I just noticed on twitter that something called Geek Girl Meetup (#ggm10) took place in Sweden this weekend. From the tweets (in Swedish), it sounds like a very interesting conference, with some seminars, people meeting up, etc. And of course in the Notes community we have our own Nerd Girls.
I think it is great that women now can show their techology interest, or other "nerdy" interests. When I grew up as a teenager, as a computer and RPG playing nerd, I was not very interesting to girls. Then, when the Internet starting to take off in the mid 90´s in Sweden, I noticed an increased interest/acceptance for nerds and geeks. As long as they were male. It was still kind of taboo for a girl to be a geek.
I think that in the last 5-6 years, the acceptance of female geeks have been increasing dramatically. Non-technical people see that girls can have a good career and enjoy a technical job. Personally I find intelligence (and geekdom) in a girl very attractive. So I hope this trend will continue. I also hope that the issues I know some (many?) girls experience in a male dominated area, like technology, will soon go away, and that everyone get judged on their merits and knowledge, not their gender.
However, I think that some participants in events like the above mentioned Geek Girl Meetup and SXSW Interactive are not "true geeks", but marketing people who want to hop on the bandwagon, because the fact that geek is the new chic/cool. I am sure not everyone with titles like "entrepreneur", "venture angel" and "founder" have the real geek/nerd mindset. That is ok. But don´t try to pretend you are something you are not.
However, if you code (creating web pages with Frontpage does NOT count as "coding", though!), administer servers, build/repair electronic hardware and love gadgets, you are a geek. 🙂 And if you like me started writing code on a computer with 16 kB memory (like the ABC 80 pictured here), you are absolutely a geek. 🙂
There are of course many other kinds of geeks. Comic book geeks, Harry Potter geeks, Manga geeks, just to mention a few.
Image of Role Playing dices by Sabbut , licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported. I resized the original picture and made the background transparent.
