I’ve spent the past year talking to a LOT of parents and their kids for Jewelbots.
Scratch that, I’ve spent the last year talking to lots of parents and their daughters.
Because of my network, many of these parents happen to be developers or have technology adjacent roles. The ones that have daughters in our demo always light up when we tell them what we are doing. You can see the recognition in their face when they realize the role of an open source project centered around friendship in their daughter’s lives. It’s been exciting and affirming talking to them.
Every so often, on a rare occasion, when having a conversation with a parent, they say something like this:
“My daughter is really into making and building, I’m happy she’s not into super girly stuff.”
or
“I try to keep my daughter interested in science and technology, I don’t expose her to anything girly.”
This always left me with a funny feeling, and I chalked it up to the fact that parents were telling me that they wouldn’t expose their daughter to our products, which would leave anyone bummed. However, the other day it dawned on me why these sentiments left me with a bad taste in my mouth.
