International Women's Day 2014

Today is International Women's Day 2014, and there's a ton of great news, information and activity happening around the world!

Here are some cool things to share:

• www.makers.com has inspiring videos/documentary film making that showcases the achievements of American women
• the IFLS blog has a post up about famous female physicists you have probably never heard of and need to know (I have a mug commemorating Anna Ternshnikova which is awesome)!
• Canadian content: The National Film Board blog has a post up about some great Canadian films made by and about women, check it out!

Women in Computing Science Alumni Endowment Fund
In case you're looking for a good cause to support to mark the occasion, you might be interested in donating to the new Women in Computing Science (WICS) Alumni Endowment Fund for my alma mater, Simon Fraser University!  I've posted a few times already but given the day and given that we haven't yet reached our goal, I'm going to do so again now.

WICS is a student society that helps support and promote women studying Computing Science.  They are an inclusive org that also welcomes male supporters and allies.  Since many of the WICS alumni in recent years have gone on to do awesome things and build successful careers, we wanted to give back by funding a scholarship to support women in the pipeline - women studying CS now who could use our help.

Here's how you can donate in Canada:

• Go to http://www.sfu.ca/engage50/ways-to-give.html
• Click the bar 'Online' and add your contact information
• Under *Please designate my gift*, choose: Faculty of Applied Sciences - Student Support
• Under *Additional Donation Designation Information* - please enter the name of the fund as 'The Women in Computing Science Alumni Endowment Fund'.

You can also donate if you are in the US: the organization is Friends Of Simon Fraser University which is a 501(3)c (for charitable donation purposes).  Please indicate that you are donating to 'The Women in Computing Science Alumni Endowment Fund'.

We still need about $4K to launch the award, so anything you can contribute will help!  If you've pledged to donate but haven't yet, today would be an awesome day to do so!

Update on Women in Computing Science Alumni Endowment Fund for SFU

I recently posted about how I've been working with WICS @ SFU (Women in Computing Science @ SFU) alumni to set up an Endowment Fund to support women studying CS at SFU.

We're pretty close to raising the $20K we need (need about $6K $4K still), but more is always appreciated and will help make the scholarship larger/get started sooner. Please spread the word if there are alumni I missed!

Instructions for donating in Canada:

• Go to http://www.sfu.ca/engage50/ways-to-give.html
• Click the bar 'Online' and add your contact information
• Under *Please designate my gift*, choose: Faculty of Applied Sciences - Student Support
• Under *Additional Donation Designation Information* - please enter the name of the fund as 'The Women in Computing Science Alumni Endowment Fund'.

You can also donate if you are in the US, the organization is Friends Of Simon Fraser University which is a 501(3)c (for charitable donation purposes).

Thanks to Brittany Zenger for this awesome idea! And many thanks to other WICS alumni for spreading the word: Angelica Lim, Crystal Xing, Ming Hua, Xiaoyuan Vivian Xu, and many others (sorry if I missed you). Also special thanks to Greg Baker for your help in discussions with the school and spreading the word, and Sumo Kindersley and Nancy Bart for your ongoing support. 

Women in CS Alumni Endowment Fund for SFU

UPDATE: We are now at 14K, only 6K left to go!

Last week one of my grad school friends had what I think is an amazing idea: set up a scholarship to support women studying Computing Science at our alma mater, SFU.  Since then I've been reaching out to many people I know from the school and have pledges for ~$12K of the $20K we need to start the fund, which we're tentatively calling the 'Women in CS Alumni Endowment Fund'.

Read on for more details!

Why This Idea Rocks!

This fund will:

• Provide extra support for women studying CS (the obvious one!)
• Show that women from the CS department are successful (role modeling) and that we support women in the pipeline
• Implicitly encourage women to participate in the WICS community

Some Details:

• We plan to set up an endowment fund as defined by the school
• Alumni in the US and Canada can easily donate to this fund as a charity since it qualifies as a 5013c in the US
• The school would take care of administration of the fund and awarding of the scholarship, given qualifying requirements as set by us (details TBA).
• Anyone can contribute to the fund, not just women, not just alumni of CS at SFU, etc.  All friends and supporters are welcome! :-)

Current Status

Since we're still looking for ~$8K more, please contact me ASAP if you would like to support this effort!  

(I can be reached via kjtsouka AT gmail DOTcom.)   

Ada Lovelace Day 2013

Today is Ada Lovelace Day - a day for celebrating the achievements of women in science, tech, engineering, and math.

 

This year I thought I'd write about my favorite Canadian author, Margaret Atwood.  You might be thinking, an author?  What does she have to do with STEM?  Well, here's a few of her science and engineering-related accomplishments:

• She invented the Long Pen, a remote signing device used by authors to do carbon-neutral book signings
• She's written a fascinating science fiction (I'm deliberately calling it that, sorry Margaret) trilogy that deals with the implications of genetic engineering: Oryx & Crake, The Year of the Flood (my copy is signed using the Long Pen), and Maddaddam
• She is an environmental advocate, often using her fame to educate about the plight of endangered bird species

As technologists' training and careers become more and more focused and specialized, we tend to forget that women in STEM often come at their fields sidewise.  I can relate to this as I came to Software Engineering only after completing a Bachelor's degree in a different field - Physics.  I think the voices and perspectives of people who have experience outside CS, for example, are incredibly important, both for developing new approaches and in understanding our end-users.  And for that reason, although she wouldn't be called a scientist exactly, I want to include Margaret Atwood in this year's Ada Lovelace Day as someone who gets us thinking about science and its implications.

Biology & Women in CS

Terri Oda made this slide show, I think it's great and although I've seen it several times, thought I'd share it here too.

How does biology explain the low numbers of women in computer science? Hint: it doesn't. from Terri Oda

Job Shadowing

Recently, I had a high school senior job shadow me for a day.  It was a neat experience and I thought I'd share it here, along with some advice/tips for how you can give someone this invaluable experience!

Why Should You Have a Job Shadower?
I think job shadowing is a great experience for students, especially if they don't have a clear direction career-wise yet.  When I was a kid, I didn't have any close relatives or friends whose parents worked in tech and could show me what it's like, and I was a latecomer to the industry.  I'm a big believer in 'you can't be (or have a harder time being) what you can't see', so I think it would be great if more tech women could offer this opportunity to younger women considering (or not) a career in tech. 

The Setup
A few weeks before the actual job-shadow date, we checked with HR and made sure all the necessary forms were signed (i.e. NDA).  I checked with my managers to make sure it was OK too.  An added benefit was that they knew my job shadower was coming and welcomed her when she arrived.

A few days before my job shadower arrived, I figured out what we would be doing that day and arranged three 15-30 minute 'interview' slots where she could meet with female interns and employees to ask questions about how they got into technology.  This worked really well, since there were some tasks I needed to complete that I knew wouldn't be as interesting, and I could work on those while my job shadower was in her interviews. 

Key Takeaways: Keep managers/HR in the loop so you don't get in trouble when your job shadower shows up unexpected, and so they can welcome her to the business.

The Day Of
We started off with an explanation of my role, how the different parts of our team/org work together, what areas of the product I own.  My plan was to have my job shadower manually re-test a feature (since without any experience coding it would take too much time to ramp up) I had tested a few days earlier, and see if I'd missed any test cases or bugs. 

I printed off copies of the functional design spec and the test plan and gave her a OneNote with a checklist of the existing manual tests.  I provided a phone with the prototype on it and let her play for a while.  At the same time, I was working on some other investigations and reports.  I explained what I was doing and my job shadower asked great questions.  This combination of tasks worked well because report-writing can be kind of boring to watch, so having her own small job to do kept it interesting.

The interviews worked out really well.  I had several enthusiastic interns volunteer to meet my job shadower as well as one full time employee.  I made sure my job shadower had questions prepared so their time wouldn't be wasted and the discussion would be productive.  It turns out my job shadower does not like science in school, but I hope these women showed her that careers in tech are exciting and will maybe get her to think about these subjects in a new light.

Key Takeaways: Give job shadowers their own task so they don't get bored watching you, but make sure you make it achievable and they understand the point of what they're working on.

For Next Time
If there was one thing I wish I had more time for, it would be to talk more about my own background and why I chose this field, and how awesome it is.  Unfortunately one day is not enough!  If you can swing it, I recommend two days so you can work more outreach into the experience.

Have you had someone job shadow you before?  I'd be curious to hear of others experiences, what worked and what didn't.

Grace Hopper 2013 Proposals

This year I'm part of three panel proposals for GHC13.  GHC submission time always brings out the Women in Tech community, and this year was no different.  I joined the first proposal via a large email thread I got added to by a colleague and found it contained people from many great companies doing lots of interesting work!  For the second two proposals I put out requests on the Systers community, Twitter, and this blog for contributors and was overwhelmed with the response.

