Inquiring minds often wonder: How did she get to be what she is? How do women's career pathways differ from those of men? It was questions like these, during the 2003 SIGCSE Technical Symposium in Reno, Nevada, that led to an exciting project: The Computing Educator Oral History Project (CEOHP). Projects such as CEOHP can play a key role in increasing the population of people entering and staying in computing careers, especially careers in computing education.



The goals of the CEOHP are to:

Living and spending my sabbatical in Sweden for more than six months has allowed me to gain a different perspective on a variety of issues in computer science, including those related to gender equity.

Every few months, the blogosphere addresses the matter of gender diversity of speakers at conferences about design, technology, and the web. The latest such incidents revolved around the lack of women speakers at the Future of Web Apps conference in San Francisco last September* and the Creativity Now conference put on by Tokion in NYC last October.

Instead of agonizing over why there aren't more women in IT, it might be more interesting and more fruitful to ask: Why are women so brilliant at IT? I ask the question because I know, have employed or interviewed, so many outstanding women in IT, and it always amazes me that no one has noticed how, or why, they are so stunningly successful.