ilar769

JEAN: Only 20% of computer science PhD students are women. Often when I meet new people they are surprised they are meeting a female computer scientist at all and have many questions. We wanted to give everyone the opportunity to ask questions to female computer scientists (including questions about being women in a male-dominated field).

That's amazing! It's great that you are encouraging her. I definitely recommend groups like Pyladies and Girls Who Code.

Edited to explain more about why I recommend those groups over (but not instead of!) gender-neutral ones or online resources: First of all, you should try everything! But I personally have found groups like Pyladies awesome because they specifically focus on mentorship, and I bet if there's one in your area they would love to help your 11 year old daughter. Face-to-face learning in a warm environment can help someone stay committed.

JEAN: Yes. Especially when I was younger, I noticed that people did not expect me to know very much. While some of my male friends could walk into a room and have people listen to their technical ideas by default, I had to do some amount of proving myself. Now that I have more credentials it's become easier because rather than having to do this whole song-and-dance to demonstrate my technical credibility, I can say what I've done in the past. This can be exhausting--and certainly made me doubt myself more when I was younger.

An advantage of being one of the very few women in a male-dominated field is that people remember me. At some of our conferences, there are hundreds of men and less than 10 women. People are more likely to notice me and remember my name than someone who is just another guy in a button-down shirt and glasses. I feel like this has given me a good platform for spreading my technical ideas.

I think it's terrible, and I'm encouraged that we're moving away from restricted access. I put all my papers online.

My mom. She's a doctor, not a computer scientist, but she was pretty bad-ass: she moved to the US from India alone in her twenties with no resources besides an MD and a residency job, and eventually brought my dad over and now has a successful pediatric practice.

Edited to say she had like, $7 to her name. It wasn't really all that 1% ish.

Edited again to add a few folks:

• My dad, who first bought us a computer and who now, in his 60s and with zero CS education, is learning a TON about video editing, P2P, and more. His growth astounds me.
• Amazing women like Barbara Liskov, a professor at MIT who is on my thesis committee (!) and also one of the first women in the US to get her PhD in computer science, and a Turing Award winner.