I’ve been going to Girl Geek Sydney events for six years now. The first was at Google back in 2009, and I went with my friends Tia and Issy. None of us really knew what to expect. I remember feeling apprehensive because I’d recently left development to work as a business analyst, and I was intimidated to be surrounded by so many smart and talented women. Back then I didn’t have a lot of women friends. (I had some women knitting friends, but most were older and not working in tech.) I was still in my Cool Girl Feminist phase. Most other women were either dumb and boring, or Competition For My Spot. I’m not proud of it.
So I started going to Girl Geek events, and then I started speaking at them, and then I started helping to organise them, and along the way things changed. I grew up a lot. Maybe not entirely due to GGDSyd, but it was a big part of it. Nowadays I’m not ashamed to say I have girl friends, and they are amazing people: Jody and Sera and Amy and Peggy and Daphne and Lucy and Donna and Georgi and so many more. I genuinely like helping the younger generation (women and men!) starting careers in tech. I am thrilled to see my peers building cool stuff, speaking at events, and winning awards. It’s not a zero sum game anymore – we can all be successful. And I stopped caring so much whether I looked the Cool Geek Girl part (I had a terrible habit of denigrating girly-girls mostly because I was desperately envious of them), and I discovered that you can wear dresses and Taylor Swift’s red lippie and still be taken seriously in tech (by the people who actually matter).
So that’s a very long preamble to the real point of this post, which is that last Tuesday we hosted the July meetup for Girl Geeks Sydney at the Canva offices – and it was honestly one of the proudest moments of my career. I was the emcee for the night, and it was like getting to introduce two friends that you just know are going to get along terrifically. The attendees seemed rapt to be there, and my fellow Canva women all crushed it with their phenomenal talks. Even my male colleagues were telling me the next day how inspired they were.
I’m just going to end with an excerpt from a chat conversation I had with Jody a month ago, prompted by our wonderful friend Kelly:
So that’s my new mantra – saying nice things to people. To all the girl geeks I’ve met over the past six years: you are all awesome and smart and talented in different ways, and I think you’re super inspiring. I wouldn’t be where I am now without your examples. And to my colleagues at Canva: I feel lucky every day to get to work with you. Thanks for putting on a great night for all my friends. 🙂