Ada Lovelace Day: Amy Hoy
Normally I stay away from the whole “Women in Technology” topic but today I’m breaking my silence and blogging for Ada Lovelace Day. But more on the silence bit later, this post is first and foremost about Amy Hoy, my subject of choice for Ada Lovelace Day.
What is Ada Lovelace Day?
Ada Lovelace Day is 24th March and to quote from the site is: “an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.”
Why Amy?
Amy was a hero(ine) of mine long before Ada Lovelace Day and it’s important for me to say that her being female is inconsequential of this status I give her (but it helps for the purpose of this post).
I first found Amy probably just about when I was learning Rails when I stumbled across her site. Here I found a wealth of information not only on Rails but JavaScript and web design, amongst other things. Amy has an amazing talent for explaining things and her in-depth and engaging articles certainly helped make my journey to Rails a smooth and fun one.
Another thing I noticed about Amy is her brilliance for both development and design. These together are a pretty rare quality, but she excels at both. Amy is also a successful business person at the age of 23(ish?) and also regularly speaks at major conferences. Amy’s services to the community are astounding.
One last thing. I have huge admiration for her attitude to the whole “Women in Technology” thingo. I particularly enjoyed her “I don’t like Articles about Women in Technology” article, I think mainly because it reflected my feelings on the topic at the time. I haven’t seen my gender as an issue, as I assume (rightly or wrongly), neither have others. Amy states her success as being down to her taking responsibility for herself:
So I may be very good at what I do, and I may be financially and professionally successful, but it’s not because I’ve got some special talent. At the end of the day, what I’m really good at is taking responsibility for myself, and all the rest has come from that. And none of it has anything to do with the fact that I was born a girl.
Why the Silence?
This only came to me last night, but I think I’ve worked it out. I think I dislike talking about “Women in Technology” because it makes me feel uncomfortable; because I don’t like to see myself as any different to anyone else and just a mere mention of the topic instantly reminds me that people may indeed see/ treat me differently in my job because I am a woman or may have done so in the past. I don’t really like thinking about that and I’ve done a good job of sweeping anything of that type under the carpet in the past and generally sticking my fingers in my ears and going “la la la la”.
I now realise that this is probably why I was initially uncomfortable with the “Girl Geek Dinner” concept - a seemingly girl-biased event to me only served to highlight the fact that we are different and that’s the very thing I thought we should moving away from if we were going to be seen as equals in this profession. But as John Leach put so well (please read the rest of his article too):
You only have to see the turnout of women at Leeds Geek Girl dinners compared to the turnout of women at Leeds Geekup to know there is a demand for these women-friendly events. For whatever reasons, some women are more likely to go an explicitly women-friendly geek event than another random geek event. Of course women should be encouraged to come to all events, but not all events are equally friendly to women, and it’s often difficult to assess how friendly they are from outside.
Next up for my realisations was “it’s not all about me“. Even though I follow Amy’s mantra that people should take responsibility for themselves, I can’t help thinking that I’ve been very lucky in the people I’ve worked with and the opportunities I’ve had. Just because I am ok and see no direct problems does not mean that there aren’t any and it would probably be rather self-centered of me to carry on thinking like that.
These probably don’t sound like big revelations to most, but I feel like this post has been a starting point for me to step out of my comfort zone and at least start thinking and talking about the Women in Technology topic some more, and thank you to Ada and Amy, and my other heros of the day Lorna Jane and Linda Broughton for opening my mind to the topic.
