Second Toronto Girl Geek Dinner

This past Wednesday saw the second Toronto Girl Geek Dinner. This time I hosted, solo, as Maggie Fox was out of town -- but thanks to her thorough prep work everything went smooth as glass. In my humble opinion, of course. :)

The event's defining principle seems to have engendered quite a lively debate over on the TGGD blog -- interestingly, the most enflamed comments have come from those who weren't able to attend. Huh.

Maybe I'm naive, but when I co-founded the TGGD with Maggie, we weren't thinking of excluding men at all -- having attended a few testosterone-heavy geek dinners, the whole point was to encourage any guys who wanted to attend to bring a girl with them, to encourage the ladies (particularly female students) to come out more and network.

Anyway, the whole thing is a minefield of misread intentions, so I'll say no more. Except to ask this: do YOU think it's exclusionary? If so, what's the solution -- a merge with the ad hoc Geek Dinner crowd? Suggestions welcome!

Getting My Girl Geek On

This past Wednesday night was the inaugural Toronto Girl Geek Dinner. I've already written about it on the TGGD blog -- check it out!

As a more personal aside, I'm throwing off my carefully constructed mantle of jaded cynicism for a moment to note that I really found the evening very inspiring. Hearing Sandy Kemsley speak about the challenges she's faced and surmounted as a woman working in the male-dominated tech sector made me feel very lucky to have the position that I do, working in an industry (publishing) and at a company (Harlequin) that is populated with strong, smart females, from the front lines all the way up to the executive ranks. I'm also very lucky to work with a small, passionate team of extremely smart women who also happen to enjoy dishing about LiLo, TomKat, and reality TV, and admiring each other's shoes. :)

I'm really very psyched about the future Girl Geek Dinners and am excited about the opportunity to meet and network with more cool chicks!