Day 94 - Counting success of unlocked doors

As I continued to think about the She++ video that I watched yesterday, I was reminded that one of the challenges of encouraging more women to develop their aptitude and confidence with technology is that we don't always celebrate our count all our successes. 

The women in the She++ panel echoed some of the same messages I would tell my high school students. 

Continue to develop this MOST important skills of LOGIC and ALGORITHMIC

THINKING… that mindset can be applied to a variety of different thinking

A little bit of programming knowledge can unlock all these doors

You can go into any industry,  science,  fashion,  math

Finding problems that are worth solving and then solving them using computing

And when you successfully communicate that message to our women and girls and they start to feel empowered with technology, they may choose to very different field than "Computer Science"  to apply their new technology skills.

I had many girls pursue college and career choices they would have never considered had they not become more tech savvy from accounting to biology to civil engineering.

These successes must be celebrated, but are not easy to count.

It is easier to measure the number of  women in computer science.

But let's not measure our success only by the increase or decrease in computer science fields.  Many of our tech-savvy girls are walking through doors that were unlocked because of the work we have done raising their awareness, skill level, and confidence with technology.