The Women of EA: What's it Really Like?

This video is quite positive about working for video game company Electronic Arts, even as a minority female.

(video link)

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?

Girl Develop It Recap

On the evening of Tuesday, December 6^th, 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

She Topped All the Men in Math and Kept Her Life in Balance

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a popular blog post about a 19th century woman who beat all the men at Cambridge University in their prestigious math exams:

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!

Global Entrepreneurship Week

Global Entrepreneurship Week 2011 is celebrated during the week of Nov. 14th-20th 2011.


The National Capital Region will be participating as well so check out the OCRI website for details of when and where.

Carleton University will be having many events and here are a few.

Lead To Win for Women and the Technology Innovation Management program.

Most events have limited capacity therefore do not forget to register.

If you can't be there in person you can follow the conversation on twitter via these hastags #leadtowin #GEWnews

I am sure there are many more events so let us know details of how you plan to celebrate.

Two Months Before Mommyhood

I'm actually not sure I've talked about this whole "becoming a mom" thing here on the CU-WISE blog yet, so, if you didn't know, I'm expecting! Not only that, but I'm due in less than two months. (That's one reason you don't see me on the current list of executives.)

I noticed on my personal blog that I hadn't written about pregnancy or mommyhood very much, so I took a few minutes to list out some of my worries and some of the things I'm looking forward to.  Check it out.

What are your impressions about being a student and starting a family? It probably seems like a particularly scary notion if you're an undergrad, but can you see yourself doing it as a grad student? What goes through your mind when you see other students with pregnant bellies walking around campus?

Women-Led Start Ups Have Fewer Failures, What Does that Actually Mean?

Local developer and entrepreneur Alicia Liu recently reflected on recent research that said women-run startups are generally more successful:

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.

...

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.

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?

Kudos to past WISE exec and officer for defending their PhD theses!

I just wanted to recognize the awesomeness of one of the original four founding members of CU-WISE and past Executive Natalia Villanueva-Rosales, and past CU-WISE Officer Terri Oda, both of whom successfully passed their PhD thesis defences in the last few weeks.  Both of their committees were rather impressed with them.  Congrats ladies!!

I don't think we celebrate our own accomplishments enough, so I'm always trying to encourage others to do so here on the blog.  If you're a member of the CU-WISE community and have something to share about yourself or another awesome woman in science or engineering here at Carleton, you can always contact CU-WISE (wise@carleton.ca) and have us post it!