Here are the abstracts for our proposals.  Good luck to everyone else who submitted!

Native or Web, Which App Should I Build? A Mobile Developer’s Dilemma
Chaitrali Amrutkar, Georgia Institute of Technology
Tracy Chou, Pinterest
Sara Haider, Twitter
Kate Tsoukalas, Microsoft
Jane Wang, Etsy

The difference between the capabilities of web-based and native mobile apps is increasingly being blurred. While building an app for mobile users, developers need to make several considerations such as platform specificity, speed, user experience and commercial opportunities. This panel will discuss design principles, best practices, tools, security considerations and trade-offs in development of native and web apps on mobile devices. Our panel consists of experts from academia and industry.

Thinking Big about Careers in Test: Driving Your Career in Forward
Kery Laughter, Space Dynamics Laboratory
Kate Tsoukalas, Microsoft
Mirkeya Capellan, Sogeti USA / Pace University
Kavita Maheshwari, Trilixx.com
Iccha Sethi, Rackspace

Although the role of software testing in ensuring software quality is well established, the concept of a Test Engineer is relatively novel. There is an increased need for Engineers who can fill this role, but most institutions do not formally teach Test skills and many tech workers still do not clearly understand Testing. In this panel we explain technical specifics of Test skills, role, and directions for Test careers.

Thinking big about great mobile experiences: Smart development and test techniques drive us forward!
Rosario Robinson, Anita Borg Institute
Kate Tsoukalas, Microsoft
Leanne Waldal, OTIVO
Jennifer Wong, Wyley Interactive
Foghor Tashi, Nigerian Breweries Plc

As the number of mobile technology user is increasing, developers need to switch their thinking from designing applications for a desktop environment to cater to the specific needs, limits, and opportunities of mobile devices. However, many developers of mobile websites and applications repeat common mistakes that result in a poor user experience. This panel aims to raise awareness of these pitfalls and provide developers with strategies to overcome them.

GHC13 Panelists Needed for Mobile Tech Panel

Yesterday I wrote about a proposal I'm working on for GHC13.  Luckily I got a great response from my post and found more than enough panelists.  

However, I have a second proposal entitled "Thinking big about great mobile experiences: smart development and test techniques drive us forward!".  Here's the abstract:

"As the number of mobile technology user is increasing, developers need to switch their thinking from designing applications for a desktop environment to cater to the specific needs, limits, and opportunities of mobile devices. However, many developers of mobile websites and applications repeat common mistakes that result in a poor user experience. In this talk, we will:

• Share important guidelines for developing better mobile applications and websites such as: planning principles, design modeling principles, coding principles and concepts and others.
• Analyze and present common pitfalls, bugs, and design flaws made by mobile developers
• Present strategies and techniques for testing mobile-focused products
• Provide a forum for members of the audience to share their mobile testing/developer experience"

Right now we have two panelists and are looking for up to two more panelists and one moderator.

Please let me know if you are interested!

GHC13 Panelists Needed for Testing Proposal

I have a proposal for a panel for GHC13: "Developing Your Career in Test".  Our idea is to give real-world examples of testing techniques via demos and also to give advice on career development.  Right now we have two panelists and are looking to add:

- a moderator

- a Tester from another company (we are from Microsoft and Pace University)

- [optional] a panelist who tests as part of their role but whose title is not necessarily Test/QA

Please let me know if you are interested, time is getting short!

International Women's Day

Happy 101^th International Women's Day!  Although this year marks several milestones, I haven't seen much news yet today.  Well, it's still early.

This year I've been thinking about how far we've come, and how far we still have to go.  With regard to the former, I've seen some inspiring stories and documentaries in the past week or two that you should check out:

• PBS Maker's: Women Who Make America (documentary): This doc is three hours long and riveting throughout.  It's a really well-done series of interviews with prominent leaders from the Women's Movement, now and then.  Definitely a must-see!
• It's the 100th anniversary of women's suffrage in the US: This story not only has excellent written contact, but amazing photography to boot.  Worth a ready!  Kudos to my dad for sending it my way.
• Nature's article on Women in STEM: The content may be a little depressing (women in STEM fields still face systemic discrimination) but what is inspiring is that Nature devoted a special section entirely to this issue, which unfortunately not enough people have awareness of.
• Anita Sarkeesian's first installment of Tropes vs. Women in Video Games: You may remember Anita Sarkeesian's kickstarter project and the bullying it faced.  That the project was installment and its first video is here is a triumph.

