Are Women Enough?

As an accidental women in tech I'm still getting used to being classed as a minority. I didn't study to be an engineer or a programmer or a scientist; my background is in business and in work I never really gave male to female ratio's much thought.

Yet just over a year ago I joined Sunderland Software City, and was instantly propelled into an amazing world of abbreviations, artificial intelligence and virtual reality.

People really are making the impossible, possible.  

Something I've really seen over the last year is that the world of technology, and the people creating it, have one thing in common; they really want to make things better. They want to solve global issues and improve quality of living and generally make things better faster and more efficient.

The push for more women in the technology is a direct result of this... we know that if it's only men designing technology, we're only going to be able see the problems and solutions from a male perspective.

And that's the key word - perspective

Having both men and women's perspectives on different problems, and solutions, will not only bring different ideas to the table, it will also create solutions far more suited to the end user and therefore be more likely to create sustainable businesses. It's a win win!

So my thought is...why stop there? 

The more perspectives we can bring to the table; through diversity in things like background, culture, age, religion, up-bringing, political opinion, in everything: then the better view of the bigger picture we'll get. And not just technical people: not all end user are going to be technically minded, like me!

Is promoting the industry to encourage more women into tech enough? It's amazing to see more and more organisations, and individuals, reaching out to inspire people from all backgrounds, all over the world, into different careers within tech. In order to see the biggest picture of the world possible, we need listen to as many different views of it as possible. 

The only way to do that is to open our doors and show the world what an exciting, challenging, and revolutionary industry it is to work in.