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Why so few women in tech? Seven challenges and potential solutions.

Here is a look at some of the roadblocks women face in technology fields, and the organizations that are fighting to overcome these issues.

4. There is a lot of pontification about including more women in tech, without much action. One solution: Passion Projects

Passion Projects
Julie Ann Horvath started Passion Projects at GitHub as a way to bring women in technology together to share their work.

If you have followed the issue of women in tech, you may have heard the name “Julie Ann Horvath” come up in the past few months. Ms. Horvath went public with what she felt was sexual harassment and intimidation at GitHub, a software development company where she worked as a developer.

Many credit Horvath with increasing the number of women that GitHub hired. While at GitHub, Horvath created a series called “Passion Projects,” which brings in women speakers from the tech community to talk about what they had been working on at events in San Francisco. Passion Projects speakers have included a senior engineer at Twitter and a developer who was named one of the most influential women in technology.

In the end, after Horvath left GitHub, the company conducted an internal investigation and while they first found there was no evidence of harassment, they later issued a lengthy apology, which Horvath accepted (though she added that she is happy the environment at the company “is no longer her problem”). She also accepted a job at &yet, another development firm.

“I’ll be postponing Passion Projects this year to explore new ways to help tell the stories of incredible women and people of color in the technology industry,” Horvath says in an e-mail. 

Outside of the Bay Area, a similar organization is Ladies Who Code, which hosts events in Washington, New York, and overseas in London and other cities. Upcoming meet-ups include “How to Build Flappy Bird – an iOS workshop” and “Hack the Night Away.”

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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