I am happy to see this, but I can't help but question what it's really like. I have heard so many horror stories about excruciating hours and lack of life balance.
What do you think? Have things changed?
Carleton University Women in Science and Engineering (CU-WISE)
On the evening of Tuesday, December 6th, the second half of Girl Develop It Ottawa's Intro to HTML and CSS workshop took place - and as you can see in the pic below, everyone looks absorbed in their code!
As one of the assistants for the workshop, I had a great time and found it to be an interesting experience. If you're a developer who likes helping people learn, I think you might enjoy assisting with or leading a similar class (see this post on tumblr.)

Seeing people walk through the process of building a web page from scratch, and troubleshooting when they ran into problems, reminded me of when I first began dabbling with HTML and CSS many years ago. I liked meeting the students - who came into the class with varying levels of prior experience, but were all friendly and curious about code. I credit this to instructor Suzan Hill's teaching style, which was clear enough for the almost complete beginners in the class, while students looking for more information were able to ask the assistants questions in detail.
If this sounds interesting, you'll be happy to know that GDI Ottawa has more programming classes in the works. For anyone who wants to get started with web development on their own, I've included a link below to one of the online resources I've found helpful for HTML/CSS learning and reference.
Online intro to HTML/CSS guide
Liz Allen is a computer science student at Carleton University. She tweets about technology and life at @liz_codes
Philippa Fawcett did the unimaginable: she beat every other man and woman who competed in the prestigious mathematical examinations held at Cambridge University. This was in 1890, a time long before men and women were even allowed to study for degrees side by side. Even the science of the time suggested that this probably couldn't happen.The cool thing is that she managed to do it while keeping an impressive balance in her life. Check out the entire post (She Topped All the Men in Math and Kept Her Life in Balance) to find out how!
The National Capital Region will be participating as well so check out the OCRI website for details of when and where.So these women, on top of an already gruelling process of pitching and due diligence, had to overcome additional obstacles, including investor bias. So wouldn’t it make sense that this additional selection, though unfair, means that only the very best women are able to get funding and grow their businesses to successful exits? Viewed like this, the study results are not surprising.What do you think? Do the women running these startups just happen to be better than average because they were the ones tough enough (or smart enough, or whatever quality you want to insert here) to make it? Is the same true of women in highly male-dominated fields like computer science and engineering in general?
...To me, the additional selection imposed on women through overt and subtle stereotypes, biases, and differential treatment contributes to fewer women in male-dominated fields, like running a tech start up, but it also results in higher quality. This is analogous to survival of the fittest.
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