n the tech community, the questions about females abound: Where are the women in the industry? What about female speakers? Founders? Tech bloggers? And if they aren’t present, why not? Are women really not interested in technology? Do we discourage our daughters from pursuing careers in technology? Does the nerdy stereotype discourage young women from becoming geeks themselves? Are women just built differently? Is it nature or nurture? I believe that part of the answer to the question “Why aren’t women in technology?” lies in our mistaking the answer to the former question, “Where are the women?”.

Women are present and in droves. On a trip out to an internal Yahoo! Hack Day about a year ago, I was surprised to enter the final presentation room and find that over one third of the presenters were female. Not only were there a surprising number of females presenting, the winning team also happened to be made up of two females. The winning hack was the ability to transfer your Yahoo! Travel data to your iPod for easy portability. A geeky answer to a very human problem. About two weeks later, my partner and I went out to the SuperHappyDevHouse all-night hacker fest to find a houseful of males with a smattering of females cycling through, most of them not developers and mainly there to socialize. There isn’t anything wrong with coming to a hacker fest to socialize—many of the attendees do this—but I had to wonder, “Where are all of those awesome hacker women I witnessed at Yahoo! Hack Day?”