I'm really happy that there are such great organizations/groups/initiatives particularly concerned with the issues facing women in STEM fields.  In case you haven't heard of them, here are a few:

• Anita Borg Instiitute (@anitaborg_org)
• Steminist (@steminist on Twitter)
• Anita's Quilt (@AnitasQuilt on Twitter)

Going forward, what I really hope is that we can continue to work towards a world where all women face equal opportunities, not just in STEM field but whatever endeavours they choose to pursue.  I hope the stories of discrimination in the workplace decrease, that I read fewer and fewer stories of harassment or of women being pushed out of promising careers.  And I hope to see more of the fantastic achievements from women that I know we are capable of.

Ada Lovelace Day, CS Ed Week, and More!

Given my recent post on the state of math education in Canada, I have a few relevant updates that may be of interest:

CS Ed Week
Whether you're a student, educator, parent, or CS geek like me, if you haven't checked out CS Ed Week yet you should!  There's all sorts of great information, activities, and events for all sorts of people, including a #CSEdWeek Twitter conversation tomorrow at 6pm ET, some interesting articles to read, and links to cool demos.

For my small contribution I helped out at the University of Washington's CSE Open House last weekend, where we showed of Windows Phone to nearly 700 students, parents, and educators and helped them learn how to make a simple Windows Phone app.  It was really neat to introduce some of the attendees to programming and show them an immediate practical application of it, which seemed to get them pretty excited!

Ada Lovelace's Birthday
December 10th marked what would have been Ada Lovelace's 197th birthday.  If you haven't heard of her, Ada is the author of the first computer program and a well used example of women in Computer Science.  Unfortunately her detractors have mounted a campaign to discredit her, saying for various reasons that she did not in fact write that program, that she had help or made mistakes etc, etc.  You can (and should!) read more about it in this excellent article.

Earlier this year we celebrated Ada Lovelace Day, on which everyone is supposed to write about a female role model in CS.  Here's my post in case you missed it.

A pic of the video I really wanted to post!

Grace Hopper's Birthday
December is when all the cool kids are born, apparently!  December 9 was Grace Hopper's birthday, so following the theme I'll end this post with her wonderful explanation of what a nanosecond is (since my favourite video, her interview with Letterman, seems to have been removed from the internet due to copyright infringement, grumble grumble...).

Ada Lovelace Day 2012

Today is Ada Lovelace Day - a day for celebrating the achievements of women in science, tech, engineering, and math.

Instead of focusing on just one role model, I thought I'd list a few of the women who've inspired me for the past year:

• My good friends Kerry Corrigall and Aakriti Agarwal who co-presented with me at GHC12 and gave such great tips and "careers in tech" advice to our audience.
• My friend and fellow robot-enthusiast Angelica Lim, who has traveled around the world to pursue graduate studies in Japan, is a globe-trotting conference speaker, and now also a TEDxKyoto speaker.  She balances so many seemingly difficult things with ease even while immersed in a foreign language and culture.



Angelica at TEDxKyoto with her robot, Nao

• My fellow female Windows Phone colleagues at Microsoft, several of whom I worked with to get to GHC12 this year and teach others about Windows Phone app development.  I look to them to see all that is possible in my career and am excited by what the future holds!
• The many female students who tough it out and persevere in their STEM studies and remain in the pipeline.  It's so encouraging to see your energy and enthusiasm for your fields!

Me working with some students on building their first Windows Phone app at GHC12

I also found a nice infographic with lots of more well-known female role models here.

Who are your female role models in STEM?  Who inspires you?  I'd especially like to hear about emerging stars and work I haven't heard about yet!

GHC 2012 Submission Results

The results are in for two of the proposals I submitted to this year's Grace Hopper Conference (GHC12).  I'm happy to say that although the acceptance rate was especially low this year, so far one of my proposals has been accepted!

The proposal is a Birds of a Feather session with my two good friends Kerry Corrigall and Aakriti Agarwal and is titled "Are we ready for the next level yet? Perspectives from junior women in technology".  It's all about our experiences making our way through our respective companies as junior women and our thoughts on what junior women can do to make it to the mid-career stage.  

