Plan E
Because Plans A-D aren't usually interesting enough.
Friday 3 November 2006, 8:22 PM
Women working in technology
Last night found me at the Women In Technology Awards held at Billingsgate Market in London, about 10 mins walk from our offices here at ZDNet UK (although 10 mins felt a lot longer in the killer heels I was wearing - next time I will follow the example of the sensible half of our party and get a cab).
An obsersvation - there were 12 of us there: 4 boys, 6 girls. Of the boys, Tom had a bowtie that wouldn't sit properly, Matt forgot the buttons to do up his dress shirt, so Mike had to lend him one of his and then we resorted to safefy pins, and Ritchie, who hasn't yet set up a Biog here (he's our FD in case you wondered, and is clearly shy) was wearing a kilt. He is Scottish tho so that was allowed.
I'm not aware of any disasters amongst the girls so clearly the moral is that you don't have to be a woman to work in technology, but when it comes to dressing up, it helps. Mind you, three of us turned up wearing the same dress which made me think that the awards should have been renamed The Stepford Wives In Technology just for us.
It was a good evening, although I did think that this may be the one event in the year that I went to where they would have organised enough female toilets to not have to queue.
Clearly, I was wrong, and ended up using the mens as usual.
What it did remind me, is that I am really very lucky to work for a technology-centric company where there is absolutely no evidence of discrimination against women at all. At least half of our broad management team is female, and the UK board that I sit on is exactly 50/50. In fact, if you fancy working here (male or female!) get in touch.
I don't consider myself a feminist by any stretch of the imagination, but was shocked to learn that at present, women still make up only 22% of the hi-tech workforce. You can see it on this site too - the majority of our readers and members are men, and we've got so used to it that we just consider it normal.
So here's a plea to the women out there who are working in tech and reading this post. The ZDNet UK community, like the company that works behind it, is aggresively gender neutral. This is a place for you to to be heard too - join in and have your say.
Finally, congratulations to last nights winners.
An obsersvation - there were 12 of us there: 4 boys, 6 girls. Of the boys, Tom had a bowtie that wouldn't sit properly, Matt forgot the buttons to do up his dress shirt, so Mike had to lend him one of his and then we resorted to safefy pins, and Ritchie, who hasn't yet set up a Biog here (he's our FD in case you wondered, and is clearly shy) was wearing a kilt. He is Scottish tho so that was allowed.
I'm not aware of any disasters amongst the girls so clearly the moral is that you don't have to be a woman to work in technology, but when it comes to dressing up, it helps. Mind you, three of us turned up wearing the same dress which made me think that the awards should have been renamed The Stepford Wives In Technology just for us.
It was a good evening, although I did think that this may be the one event in the year that I went to where they would have organised enough female toilets to not have to queue.
Clearly, I was wrong, and ended up using the mens as usual.
What it did remind me, is that I am really very lucky to work for a technology-centric company where there is absolutely no evidence of discrimination against women at all. At least half of our broad management team is female, and the UK board that I sit on is exactly 50/50. In fact, if you fancy working here (male or female!) get in touch.
I don't consider myself a feminist by any stretch of the imagination, but was shocked to learn that at present, women still make up only 22% of the hi-tech workforce. You can see it on this site too - the majority of our readers and members are men, and we've got so used to it that we just consider it normal.
So here's a plea to the women out there who are working in tech and reading this post. The ZDNet UK community, like the company that works behind it, is aggresively gender neutral. This is a place for you to to be heard too - join in and have your say.
Finally, congratulations to last nights winners.
Wednesday 1 November 2006, 1:07 PM
Just how much has web technology changed?
The relaunch of ZDNet in its current Beta format has started to cause quite a stir and as I was mooching around reading what the world is saying about the site, I came across this piece written by ex-ZDNetter Wendy McAuliffe over at Liberate Media.
Wendy mentioned that she was disappointed that much of what we've done didn't happen whilst she was here (I think Wendy left ZDNet in 2000/2001...)
Which made me think - why didn't it?! What couldn't we have done then, that we are doing now? And the truth is, I've come up with very little. Infact, I can only think of 3 things:
1. The XMLHTTP code that enables AJAX to work was produced by Microsoft as part of Web Access 2000. Whilst we don’t use XML on ZDNet.co.uk we use that module to produce our Tag Clouds and it also sits behind the “Check Username Availability” function in our registration pages. So if Wendy left in 2000 then I guess we couldn’t have done that, but I’d be willing to bet there would have been another way of doing this – it just wouldn’t have been so clever.
2. It wasn't until 2002 that broadband kicked off in the UK when Ben Verwaayen (who had just been appointed BT CEO) announced huge price cuts and the take-up rate accelerated within months. In fact, broadband developments were such a big deal that we even had the Broadband Informer newsletter on ZDNet -dedicated (funnily enough) to everything broadband and written by our very own Graeme Wearden. So again, when Wendy was here you wouldn't have been able to watch the kind of multi-media content that we now produce on ZDNet.co.uk - or very few people could have anyway as the bandwidth simply wasn't there to deliver it properly.
3. Love it or hate it, the phrase 'Web 2.0' wasn't coined until 2004, so how could we have done some of the stuff you'll find across ZDNet.co.uk now like the professional networking functionality etc before the catch-all phrase to describe this kind of stuff was invented???!
Of course, we could have invented it. It’s only a phrase afterall, and frankly, if I'm right, then the tools were there do to it when Wendy was here.
And that, as far as I can tell, is about it. Am sure the team will tell me otherwise :) but the basic point is this - the main reason why we didn't do it before is because we didn't think of it.
I'm glad we have now. This is only the beginning.
Wendy mentioned that she was disappointed that much of what we've done didn't happen whilst she was here (I think Wendy left ZDNet in 2000/2001...)
Which made me think - why didn't it?! What couldn't we have done then, that we are doing now? And the truth is, I've come up with very little. Infact, I can only think of 3 things:
1. The XMLHTTP code that enables AJAX to work was produced by Microsoft as part of Web Access 2000. Whilst we don’t use XML on ZDNet.co.uk we use that module to produce our Tag Clouds and it also sits behind the “Check Username Availability” function in our registration pages. So if Wendy left in 2000 then I guess we couldn’t have done that, but I’d be willing to bet there would have been another way of doing this – it just wouldn’t have been so clever.
2. It wasn't until 2002 that broadband kicked off in the UK when Ben Verwaayen (who had just been appointed BT CEO) announced huge price cuts and the take-up rate accelerated within months. In fact, broadband developments were such a big deal that we even had the Broadband Informer newsletter on ZDNet -dedicated (funnily enough) to everything broadband and written by our very own Graeme Wearden. So again, when Wendy was here you wouldn't have been able to watch the kind of multi-media content that we now produce on ZDNet.co.uk - or very few people could have anyway as the bandwidth simply wasn't there to deliver it properly.
3. Love it or hate it, the phrase 'Web 2.0' wasn't coined until 2004, so how could we have done some of the stuff you'll find across ZDNet.co.uk now like the professional networking functionality etc before the catch-all phrase to describe this kind of stuff was invented???!
Of course, we could have invented it. It’s only a phrase afterall, and frankly, if I'm right, then the tools were there do to it when Wendy was here.
And that, as far as I can tell, is about it. Am sure the team will tell me otherwise :) but the basic point is this - the main reason why we didn't do it before is because we didn't think of it.
I'm glad we have now. This is only the beginning.
