At the moment, only about 12–15% of the engineers who are building the internet and its software are women.

Here are a couple examples that illustrate why this is such a big a problem:

• Do you remember when Apple released it’s health app a few years ago? Its purpose was to offer a ‘comprehensive’ access point to health information and data. But it left out a large health issue that almost all women deal with, and then took a year to fix that hole.
• Then there was that frustrated middle school-aged girl who enjoyed gaming, but couldn’t find an avatar she related to. So she analyzed 50 popular games and found that 98% of them had male avatars (mostly free!), and only 46% of them had female avatars (mostly available for a charge!). Even more askew when you consider that almost half of gamers are women.

We don’t want a repeat of these kinds of situations. And we’ve been working to address this at Women 2.0 for over a decade. We think a lot about how diversity — or lack thereof. We think about it has affected — and is going to affect — the technology outputs that enter our lives. These technologoies engage with us. The determine our behaviors, thought processes, buying patterns, world views… you name it. This is part of the reason we recently launched Lane, a recruitment platform for female technologists.

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