March 8, 2022
On this International Women's Day 2022 we wanted to tell stories about women in tech. What better way to do that than celebrate female authors! These women have written phenomenal books in the tech space to tell their stories. These are women who have walked the walk in the tech world and/or offered unique perspectives to not just women in tech, but women in the workplace. This list goes in no particular order as we believe you should add all of these to your kindle or book library asap. You can click on each book image to take you to a purchase page on Amazon.Let's dive into the list below:
From the book's description on Amazon:"In 2015, Ellen K. Pao sued a powerhouse Silicon Valley venture capital firm, calling out workplace discrimination and retaliation against women and other underrepresented groups. Her suit rocked the tech world—and exposed its toxic culture and its homogeneity. Her message overcame negative PR attacks that took aim at her professional conduct and her personal life, and she won widespread public support—Time hailed her as “the face of change.” Though Pao lost her suit, she revolutionized the conversation at tech offices, in the media, and around the world. In Reset, she tells her full story for the first time."
From the book's description on Amazon:"This book describes the experiences and successes of female innovators and entrepreneurs in the still largely male-dominated tech world in twenty candid interviews. It highlights the varied life and career stories that lead these women to the top positions in the technology industry that they are in now.Interviewees include CEOs, founders, and inventors from a wide spectrum of tech organizations across sectors as varied as mobile technology, e-commerce, online education, and video games. Interviewer Danielle Newnham, a mobile startup and e-commerce entrepreneur herself as well as an online community organizer, presents the insights, instructive anecdotes, and advice shared with her in the interviews, including stories about raising capital for one’s start-up, and about the obstacles these women encountered and how they overcame them."
From the book's description on Amazon:"Buying groceries, tracking our health, finding a date: whatever we want to do, odds are that we can now do it online. But few of us ask how all these digital products are designed, or why. It's time we change that. Many of the services we rely on are full of oversights, biases, and downright ethical nightmares. Chatbots that harass women. Signup forms that fail anyone who's not straight. Social media sites that send peppy messages about dead relatives. Algorithms that put more black people behind bars. Technically Wrong takes an unflinching look at the values, processes, and assumptions that lead to these problems and more. Wachter-Boettcher demystifies the tech industry, leaving those of us on the other side of the screen better prepared to make informed choices about the services we use - and demand more from the companies behind them."
From the book's description on Amazon:"Silicon Valley is not a fantasyland of unicorns, virtual reality rainbows, and 3D-printed lollipops for women in tech. Instead, it’s a "Brotopia," where men hold the cards and make the rules. While millions of dollars may seem to grow on trees in this land of innovation, tech’s aggressive, misogynistic, work-at-all costs culture has shut women out of the greatest wealth creation in the history of the world.Brotopia reveals how Silicon Valley got so sexist despite its utopian ideals, why bro culture endures even as its companies claim the moral high ground, and how women are speaking out and fighting back. Drawing on her deep network of Silicon Valley insiders, Chang opens the boardroom doors of male-dominated venture capital firms like Kleiner Perkins, the subject of Ellen Pao's high-profile gender discrimination lawsuit, and Sequoia, where a partner once famously said they "won't lower their standards" just to hire women. Exposing the flawed logic in common excuses for why tech has long suffered the “pipeline” problem and invests in the delusion of meritocracy, Brotopia also shows how bias coded into AI, internet troll culture, and the reliance on pattern recognition harms not just women in tech but us all, and at an unprecedented scale."
From the book's description on Amazon:"The last twenty years have brought us the rise of the internet, the development of artificial intelligence, the ubiquity of once unimaginably powerful computers, and the thorough transformation of our economy and society. Through it all, Ellen Ullman lived and worked inside that rising culture of technology, and in Life in Code she tells the continuing story of the changes it wrought with a unique, expert perspective.When Ellen Ullman moved to San Francisco in the early 1970s and went on to become a computer programmer, she was joining a small, idealistic, and almost exclusively male cadre that aspired to genuinely change the world. In 1997 Ullman wrote Close to the Machine, the now classic and still definitive account of life as a coder at the birth of what would be a sweeping technological, cultural, and financial revolution.Twenty years later, the story Ullman recounts is neither one of unbridled triumph nor a nostalgic denial of progress. It is necessarily the story of digital technology's loss of innocence as it entered the cultural mainstream, and it is a personal reckoning with all that has changed, and so much that hasn't. Life in Code is an essential text toward our understanding of the last twenty years--and the next twenty."
Let us know your thoughts on this list on social media! What books or authors should we add to this list for a future post?Are you a woman who is interested in launching your career in tech? Help us close the gender gap in tech and apply for our Women in Tech scholarship! You can learn more by clicking here. We have a Data Science program that starts on 3/21 and a Web Development program that starts on 4/1. Let us know if you have questions by submitting your application or reaching out to us at admissions@codeup.com!
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