Dinah Davis – Code Like A Girl

Before Dinah Davis graduated high school, she went to her guidance counsellor for some advice.

“I said, ‘what careers could I do? I really like doing math,’” she remembers. “And he said, ‘well yeah, you could be a math teacher.’”

That was his only recommendation. Nothing about science, engineering, or computers – “you know, because I’m a woman.” So the 17-year-old said okay, and started a teaching degree at the University of Lethbridge.

There was just one problem.

“I hated it so much,” she says. “I realized that teaching was about having a passion to build relationships with the students, and build relationships with the teachers, whereas my passion was actually the mathematics.”

Dinah is the founder of Code Like A Girl, an online publication that champions the contributions and experiences of women in technology. She’s also a Director of Research and Development at Arctic Wolf Networks. But it wasn’t until her third year of university that she decided to try a computing course for the first time – “and it clicked!” so took as many as she could.

She noticed something strange, though. In a university where females outnumbered males seven-to-one, there was only one other woman in her first high-level computing course.

Dinah knew that women were underrepresented in STEM fields. “And that really opened my eyes up to, wow, this is a problem.”

Still, she didn’t let the numbers hold her back. She graduated from Lethbridge with a Bachelor of Science majoring in math, and from the University of Waterloo with a Master’s in Math with a focus on cryptography.

She entered the workforce to find the same thing: teams in tech that were mostly, if not completely, male. She was pretty happy at her first job. “I was probably prevented from getting as much recognition as I should have,” Dinah says, but “inside my team I was definitely treated like everyone else.”

Things were different at her next job, though. She was leading a development team at a security company, and it seemed like a great opportunity, until she ran into bullying and misogyny. “Within the first two weeks I knew I had made a huge mistake… within 10 months, it took my self-esteem from very high to almost nothing. It was a terrible, terrible, terrible experience.”

Until then, Dinah had stayed quiet about the inequality she encountered. “I was just the cool girl. I was just there doing my job, and I wasn’t going to worry about that stuff. I wasn’t going to ruffle any feathers because I didn’t want it to affect my career.” But when she left that job, “I made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t let this happen anymore. I was going to be loud about it.”

That’s when she started a personal blog about her experiences. She also started speaking at local events, like Think About Math, a University of Waterloo series for grade nine girls interested in following a career in math.

At that event in particular, she wanted to make a strong impression. “I knew I was going to be meeting about 80 girls, and I thought, I need to give them some swag to remember my little message.”

The pens from work just wouldn’t do – so she decided to make her own stickers. “Everybody loves stickers. So I was like, what would be a cool sticker to make? ‘Code like a girl,’ that would be a cool sticker to make!”

The girls loved them, too. “All of those stickers were gone after that weekend.” All 80 of them.

At the same time, she was having difficulty submitting her stories to publications outside of her own blog. There were very few places writing about women in technology, and those that did were quite picky about the stories they accepted.

“So I thought to myself, well, I could start my own publication,” she says. “What if I open this publication and I amplify hundreds of voices? Then what kind of impact can we make?”

Today, Code Like A Girl has 33,000 followers, split 55% women and 45% men. (“Your first guess might have been 80% women and 20% men, and that’s not the case because there’s so many men who want to make a difference,” she says.)

She’s fortunate enough to have lots of support from friends who’ve helped her with the logo and her social media presence, and Patreon supporters whose funding helps her focus on putting great stories forward.

But it’s a labour of love for Dinah. “If it makes a woman smile because she feels like she’s included and she identified with the story, that’s amazing. If it made a guy sit back and think, ‘Oh maybe I don’t do that right, maybe I am doing something wrong or maybe I’m just not considering all the things around me,’ that is a win.”

And what would she tell a high schooler who came to her, with a passion in math, looking for advice on what she could be when she graduates university? “Have you tried coding? Are you also into art? Do you like to do design? There are endless things, so many things!

Learn more at:
https://code.likeagirl.io/