Flash maven Stacey Mulcahy recently wrote an open letter to her 8-year-old niece, recounting the difficulties, both subtle and overt, that many women working in technology face.
Some of Mulcahy's sentiments are lighthearted: "I hope that you attend conferences and find yourself complaining about long lines for the bathroom." Others are straightforward about the many challenges that come with being a woman in tech: "I hope that you will speak about your expertise. And when you do, people won't use some form of social media to point out your body issues. The only body on display, is your body of work."
Read the letter here.
Mulcahy, who is the lead developer at Brooklyn-based digital creative agency Big Spaceship, was inspired to pen the letter after she received a phone call from her niece. "She had called to tell me that she finally had an answer to that fateful forever question of 'what do you want to be when you grow up," Mulcahy wrote. Her niece said she wanted to make video games -- no surprise, said Mulcahy, who noted that her niece loved Mario and had "a knack for summarizing complex game play in a few words."
Mulcahy's open letter comes at an opportune moment, as people criticize the tech world in the wake of several instances of sexism. As Slate points out, Mulcahy's letter offers a much-needed voice in the conversation, ultimately coming across "as a message of hope."
The letter has been passed around tech circles on Twitter, and responses have been largely positive, even across the gender divide. "This is worth reading all the way through, and I haven't even finished reading it yet," tweeted indie game developer Erin Robinson, while software developer Mats Einarsen called it a "nice counterpoint to the brogramming BS."
Mulcahy, tweeting under the handle bitchwhocodes, has been replying to many of the responses individually, and on Friday tweeted out an encouraging statistic:
