A Stanford student is spotlighting the women making waves in tech with her blog Women of Silicon Valley.
"One of the biggest challenges for women in tech is feeling alone and outnumbered," Lea Coligado told The Huffington Post. The college junior hails from Dallas, Texas, and she studies computer science with a minor in Italian.
"I got through some rough patches all because of some great female mentors," she explained of why she decided to start this project. "I wanted to provide that comfort and inspiration at a larger scale."
Coligado took inspiration from the wildly popular blog Humans of New York, which features photos of a wide array of New Yorkers alongside meaningful snippets from their lives.
"I thought it would be great to transfer that model to an issue I feel really deeply and personally about: the under-representation of women in tech," she said.
So she started profiling hardworking women on Medium and Facebook. The result is a collection of richly detailed interviews with accomplished women in technology, complete with shocking anecdotes and inspiring advice:
"It was always the little things that made me feel I didn’t belong. When I attended industry events and people heard I...
Posted by Women of Silicon Valley on Sunday, 22 March 2015
"One of the greatest indicators of maturity is revealed in how you respond to the inexperience and the potentially...
Posted by Women of Silicon Valley on Monday, 6 April 2015
"Now that I’m pregnant, I am more driven than ever to make something of myself, if for no other reason than to prove it...
Posted by Women of Silicon Valley on Monday, 9 February 2015
"And as I’ve started to understand that there are structural problems within the field and that these external...
Posted by Women of Silicon Valley on Sunday, 25 January 2015
Tracy Chou, featured above, told Coligado that she's experienced both blatant and implicit sexism in the workplace. She said the "subtle, unspoken biases" are the hardest to deal with. "It has helped tremendously to build out a network of women around me," Chou, a tech lead at Pinterest, added.
"Technology places an immense amount of power in your hands and in your mind. My advice to girls pursuing a future in...
Posted by Women of Silicon Valley on Monday, 20 April 2015
"I’ve experienced sexism to the point of absurdity," Lindi Emoungu, a software engineer at Google, told Coligado in her interview.
Hopefully, this treasure trove of stories will help inspire the next generation of women in tech. They're sorely needed. Women are woefully underrepresented in tech executive suites, and the number of women in computing jobs has fallen over the past 23 years.
H/T BuzzFeed
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