BFFW 2016: CODE: De-Bugging the Gender Gap

Despite having passed what would have been Ada Lovelace’s 200th birthday, the tech community still lack both women and people of color. In CODE: De-Bugging the Gender Gap we get to meet industry professionals, activists and scientists who try to figure out why and what we can do about it. Female coders have proven to be judged harsher than men, but as soon as their gender is unknown, the story is a different one.

“Robin Reynolds' CODE documentary exposes the dearth of American female and minority software engineers and explores the reasons for this gender gap. CODE raises the question: what would society gain from having more women and minorities code?”

In 1843, Ada Lovelace, a 19th-century mathematician, wrote the rst series of instructions designed for a machine to carry out, creating what was, in essence, the rst computer program. A century later, in 1944, it was another woman, United States Navy Rear Admiral and computer scientist Grace Hopper, who became one of the rst programmers of the groundbreaking Har- vard Mark 1 computer. Hopper coined the now-ubiquitous term “debugging” to refer to xing a coding error.
But despite these landmark accomplishments, both Lovelace and Hopper are often overlooked in our country’s popular knowledge of computer science’s origins. Gloria Steinem has said that, “Women have always been an equal part of the past—just not an equal part of history.” The computer science and technology industry is a powerful example of this observation.

The film screening will be followed by a discussion with industry insides, female coders and activists from the Berlin community.

Time: 20:00
Venue: Babylon Berlin
Language: English
Tickets: 8 euro

Panelists:

Aleksandra Gavrilovska (WomenWhoCode.com, Soundcloud)
Anne Kjær Riechert (Redi-School.org)
Laura Laugwitz ( RailsGirls Berlin, http://railsgirlsberlin.de)

More information about the film: http://www.codedocumentary.com