What if one of your girl geeks wanted to bring another GIRL geek? Would that be allowed? Or are your girl geeks limited to bringing a GUY geek guest or NO guest at all?

This is the 21st century, Angie, not to mention this event was held in the Bay Area which has a “pretty” good reputation of being inclusive. I hope you will reword future Girl Geek Dinner invitations to make it clear that girl geeks are welcome to bring the geek of their choice, and leave gender out of it altogether.

I’m familiar with Malaysian Software Companies about 40 percent of staff are women and they are technical. What’s going on?

Pattern generally repeats compare UK / Europe to India / China?

Could it be girls without choices fight harder to get equality? But once it’s freely available, make other choices?

Fund some research or rip me a new one?

My Firefox browser crashed right before I posted an in-depth reply to the points above, so please contact me at angiechang@gmail.com — let’s set up a time to have a quick talk over the phone or coffee in San Francisco.

I think these points are very valid, and there have been some good discussions on similar topics (geek/chic balance) at the Systers mailing list lately. This all points to the need for these conversations within the girl geek community.

At a real geek event, Ellen Spertus wouldn’t be introducing Irene Au; Irene Au would be introducing Ellen Spertus.

It’s even sadder that the approaches to reputation-building suggested in the event announcement don’t include actually doing geek things — things like writing innovative software, inventing new query languages, publishing academic papers, telling geek jokes, teaching students how to build computers from NAND gates, filing lawsuits to defend the internet from spammers, or appearing onstage in a circuit-board-patterned corset — just to name a few things Ellen Spertus has done which are *far* geekier than anything a pseudorandomly selected main speaker has done.

Now, don’t get me wrong — I know management is hard, and doing it well is important. But it’s not *geeky*.

How did the dinner go?

“Join us as our panel and the audience discuss ways to build credibility and reputation in technology and business, from leveraging a personal blog to managing social networks effectively, both online and offline.”

what the hell? blogging and social networking? how about, i donno, writing some code, participating in an open source project? designing an integrated circuit? how about doing something actually geeky to build your reputation? how about having more than 1 out of 5 of the speakers at your first event actually be geeks?

i am disappointed that even your lineup reinforces the mistaken conception that girls can only be geeky if they’re designers or process managers. Leah Culver seems to be the only real geek amongst a pack of suits.

disappointed,

-rachel