Girl Geek Dinner at Rocketmakers

Last night Rocketmakers crew members gathered in our lovely kitchen to host the March Girl Geek Dinner event. We welcomed developers, computational designers, academics and more for a no holds barred conversation about being women in tech.

What is a Girl Geek dinner?

The Girl Geek Dinners were first founded in 2005 as a reaction to the beer drinking tech bros culture that pervaded most events at the time. Since then they have evolved to become informal gatherings at different tech company’s offices to build community and confidence amongst women in tech.

Last night's discussions

In our case we discovered that women come via unexpected and direct routes into the sector, utilising a variety of training schemes to navigate their way through the industry and find the role that suits their interests and skills best.

We heard that women have a true sense of lifelong learning (one of the Rocketmakers values don’t you know) when it comes to their careers in tech. We also enjoyed a good giggle about about the extraordinary male stereotypes in the industry from Mr Robot to men in lab coats in the STEM leaflets.

Another theme of the conversation was the importance of ‘feeling the fear and doing it anyway’ - the group shared experiences of imposter syndrome in their everyday work, and a lack of confidence being a constant battle.

We also covered the two ends of the generational spectrum - we asked whether the next generation of tech employees was going to be more gender balanced and we discussed the plausibility of 50+ workforce taking a career pivot to join the industry.

Needless to say, we didn’t find all the answers over pizza but we did make some new connections and develop our learning and thinking on topics as varied as augmented reality and architecture!

Interested in finding out more?

Girl Geek Dinners in Bath are run by Caroline Anstey - if you’d like to host one in your office do reach out to her, and if you’d like to join the next one, sign up via MeetUp.