I went to school with Kerry, who is now working in the IT industry, and did a BOF on Women in Tech student groups at GHC 08 with Aakriti.  Interestingly, Aakriti lives in Singapore, Kerry lives in Canada, and I live in the US, making our panel truly international.  I am so excited to be presenting with them this fall!

A Few CES-Related Items...

Are you following the latest tech coming out of CES this year?  I was going to post about some of the cool new tech being shown there, but I found two interesting videos related to CES and Women in Tech that I wanted to share instead (even though the new Nokia 900 with Windows Phone is pretty exciting!)...

First up is a piece by the BBC which explores the effect CES' 'Booth Babes' has on attendees of both genders.  It's interesting to hear the perspective of women working in tech at CES - I thought they did a great job of expressing their discomfort in a way that (hopefully) all viewers of the video can relate to.

Second there is a video of a panel on Women in Tech with panelists Padmasree Warrior of Cisco, Marissa Mayer of Google, Caterina Fake of Hunch, and Lindsey Turrentine of CNET.  Their conversation is interesting and ranges across many aspects of the issue, from when to start educating students on CS, work-life balance, and how to succeed in the tech industry.

What are your thoughts on CES?  I'd be interested to hear from anyone who has actually been there in person!

Nous Nous Souvenons

Today is the anniversary of the Montreal Massacre, which took place on December 6, 1989 at l'École Polytechnique de Montréal, Canada.  On that day, 14 female engineering students were killed by a male student who blamed them for his problems in life.  So, today we remember, and commemorate the event as the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women in Canada.

When I was looking at related news stories and articles today, I found a couple of positive ones that I thought I'd share here.  The first one is particularly related to CS Education Week (which I've posted about a few times now); it's a blog post by the Girl Guides of Canada on why STEM programs for women are important, as told by Girl Guides' scholarship winners who themselves are studying in STEM programs.  Having been a member of Girl Guides for roughly a decade growing up, I'm happy to see them encouraging young women to enter STEM fields and explore technology as a career.

The second is an article about the top 100 most powerful women in Canada, featuring one of my favorite authors, Margaret Atwood (whose books I've also occasionally posted about here).  It's great to see these women honoured and I'm a little embarrassed that I don't know who more of them are.  Should make for some great reading over the coming days!

Women of Science for the Holidays

Not only is it CS Education Week, but many people have started decorating for the holidays.  And what better way to celebrate both than with these non-denominational ornaments laden with female scientist role models!  And two are female computer scientists!  Awesome!

CS Education Week Is Here!

This week is CS Education Week.  The idea is to celebrate and raise awareness of the impact of computing science and the need for CS education.  You can find out more here.

My first experience with CS education was terrible.  It was Grade 10 and I was enrolled in the pre-IB program (a preparation year for the full IB program which started in Grade 11).  I had chosen CS as an elective as I was generally interested in computers and programming, but had no background or training in either.  The first day the teacher gave out the assignment:

"OK, you guys are going to code a database, and you will be able to sort, save, search, and print records.  Go."

Can you imagine my shock and panic?  I had no idea what to do, but it seemed like all the other students in the class (all  boys, incidentally) did.  They confidently started up their IDEs and began typing away.  There was no textbook and the teacher did not offer any kind of useful help, and there was no internet so I could not search for examples or tutorials there either.

Well, I made it through the year (I had to, since by that time it was too late to transfer and nothing else fit into my schedule) but vowed never to take another CS course again.  I didn't feel like I learned anything except HTML programming and was very annoyed by the experience.  The next year I switched to Physics and managed to avoid CS courses almost entirely in my undergraduate studies.

Luckily I realized later how important CS would be for me and went back to school to study it - but I imagine that there must be many students like me who get turned off early on and never come back.  My experience highlights a few things that are currently missing from CS education in my opinion:

• Programming is not CS: That is, programming is a tool of CS, but at its roots CS is much more than just writing code.  CS to me is all about modeling solutions to problems using algorithms and data structures.  It's about how to think abstractly, how to analyze problems and their solutions to come up with the most efficient one, and it's how to communicate those solutions to users in a sensible way.  When I took my first course in algorithms and data structures, I fell in love, but that wasn't until long after completing my undergraduate studies.  It seems to me we have the order of things backwards here.
• CS is everywhere: There are so areas of education that CS could impact.  Bringing up CS when teaching about other topics could help inspire students or at least get them thinking about it more broadly.  Algorithms are an easy example when it comes to mathematics, and pretty natural when you think about the programmable graphing calculators students are encouraged to use these days.  We can start even earlier; even kids in elementary school could be learning how to sort using various algorithms (there is a neat demo using blocks and weights, or discs).  There are all sorts of applications of CS to art (digital painting, photomanipulation, using computers in art installations, graphics displays, etc).  There is a lot of literature around computing these days.  I'm thinking of Cyberpunk books like Neuromancer or Cryptonomicon.  How about artificial intelligence?  When I was a kid one of my favorite discussions on this topic was whether the character Data from "Star Trek: The Next Generation" was alive or not:

