Monday, October 22, 2007

She's Geeky: Women Are Cool

Photo: How Geeky Girls Eat Lunch. Laptops open and food barely fitting on the table in front. Yep, this is how I eat my lunch most days.

For the past couple months I've been helping Kaliya Hamlin with her conference She's Geeky. I figured that although I'm not very geeky, if I got involved I'd feel more comfortable attending and being part of the process.

It worked.

I got the "chore" of taking everyone's polaroid photo this morning. This means I got to meet everyone for a second, decide how to make them look good (black, blonde, brown or purple background) and assure them all that their photos were true representations of the women I was seeing. I know photographs. And even though I never take pictures of people, I really enjoyed taking polaroids of all these fabulous women.

I'm sitting here with women who have started businesses, women who work for large tech companies (like Google and Yahoo), and although I'm still not quite feeling "equal" I'm not feeling like a fish out of water.

I'm going to be writing a larger piece about this: about our internal insecurities, about feeling scared, about taking chances and how these are the way we remind ourselves that we are humans. That we've evolved above the basic animal survival skills. I started thinking about this on the drive down here to Mountain View; and I'll work about in spare moments throughout the conference and get it up soon.

In the meantime, know that women are smart. Women are strong and capable. Women are competant and compassionate.

Women are cool.

I also blog at: Deb's Daily Distractions and BlogHer on Mondays and Saturdays.

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