WIT

Somehow I’ve made it a pastime of pointing out how many times women are passed up for recognition while men are promoted around them. Its not that the men were identified as better or worse than women, but just about how heavily we scrutinize and limit women while everyone else passes them by. Now I’m going to ask the Oracle folks to not take this personally, but hopefully take it as a call to arms, but I know how we love to shoot the messenger.  Hopefully you already know that I will have no qualms about deleting abusive or threatening comments to this post, so please think twice before doing and really think on what I’m posting here.

I receive about 20-30 messages a week from women in the industry.  I take my role in the Oracle community as a role model for women in technology quite seriously and I’ve somehow ended up speaking up a number of times, upon request from different groups.

Even though I didn’t have the “official” prerequisite classes of HTML and CSS for the JavaScript class offered by sister Meetup group, Girls Develop it, I decided on Friday that I wanted to take the weekend class and signed up.

Last night I attended our RMOUG WIT’s movie night.  We partnered with Regis and the choice in movie has received a lot of great reviews, titled, Code-  Debugging the Gender Gap.

I’ve been running the Women in Technology, (WIT) at RMOUG, which I first started planning out in 2011, which has grown to include other user groups and even countries as its grown.  The last couple years, I’ve worked to try to add a WIT scholarship to RMOUG’s, but it wasn’t always easy to convince others that we should provide one when you are asking to choose one group over another.

I keep having this conversation over and over, in retail stores, restaurants and other establishments- women coming up to me and asking, “Can you tell me about that watch you have on?”

It made me realize that it could be really intimidating to:

1.  Ask questions of the sales staff in most stores.