• Teachers need CS, too: In my (admittedly limited) experience, few teacher training programs have little if any focus on CS (or even STEM subjects in general).  How can we attract people with the necessary technical skills to teaching, when the technology sector provides numerous better-paying jobs?  But it's not just technical skills we need in the classroom - we need a special blend of the ability to teach and instruct in addition to the necessary subject knowledge.  At my university they had a course which was in effect 'Math for Teachers'.  Maybe we need something similar for CS.  Greater awareness of CS in general among teachers could help them integrate it into more traditional subjects, especially when CS-specific courses are not available.

Are you supporting CS Education Week in some way?  If so, please sign the pledge and talk about it!  If not, please consider how you can help raise awareness.  I don't think my experience is all that uncommon, and if so we must be losing an awful lot of talent to other fields.  Let's do what we can to help make things better!

Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson GHC Keynote

A while back I posted about Dr. Jackson's GHC keynote speech.  I'm sure my notes didn't do it justice, but luckily the video has finally been posted so I can share it with you!  Enjoy, it's well worth watching.

Teaching Your Kids Science

There was a very good piece this afternoon on CBC's afternoon program, On the Coast, about getting parents to encourage their kids to study science.  The guest gave some helpful resources, such as Let's Talk Science and Curiosity.ca. I wholeheartedly agree with most of what they discussed - parents should encourage their kids even if they themselves struggled themselves with math or science, and shouldn't emphasize that to their kids, but rather encourage their children's natural curiousity and thirst for knowledge.

The only problem came towards of the interview when the host asked "What about science fiction, is reading that or watching Star Trek enough".  This happens at about 6:39 into the interview.  The guest talks about how this is great for encouraging boys.  What the heck?  Lots of girls (like me, growing up) love science fiction, volacanoes, and yes, even farting dogs (which the host gives as an example).  Worse yet, she goes on to talk about how we should make science relevant to our 'youth', and how websites like curiousity.ca show lots of examples of cool 'guys' doing science.

These initiatives are generally great and yes, we need to do everything we can to ensure our population has a good grasp on scientific literacy.  But we need to make sure we are encouraging everyone, regardless of gender, and that means showing examples of all kinds of role models and making sure we don't discourage one group of people from pursuits they enjoy just because of their gender.

I Want To Work In A Meritocracy, Too

Lately when the topic of the gender imbalance in CS comes up, the answer I seem to hear a lot is 'I want to work in a meritocracy!' or 'We work in a meritocracy!', and as long as we do then it doesn't matter if there aren't many prominent female computer scientists, engineers, or CEOs.  You can get ahead if you're good.

But something about this line of thinking doesn't sit right for me.  For one thing, even if you ignore the initial gender imbalance for people in school or at the start of their careers, the percentage of women starting out isn't the same as the percentage of women at the top.  Where do they go?  Why aren't they getting there?  Unless the percentage of women who aren't meritorious is much higher than the percentage of men who aren't meritorious, this doesn't make much sense.  But having the percentage of meritorious people for one gender be much higher than the other doesn't really make sense either, as explained in this fantastic set of slides by Terri Oda.

Yesterday I came across a great article called 'Racism and Meritocracy', which also touches on the gender imbalance in tech.  It offers another explanation: there's a systemic bias which filters women (and other minorities) out, and that this systemic bias can exist even if individuals in the system don't have it.  I think this is a pretty powerful argument, but the article also proposes concrete, practical solutions that we can all employ to help correct the problem.  I highly recommend giving it a few minutes of your day to consider.

On a side note, another comment I hear on this topic is that people don't want to see quotas or to see people rewarded when they don't have the contributions or achievements that warrant it.  I don't think many people would want that, actually (I certainly wouldn't!).  I want to work in a meritocracy too, I'm just not sure our industry truly reflects that yet.