A couple of weeks ago
some of us went to the TechSummit conference organized by LeaseWeb. Here is a list of the talks that I attended, along
with a short description for each.
The first presentation
was “Shaving my head made me a better programmer” by Alex Qin, which was about
what it is like to be a woman, and specifically a programmer, in the U.S. tech
industry. (And in the University before
that.) She talked about the inequality,
the sexism, and the harassment. She
mentioned that she once gave a talk in a really big conference about
accessibility in the U.S., and afterwards she was asked “How do I talk to women
at bars?” The head-shaving part refers
to how changing her appearance resulted in being taken more seriously. It was quite an interesting talk, though I suspect
that in Amsterdam, she was to a large extent preaching to the choir.
