It's ladies night

More on women in IT there's a great article on the Guardian about the Geek Girl Dinners movement.

The rise of the Nu-Geeks

At QCon last Thursday Kent Beck gave a keynote on Trends in Agile Development.  There were lots of interesting slides about the rise in tests, quick releases and lots of other agileness but the most interesting aspect of the talk for me was the rise of the new generation of tech savvy business professionals.  The old "wizards" detectable by their strange socially inappropriate behaviour are out as a generation of Nu-Geeks with social skills like listening, team work and emotional intelligence are rising to the challenge of making businesses happy.

I've never been one for the old skool geek, I'd go as far to say I am a NAG (Not A Geek) and have found myself often frustrated by people trying to tar me with the brush of demeaning stereotypes - the most extreme example being a senior manager who put the IT department in the basement believing we would be more comfortable far from the real world of human interaction (no clients were ever bought to the basement by the way: except if they were techies themselves) - so I identify strongly with this rise.   This is one of the many reasons I was attracted to Agile, listening to Kent Beck talk reminded me that what I found refreshing about Extreme Programming Explained was the focus on the social side of development and the reason I signed the Agile Manifesto was the belief in "people over process".

This all supposes that the stereotype ever existed.  The feminist and existentialist Simone de Beauvoir (friend and influencer of Jean-Paul Sartre) argued that stereotyping is a form of subjugation and always done in societies by the group higher in the hierarchy to the group lower in the hierarchy so that the lower group became the “other” and had a false aura of mystery around it.  How accurately does that describe the IT industry with the exception that perhaps there is a bi-directional purpose to the stereotype: one from outside the group to keep the geeks in and the other from inside to keep the women out?

Hopefully as the geeky male image melts faster than the ice caps we will start to see more women join the fray.  Recent news seems to offer a strong promise of this trend.

Girl's found computers too macho back before the turn of the millennium and research blamed the strong male images and metaphors such as pirates, ships and planes opposed to softer, feminine images (apparently teddy bears  and flowers).  Now the tables have turned and research by Tesco found that girls are more computer savvy than boys.  So as the last bastion of strictly male territory falls so will the old stereotype of the geek-knight on a white mac coming to the rescue of the maiden caught by the evil Word dragons.  Unfortunately this will leave a horde of male geeks without any chance of female contact.

The trend is fierce and girls are not only better at computers than boys but are also more prolific with it.  Apparantly the growth of social networking and blogging is "almost entirely fuelled by girls".  Gaming is another area which women are conquering with girl gamers being the fastest growing group in the entertainment industry.  Not only that but there are more Nintendo DSs sitting snuggly in the hands of the fairer sex (54%) than the soft unworked hands of the coffee crunching, light fearing, cellar dwelling male geek of old (only 46%).  Nintendo's own research show that it "continues to reach more women ... a significant percentage of all Touch Generations software buyers are female".  No wonder the new face of Nintendo is Nicole Kidman.

ThoughtWorks is taking the challenge on to help resolve the problem.  My suspicion is that Agile itself may be the greatest weapon in the battle: a development methodology with a more people centric, reality focused approach which values the softer skills and attempts to bridge the gulf between writing code and actually creating real things.   It is those real things I am motivated by and I know that personally, without Agile, I would be struggling to maintain my sanity in the IT industry of old.