ADG Innovation Award for Girl Geek Academy
Speech at the 2017 ADG Awards Dinner, 5th May 2017.
I was going to start by breaking down what innovation means but I’m going to leave that to our illustrious politicians. Instead, by way of introducing the recipient of this award, I want to share other terms. The recipient of this award goes is a very welcoming organisation and they invite participants to think of themselves in terms of three groups. So as I call each out, think of which ones you relate to.
Are you a hacker? A hustler? A hipster? I don’t have anything much to add on the subject of hipsters. And amoungst this crowd, the same goes for hustling. But I can say a few words about hacking.
Hacking in the digital sense goes hand to hand with innovation. It’s about novel and clever outcomes. It’s also about practical solutions. I’ve only worked as a hacker once — for Reuters. It was easier for management to get a contractor like me to break into one of the systems than to deal with internal politics and go through formal channels. Hacking can be about pragmatism.
I want to bring up a myth that is still being propagated today. “Young people just Get technology”. In my experience it’s not true. People still need training and education. And when it comes to women we have a problem — a 30 year problem — that the recipient of this award is helping to address.
When I started coding in the mid-80s I wasn’t allowed to use the family computer without supervision. This had a huge impact on my relationship to tech. What would have otherwise been a fairly unattractive prospect became this secret enticing world of discovery. Because it was banned, I used to sneak in and play. I identify as a director but since those days I’ve always also been a developer. But something was going on back then that I only became aware of many years later. The storytellers, the ad makers — I hope you all start feeling some twinge of responsibility here — began targeting boys exclusively as the users of these devices. Until then, women had been fairly well represented in computing — there was rough gender parity — but once the age of the microcomputers kicked in, the percentage of women using computers started dropping fast. And we’re still dealing with the fallout to this day. When I did Computer Science Honours at university there were only two women in the class and I wasn’t counted as one of them. I grew up with male privilege and I was completely oblivious to the fact that women were left behind.
Who writes code matters. Mark Zuckerberg came up with Facebook as a follow-on effort from his Hot-or-Not app at Harvard. I sometimes wonder what a female peer of his would have come up with. I’m not trying to be virtuous here. It’s not about typecasting. I just want to see women implementing their own ideas. I want to see women making mistakes. Learning on the job. Experimenting. Growing as they discover new things and having fun with it. We’ve got a long ways to go. But the ADG Board recognises that the recipient of tonight’s award is working to be part of the solution — and that’s something to celebrate. It’s about Empowerment. Representation. And for me, a big one, it’s about Confidence.
Founded in 2014 Girl Geek Academy is now a worldwide organisation that unites geek girls to teach & share. Listen to some of the programmes they run: SheHacks, SheMakes, SheMakesGames, LadiesWhoLinux, and my favourite, MissMakesCode, aimed at 5–8 year olds. Communicating the joy of making and coding is so important.
We’re here tonight in Melbourne the capital of Australian game development. Amazing products and experiences are being created in this town. This is the first time that the ADG is formally reaching out to the games community. We’re all in this together. From one maker community to another, the ADG would like to acknowledge all the women and men who are working to address gender imbalance in STEM (in Science Technical Engineering and Math). The 2017 ADG Innovation Award goes to Girl Geek Academy. I’d like to invite CEO Sarah Moran up to accept the award.
