Introductions

There are few things that shape my world more than my love of technology and the fact that I am a woman. For as long as I can remember I have struggled to balance my enthusiasm for coding and science with my more stereo-typically feminine traits - like my fondness for pretty clothes and Richard Armitage. It can be hard to know where you fit as a girl with interests that don't fall neatly into one gendered category or another and for a long time I thought that I had to choose. I wanted to be "one of the boys" - someone who would be taken seriously as a coder, could lead a team effectively, and was accepted as a member of the exclusive world of true geekdom. But I also wanted to be "one of the girls" - pretty and charming, surrounded by a caring cadre of women with whom to gossip and have sleepovers with, and sought after by the opposite sex.

For a long time I failed to ask myself a very important question; in the words of the adorable little girl from the Old El Paso taco shell commercial:

Why couldn't I be both a girl and a geek without feeling like any indulgence in one endangered the other? Was it self-doubt? The way my brain was just naturally wired? The patriarchy?

As a student at a (very) liberal arts college, this duality is seeming more and more possible to me. Wearing a dress doesn't feel like a betrayal of my inner nerd, and creating a Minecraft plugin doesn't feel like a betrayal of my gender and sexuality. But there was a time when it did, and it probably will again from time to time in the future.

In Digitism, I'd like to explore tech culture, computer science, and women's relationship to both. In the process I hope to learn what draws and repels women from these fields, to explore how we can work to close the immense gender gap in computing, and to further empower myself to be a powerful, confident, technical woman.