often starting by asking the hard questions and working from the grass roots. She has helped to direct, manage and run with clock-work efficiency many IT conferences and training events,  Over the past few years when I have had the good fortune to have worked alongside Donna, I have admired her keen technical eye and attention to detail. I continue to be moved by her sense of freedom, social equality and wish to make a difference. When she is not helping build bridges between different Australian communities, she openly shares her advice, knowledge and reflections across many different forums.

When I was left behind at a 2008 conference, exhausted and left alone to pack and ship dozens of computers, it was Donna who helped rally and enthuse others to roll up their sleeves and lend me a hand.

Tonight, I applaud her efforts, support and contribution to our community.

Ada would be proud :-)

I come from a teaching profession that is dominated by women and a school where most management and senior staff are women. I'll continue to grind my teeth when I am described as 'the token male'.

Any profession with a significant gender imbalance is the poorer for it.

In my field of Information Technology, gender issues are very real and growing. Two years ago, I blogged a report discussing problems by Google to recruit female engineers.  Last night I had discussed online with Pia Waugh some of the gender issues related to information technology careers. She indicated that it is "a problem that can only be overcome through positivity, inspiration and just being the change we want to see". 

As I now see this, just promoting technology technology gender horror stories will only work to further scare off girls and turn this into a self-fulfilling prophesy. Whilst it is a real and worsening problem, a chatfest about the issue will certainly not help things. Generally when I talk about IT as a career with parents, I smile and indicate offhand that as many girls do IT as boys.

It is only too rarely that a girl wants to join the computer games club we run after school each Friday. Odder when we consider this 2008 Brisbane news report about "Game Girls" that indicates that 40% game players are female. The boys in the games club seem to favour each others company. This is rather akin to the community sheds that blokes now build in the backyard to tinker with computers as reported by The Age in this "MenShed Worries" report. Considering that game playing or shed tinkering probably doesn't significantly drive any specific technology course or career interest, I probably dont need to worry as much about these trends.

In the classroom background I can continue to teach and ensure that there is a gender balance in promotion of results, interesting topics and role models etc. Occasionally this can raise the eyebrows of other staff. For now I can at least lay claim to strategies that make my classes gender neutral and frown at perceptions that it is a male dominated subject, feigning ignorance at the current state of affairs in the outside world. Lists such as The Most Inflencial Women in Web2.0 are a big help.


My 2009 VCE class roll indicates that as many girls as boys seem to have chosen to do a senior IT subject. I guess that I must be doing something right.

We have installed a suite of different programming tools on all the college computers.

• Alice has some GUI tools to move images around a screen in order to create a 3D story.
• Ren'Py supports the creation of visual novels. 

Alice and Ren'Py both use Python scripting to make things 'work' both come with a built-in tutorial to get the students started. They include some sample activities and an interactive tutorial to get students started.

These seem to be very engaging tools for my middle school students. I have not done an extensive literature review but from what I have read so far, presenting programming in a storytelling context is a great way to engage and motivate girls. Lindy McKeown mentioned something along this line at the 2008 VITTA conference keynote address. Oddly enough, some of the boys related to these games from their use of Adventure Quest, an online flash based game.