In addition to my two planned Girl Geek Dinner events while I was in Europe earlier this month, I had some impromptu conversations and meetings that opened my eyes even further to the differences (and similarities) for women geeks in different cultures.

While at the SDN Conference in Amsterdam, I had a conversation with a young woman from Egypt named Lamees Afify. