The best places and moments to make room for women in technology
A few great quotes from a piece on technology, Kenyan women and geek culture that all “first world” western people should read in full for its implications on their society:
Techies you meet [in Kenya] aren’t trying to come up with the next Facebook or another app to share your photos. They’re solving local problems with, among other things, locally developed apps that:
- allow farmers to check crop prices with text messaging, skipping the middleman
- bring math and reading help by cellphone to village schools.
- let Kenyans who don’t have computers do their online shopping by cellphone.
- a micro-insurance product that measures rainfall at cellphone towers, to automatically distribute money to farmers in drought
After explaining that these are all applications started by women, the articlecloses with this comment by Judith Owigar, president of the female computer programmers collective in Kenya called Akirachix whose values include “being positively disruptive”:
“we’re sending a message to the next wave of girl geeks. The best time to carve a spot for women in geek culture is when there isn’t much geek culture yet”
Who writes this, why, and how to help
I am Marco Fioretti, tech writer and aspiring polymath doing human-digital research and popularization.
I do it because YOUR civil rights and the quality of YOUR life depend every year more on how software is used AROUND you.
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