February 27 to March 3, 2017, is Women in Technology Week! Next Wednesday is International Women’s Day (Wednesday, March 8, 2017), which, according to the official website, is “a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women”.
I’ll be honest, I didn’t realize that it was Women in Tech Week this week until my Microsoft MVP team contacted me a few weeks ago, telling me about some different events I could attend or take part in. My bad… I am in technology but being an accountant by trade, I don’t always think of myself as a “woman in tech”. I’m not sure why exactly but I guess I am not one to label myself as I hate feeling like I have to fit into a certain box! I’ve been interested in tech since I was a kid, from learning to program on my Commodore 64 to learning Visual Basic (or was it just Basic) in high school, to writing my own VB.net Windows app to track my NFL picks with a friend. I’m a geek through and through, no doubt about it! One organization I learned about via my MVP contacts is Hive Waterloo Region. I love the mission of this organization, so much so that I joined as a member and hope to give what I can. I’m attending my first event next week called Change the Ratio (link removed, no longer valid), tying into Women in Tech Week and National Engineering Month (not that I’m an engineer!).
I’m looking forward to learning more about the organization and how I can help!
Female Microsoft MVPs
Being that I’m a relatively new Microsoft MVP, I thought I would take the time this evening to go through the various MVP award categories and see just how many of us are female. It turns out, we are a tiny fraction of the MVP list, around 5%, not that I’m surprised. Technology is a field dominated by men, but I’m glad to see more initiatives for encouraging women to join traditional STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields.
For reference, here is what I gathered. Please note, this is completely unofficial and I was basing my counts purely on names and photos on the MVP website. There are many “anonymous” MVPs (no names) as well as others with names that don’t have a photo where I couldn’t tell if it was likely a female or male name. So, if anything, my numbers here are lower than the real number; at least, I hope I’m wrong.
| Award Category | # of MVPs | # of Female MVPs |
|---|---|---|
| Total | 4025 | 219 |
| Access | 41 | 1 |
| Business Solutions | 230 | 21 |
| Cloud and Datacenter Mgmt. | 455 | 13 |
| Data Platform | 423 | 34 |
| Enterprise Mobility | 169 | 3 |
| Excel | 113 | 10 |
| Microsoft Azure | 324 | 11 |
| Office Development | 37 | 2 |
| Office Servers & Services | 526 | 49 |
| OneNote | 14 | 3 |
| Outlook | 13 | 2 |
| PowerPoint | 36 | 13 |
| Visio | 15 | 1 |
| Visual Studio & Dev. Technologies | 1089 | 30 |
| Windows & Devices for IT | 170 | 5 |
| Windows Development | 345 | 15 |
| Word | 25 | 6 |
I think we can do better… hopefully, in future years, we see the proportion increase! Do you know an outstanding woman in technology that you could nominate for a Microsoft MVP?