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G ‘n’ G Women in Tech Week, Cate Sevilla – BitchBuzz.com

Friday, May 8th, 2009

Cate Sevilla

My name is Cate Sevilla, and I’m the founding editor of BitchBuzz.com, as well as being a freelance writer and professional blogger. I grew up in California and after meeting a rather handsome British Geek on Myspace, I moved over to London in the spring of 2006. After blogging a ridiculous amount about women’s issues on my personal blog, CupCate.com, I was asked to be an editor for the blog publishing company , Shiny Media.

Over the past few years I have written for a number of websites such as T3.com, Yahoo! Personals’s advice column, and have appeared in various newspapers, and TV and radio programs. After leaving Shiny Media in June 2008, I decided to launch BitchBuzz.com, as I was fed up with both reading and writing for websites that were “for women, by women”, yet seemed pretty out of touch with what a lot of women actually want.

BitchBuzz is a network for web-savvy women where we discuss everything from sex and politics, to the latest in pop culture and technology. We’re the happy medium between hardcore feminism and the fluffy, Cosmo-esque magazines that dominate the Internet today. Plus, we only write about stuff that we actually like and care about! There are enough iVillages and Handbag.com rip-offs out there – I wanted to create something that recognized that women care just as much about the latest political news and most useful iPhone applications as they do about finding unique and kitschy dinnerware.

Through my work on BitchBuzz, and experiences with feminism and the tech community in London, I’ve become incredibly passionate about getting more women involved in technology. Whether it’s through blogging, IT, social media or graphic design, we need more women in the tech! The female audience online is as massive as it is influential and I strongly believe our tech culture should reflect that. While I may not be a Ruby on Rails developer or understand exactly how the server that BitchBuzz runs on works – I still am a woman in technology.

So, my current mission is to help balance out our current tech culture, along with helping make younger women and girls aware of how many different cool jobs you can have if you work in the technology industry. I think most girls are unaware of how many tech jobs don’t just involve sitting in front of a computer screen staring at numbers and graphs all day! (Unless that’s what you want to be doing, and yes, there are plenty of those jobs, as well.)

My personal blog is CupCate.com and you can follow me over at Twitter: @cupcate. Please do check out BitchBuzz.com (and follow us at @bitchbuzz ) and if you’d be interested in working with us or contributing to the site, please do get in touch via our Contact form!

Click image to check out BitchBuzz.com

Tags: BitchBuzz, Cate Sevilla, Girls 'n' Gadgets, london, Twitter, women, women in tech, women in technology, Women who Tech
Posted in Internet, Social Media | No Comments »

G ‘n’ G Women in Tech Week – Sarah Blow, Girl Geek Dinners/ TweetMeme

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

Ha ha… I’ve finally managed to take over Leila’s site… Well only for one blog post for now. But how on earth do you start a blog post about who you are and what you do…. geez… I have no idea… so I thought I’d just write and see what came out! So I’m Sarah Blow, Founder of the Girl Geek Dinners and Community Manager at TweetMeme. (formerly a software engineer at Cardinal Health). And I’m betting that you are trying to figure out what that lot means.

So let’s go from the top… Girl Geek Dinners… what are they… Girl Geek Dinners are technical events for females in the IT industry where they get together over food & drinks, network and hear a talk or three on a technical subject. Guys are allowed to attend so long as they are invited by a girl attending the event. (each girl has one invite to give out to a guy should they choose to do so) Why the events I hear you say… well I got tired of justifying why I was at technical conferences and informal tech gatherings. As such I decided something needed to change and I needed to find others like me… Female but geeky. There was no way my 4 years of university were going to be thrown out and replaced with stereotypical expectations. I wanted to be taken seriously as someone female in IT. And so the Girl Geek Dinners were born in 2005. today there are over 50 different groups around the world all with the same focus. To make the IT industry less stereotypical and more about the technology.

Interestingly it was due to my experience of taking Girl Geek Dinners world wide and learning how to install, create and use online media tools for creating online communitites that I ended up in the job that I am now as the Community Manager at TweetMeme. The two roles really do compliment each other well. My previous role to that was some what different and was more systems & software development and design than anything web focused. It was totally about programming, software testing, following the ISO 9001 standards and so on. I’m not sure that I could have got much further from one end of the technical spectrum to the other really if I’d tried to. Now I get to play with the latest and greatest technical tools like the Twitter API and so on. The interesting thing is I love both skills sets and no matter which set I use as a day job I’ll always end up using the other as a hobby one way or another. For example this weekend I’ll be down at the Yahoo Hackdays Event doing some coding and playing with their latest API’s just for fun.

So I guess the thing to take away from hearing from me online is, don’t always believe everything you hear about the IT industry, it’s fun to be here! Dare to give technology a try… don’t just accept stereotypes people try to pin on you if you think they are incorrect. And above all believe in yourself, work hard and dare to try to achieve your goals whatever they may be. My latest one is learning to kite surf!

Also just because you aren’t doing coding etc as your day job it doesn’t mean that you can’t do it at all. Have a play and come to the weekend events where you can learn how to do this stuff if you are interested in learning it! You never know it may just be the steps to getting your next job.

Tags: api, ggd, girl geek, Girl Geek Dinners, industry, sarah, sarah blow, sarahblow, Social Media, Technology, tweetmeme, Twitter
Posted in Social Media, Technology | No Comments »

Welcome to Girls ‘n’ Gadgets…

Wednesday, March 4th, 2009

We girls love gadgets. Web and technology is an amazing world, filling our lives full of fun, fanaticism and functionality. Where would we be today without our laptops, mobile phones and of course the Internet? Lost most would say! These days, it’s hard to imagine not tweeting, tumbling, DMing or IMing your way through life. These gadgets are essential in almost every aspect of our lives whether it’s work or play. I for one couldn’t live without my laptop, mobile phones and especially the Internet!

Technology over the years has always been strongly male dominated, but recently this has started to change and the number of influential women in tech has greatly increased. With many groups and events being set up, such as Girl Geek Dinners and Women Who Tech , the female voice is finally being heard loud and clear.

This brings me on nicely to Girls ‘n’ Gadgets; As a Tech and Internet lover, I wanted to share my passion with the world and I knew I wasn’t the only girl out there wanting to do this. After going to many conferences and meeting like-minded people, I decided to set up Girls ‘n’ Gadgets to give women a place to go to get a female ‘take on tech’. The site will feature up-to-date news and reviews, as well as featured internet personalities and companies. To keep things interesting, we even have our own resident boy to review our weekly musings.

I hope that over the next month, whilst we are still in beta mode, you will enjoy what you see and read. As a new and growing site, all feedback is greatly appreciated and all comments will be taken into consideration. As time progresses, we will be adding more features and perfecting the site to the best of our abilities.

We are currently looking for more female bloggers to contribute to the site on a casual basis. If you are interested and have any questions, please email me - Leila@girlsngadgets.com

Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter

Leila

Tags: Girl Geek Dinners, Girls 'n' Gadgets, GnG, Twitter, Welcome, Women who Tech
Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments »