Read Write Web has begun to take stories highlighting the work and risks of women in tech. There are women doing very cool things and this is just one opportunity to highlight them. If you know of any please submit them to @rww or Clair Cain Miller at the Times.
h/t to @rww for thinking about doing this and giving the upcoming www.womenwhotech.com summit a nod in the process. There will be some interesting women to get to know in tech who will be speaking there as well http://www.womenwhotech.com/2010-bios1.html
7 Stories About Women Heroes in Tech - Please Send Us More
By Marshall Kirkpatrick / August 27, 2010 2:28 PM / 2 Comments
The technology press is full of stories of heroic men. In the startup economy, they often take the form of brave men who quit steady day jobs to join crazy startups. That’s an inspiring kind of story; I wrote about Louis Gray doing that earlier this week and really enjoyed sharing his news. (How Chris Messina Got a Job at Google is a related example.)
But what about women who make that kind of leap? There needs to be more stories told like that. I put out a call on Twitter and Claire Cain Miller of the New York Times said she too wants to tell more stories about brave women in technology. We live in an incredible time of cultural, economic and political change made possible by changing technology. That technology is being driven in many cases by women - so whose stories would you suggest we write about here on this blog?
Earlier this week, TechCrunch wrote about Christine Tsai leaving Google to join Dave McClure’s investment firm 500 Startups. This Spring, Alexa Andrzejewski left design firm Adaptive Path to work full time on her startup FoodSpotting. Those are cool stories, but we want more.
ReadWriteWeb’s own Audrey Watters has written about the challenges and upsides of incubating women entrepreneurs.
Perhaps the whole hero-style narrative is a bad idea, unhelpful to community collaboration just like Kaliya Hamlin argues the “war” metaphor is in rhetoric like “the identity war.” “I think what is seen as heroic is a narrative of the lone cowboy,” Hamlin said to me today. “Teams and communities who foster innovation and achieve together are often not seen and therefor not honored in the same way.”
We’ve written about a number of specific women doing heroic or particularly interesting work in tech here on ReadWriteWeb. Here are 7 of my favorites - please let us know in comments or by email (staff@readwriteweb.com) whose stories are especially compelling that we ought to be writing about. Send them today, tomorrow - and don’t stop sending us interesting stories about women, please. Of course there are more ways to have an awesome story than just to quit your job - that’s just what got me thinking about this. Please send whatever recommendations you can of women who have great stories that people ought to read.
Read more at www.readwriteweb.com
