As I turned the corner, I ran into a few thousand software developers.
This was on the second floor of the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco, where Google was holding its annual developer conference, the centerpiece of its year. During a two-hour-plus conference keynote, the company had just invited thousands of coders to start building software for everything from Google watches to Google cars, and this army of developers---with their Google I/O neck badges, Android t-shirts, and, yes, computerized eyewear---were streaming towards the first round of mini-Google-seminars, where they could learn the ins and outs of stuff like Google Cast and Google Big Data services.
At first, I just wanted to get through this mass of people--I was heading to a press conference on the other side of them--but then I realized there was something different about this crowd. So many of them were women. In the always fascinating but sometimes culturally backwards world of high-tech, it was an unexpectedly happy moment.
During the keynote, Google vice president Sundar Pichai had said that his Google I/O audience was 20 percent women, up from about 8 percent last year. And I had filed this stat somewhere in the back of my mind. But the size of that number didn't really hit home until I saw how many women were streaming towards me on the second floor. Typically, this kind of massive developer conference---a common occurrence in Silicon Valley---just doesn't look like that. In years past, Google I/O didn't look like that either, but recently, says Google's Megan Smith, the company has worked in pointed ways to change the situation. In the larger scheme of things, 20 percent is still a terribly low number, but at least Google is working to move things forward.
"There are a lot of people who would have a great time in this field, but they never really get to know that this exists or they opt out really early," says Smith, who works inside Google X---the "moonshot" lab that produced Google Glass and the self-driving Google cars---but also helps oversee the company's efforts to expand the role of women not only inside Google but across the tech industry. "This is our focus with women and girls and minorities and people in emerging markets: 'How do we help people be part of this?'"
According to a recent National Public Radio report, only 20 percent of American software developers are women, and a lot of this has to do with a lingering cultural bias in the tech world---and beyond. "When you watch television, it's 15 to 1, men computer scientists depicted versus women," Smith says. But at Silicon Valley events, women are often represented in numbers that don't even reflect the broader industry. Case in point: the 8 percent representation at last year's Google I/O. And that was on the high side. For developers like Jenny Jensen, who works at a Michigan company called TechSmith, Google's efforts to boost these numbers are a vital thing.
>'There are a lot of people who would have a great time in this field, but they never really get to know that this exists or they opt out really early.'
"I think it's awesome how many women are here. It's less intimidating," she told me on Thursday, in the halls of the conference, before explaining that she's relatively new to the developer game. "It's nice to see other women and connect with other women and know that, yes, there is a future here." She says she was inspired to become a coder in 2012, when she watched online as Google demonstrated Glass at its annual developer conference. "I was like: 'Holy crap. I want to do stuff like that.'"
Google I/O tickets are a prized thing. Typically, they sell out in minutes, and in recent years, with so many people pushing for a spot at the conference, Google has instituted a lottery system to help spread the wealth. But in order to increase the number of women attendees, it also distributed tickets through organizations such as the Anita Borg Institute For Women and Technology. This is how Jensen received her ticket. She had entered the lottery, but didn't win.
Such organizations even provided stipends for female academics interested in attending the conference. Deveeshree Nayak, a graduate student in computer science program at the University of Memphis who was born in India, used a stipend from the Anita Borg Institute to make the trip from Tennessee to San Francisco. The Institute reduced the price of her ticket from $900 to $300, and gave her $700 in travel money. "I'm really thankful. It makes a difference," she told me. "I'm meeting the giants of the software industry. I'm talking, personally, with them, and learning so many things that I didn't know."
>'I don't see much of a difference in gender myself. People are just people to me.'
On one level, Google I/O is an opportunity for people like Jensen and Nayak to educate themselves. But Google is also working to raise the profile of women in the tech world, to break down those cultural barriers, to provide additional encouragement in an industry traditionally dominated by men. In addition to setting aside a certain number of tickets for women, the company held dinners for women attendees at five restaurants around San Francisco. "They're really trying to round out the tech community, so that more women feel welcomed and invited into it," said Alissa Likavec, a Tampa, Florida developer who received her tickets through an organization called Women Who Code.
Google is also working to ensure that women are properly represented among the speakers at the conference. "You notice it," said Ian Lake, an Android developer at Facebook. "It's something you don't see at other conferences, especially at smaller conferences. They're very much male only." Like last year, one seminar---part of a Google program called Women Techmakers---revolved around the work of multiple women at Google. This year, the theme was robotics. Google X engineer Gabriella Levine discussed her efforts to build robots that mimic the behavior of animals, and Yoky Matsuoka, the vice president of technology at Nest, the home automation company recently purchased by Google, showed off her efforts to create robotic devices that our nervous systems can control much as they control our own hands and arms.
Some question whether women should be spotlighted in this way--called out for being women. They feel this only exacerbates the cultural stereotypes. Others say they haven't experienced the problems that other women have complained about. "I don't see much of a difference in gender myself," said Alexandra Ogden, a developer at a company called Phunware. "People are just people to me." She received her ticket to the conference when a friend of hers found an "easter egg" code that Google had buried into a set of developer documents on the net. But Megan Smith believes the situation won't change unless we actively work to change it. "You have to acknowledge the problem. We can't debug it if we don't."
