Women have traditionally formed groups for both social reasons and to support each other (Women’s Institute for example) but…

What seems to be happening in technology is some of the female only groups are formed as a ‘defence mechanism’ because women are a minority and as you highlight there are dangers in that.

I don’t have a problem with women only groups but for everyone’s benefit I think they have to be “as well as” not “instead of” mixed groups.

The questions I ponder over are things like:
Are women always going to be a minority in tech, and is that natural or is it a result of the environment.
If it’s natural how do we support those women who want to go into tech?
If it’s not natural how do we change things so more women go into and stay in tech?

Andy

I’ve really benefited from being involved with women’s groups in my career, and I’ve also been frustrated by them. While at Adobe, some wonderful women started a happy hour for all the women at the company to interact. I was able to move from a shitty NOC position to a position on the InDesign Team in Release Engineering because of a woman dev manager I met there. On the flip side, I used to run Seattle LinuxChix and ended up disbanding the group because of the toxic negativity of some of the members. One thing I see that tends to crop up in some women’s tech groups is an attitude that all men are bad and too much of a focus on negative things that have happened in the past. It got to the point where a few individuals were making public claims about other Open Source groups in the area in such a way that they were starting to isolate Seattle LinuxChix

Whenever I’ve had the opportunity to work with other women (which is like never) I always reach out to them!! Some have become long term friends while others were clearly uncomfortable and not sure what to make of my friendliness. But yeah, to your comments, I think women are traditionally a lot harsher on other women in tech. And while I agree it’s important to seek out women’s groups, it’s also important to keep a healthy mental balance (ie, men are not the enemy).

I wrote a blog entry for Ada Lovelace Day a few years ago about the topic… http://augustinalareina.wordpress.com/2009/03/14/ada-lovelace-day-post/