Bloomington Startup Feb. 8-10, 2008 [a startup weekend event]

Last night, I attended a meeting of Women Inspire, a three-year-old group promoting personal and professional connections between local women. It was an interesting evening that included a speech by 9th District Congressional candidate Gretchen Clearwater. My purpose for attending was to spread the word about Bloomington Startup Weekend, making a special appeal to local women to help us achieve gender equity.

Gender equity is a known problem. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 26.7% of employees in computer and mathematical fields in 2006 were female, earning 84.7% of what men do. Those numbers are in decline even as the jobs in the IT field are more plentiful. This is reflected in academia, where the number of female students is noticeably low. At Indiana University, approximately 11% of students in CS and Informatics are women. One of the groups locally working to reverse this trend is Women In Computing (WIC), who are currently finishing a two-day retreat at McCormicks Creek State Park in nearby Spencer, Indiana.

While we won’t fix the problem simply by getting a large number of local women to show up at City Hall in February, visible involvement by women can have impact. Seeing women collaborating in our photos and streaming video from our event might inspire others to follow their paths. Perhaps more importantly, the flavor and direction of the new company will be different with many women involved than without them.

At the moment, Bloomington Startup Weekend has 11 women on board with 28 spots remaining. Let’s see at least a dozen more women register before we run out of opportunities.

Resources on gender equity:

Association for Women in Computing (AWC)

The Anita Borg Institute

ACM’s Committee on Women and Computing

Carnegie Mellon Project on Gender and Computer Science

The Ada Project

Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research

Center for Women in Information Technology

Women-Related Science-Technology Email Lists

Last night, the 14th Startup Weekend host city—Seattle—kicked off the first day of the quest to build something new from scratch. For those planning to attend our event, it would be well worth paying attention to how things transpire in Seattle.

Read the official blog and follow Startup Weekend on Twitter.

Startup Weekend also announced two new weekends, in Portland (May 23-25) and Ann Arbor (June 20-22). Pending my summer plans (family and employment), I plan to attend the latter.

One of the great things about living in Bloomington right now is the self-awareness that continues to grow in our local tech community. One byproduct of that awareness is that Bloomington started having Geek Dinners last fall. We have another one coming up on January 30 starting at 6p at El Norteño on Walnut Street. From the BGD blog:

We’ll have some Mexican, a little beer and talk tech - and there’s a lot of tech to talk this time around as the Bloomington Startup Weekend will be February 8th - 10th. People will get together and try to create an entire company from start to finish in a single weekend. Should be pretty amazing. What’s your idea for what the company should build? Kick around some ideas on the 30th!

Thanks to Ben Fulton, the man behind this recurring event.

More about this event can be found on the Startup Weekend and Geek Dinner web sites.