Is technology the next frontier for feminism?
Today i want to talk about the “Digital” part of “Bohème Digitale”.
I’m currently working on a career switch towards innovation and digital transformation and one of my goals is to help people with no or small digital background to learn more about digital tools and technologies, focusing on women.
I’m not a developer, my background is on the marketing/creative side, but i have been working in digital marketing for the past 12 years and my relationship to technology has evolved a lot.
What first got me really excited about internet was the discovery of blogs, and this new world of possibilities for everyone to be creative and connect with each other so freely. Internet as a media, was fascinating to me. For a long time, although i was interested in innovation, i didn’t pay so much attention to the technologies behind it. For me they were mostly tools to achieve the wanted results, and although i was working closely with developers and programmers, their world and their lines of code seemed impenetrable to me.
Over the years, there were a few key moments that have helped me change my perspective: my first experiences working on agile projects, allowed me to work more collaboratively with developers and understand better the way they think and work.
More recently, when working in Shanghai as a digital production team lead, I got to meet Ryan (not to name him). Ryan was running the platform team, he came from California Silicon Valley — where he’s d been working for hot startups and had a great deal of knowledge about digital product and software development.
When he arrived, he quickly identified some of the issues we had as a new company rapidly scaling up. He started to methodically work on solving those issues, day after day, setting up new tools, trying new workflows, and little by little, in a very humble and quiet way, made significant changes to the way we worked. I’m currently reading a book called Mindset — from Carol Dweck — that will be a dedicated post since it’s so good — but in a nutshell, it shows the virtues of going through life with a “Growth Mindset” — To me, Ryan embodies this growth mindset with a deep passion for learning, trying, failing, learning from setbacks, trying again and persevering…over and over.
One the “aha moments” i experienced when working with him, was realising that he didn’t get this knowledge by studying computer sciences, but rather built it overtime, by working very hard and also by “not being afraid of testing and playing with technology.”
In the time i would be waiting for an IT guy to come and set me up on a new platform, he would already have gone ahead and created 10 accounts for us. Experimentation seemed to run in his blood and he trusted that if he made a mistake and “broke the system”, he would find a way to fix it.
That was so inspiring, so at my level, i started to emulate this thinking and looked for opportunities to “get my hands dirty” and play with tools, helping configurate our JIRA instance, starting courses on Codecademy. Although those were not directly part of my day to day job, it made a difference in the quality of my work and collaboration with my teams of creative and developers, and helped me develop my “tech confidence”.
I also started to venture in tech events on weekends, there was a great event in Shanghai called Barcamp, where i got to learn about Social Innovation, Design Thinking, heard the first time about Drupal, Bitcoin, tried my first Virtual Reality headset…I joined a Fablab and got to try 3D printing and laser cutting.
I liked the rough, DIY feeling about those events, with handwritten signs and post-it notes everywhere. There were of course a majority of men, but there were also quite a bit of very driven young women, with a lot of ambition and passion about design and technology.
Somehow, i’m usually the first of my circle of girlfriends to take the step and actually go to those events — eventually converting a few curious minds. It was at first intimidating and i have felt the imposter syndrom more than once, but it turned out some of the most interesting people i’ve met in Shanghai were through those events.
Today, not only do i think there is a world of opportunity for non-tech people to get more involved in tech to bring in new perspectives and think of applications to all areas of life. But i also think that as women, we have a responsibility to get much closer to it.
As we learn about Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, Blockchain… we are expecting shifts that have never been seen before and their future implications are impossible to fully predict. Those technologies are coming to disrupt work as we know it, our lives, the lives of our children, mostly in a good way, but if women don’t sit at the table when those new solutions are designed, who will make sure that progress really helps them and doesn’t further increase the existing gender inequalities?
This new world has to be shaped by men and women together. There is a big skills and leadership gap that needs to be filled. We need more women developers, architects, designers but we also need to level the playing field for all women and develop our collective knowledge and intelligence around those topics.
There are a lot of awesome initiatives flourishing to get women to code, join hackathons, speak about science and technology, so i’m optimistic things are going in the right direction. I want to see a world where a group of mums take their daycare problem into their hands and design a solution to help every kid get a Kita spot (that’s for German mums ); a world where I AM approached by a neighbour to experiment on blockchain, and where there are a bit less makeup tutorials on youtube, and a bit more DIY robots tutorials for little girls.
So that’s why i’m excited to try and add my brick to the edifice this year by continuing to educate myself on major technology shifts and share my discoveries with my fellow mummy, creative, adventurers, entrepreneurs friends!
