When Women Stopped Coding

• What occured during the same time as the beginning of the decline of women in computer sciene? personal computers started showing up in U.S. homes in significant numbers.

• Why does it matter that males had been playing on computers growing up? This idea that computers are for boys became a narrative. It became the story we told ourselves about the computing revolution. It helped define who geeks were, and it created techie culture.

Employee breakdown of key technology companies

• What three take-a-ways do you have looking at this data?
  1. years
  2. color
  3. gender

Why diversity matters to your tech company

• When are diversity efforts most successful? Diversity efforts are most successful when they’re driven by a commitment from company leaders.

• Why do diverse companies perform better? “Diverse groups of people bring to organizations more and different ways of seeing a problem and, thus, faster/better ways of solving it.”

• Give an example of how a diverse company can serve a diverse user base or vise-versa. s the example of a smoker who lives to be 100 does not disprove that smoking is bad for one’s health, anecdotes of companies that have succeeded in spite of homogeneity are not a counterpoint to the overwhelming evidence that diversity makes teams smarter and is linked to positive business outcomes.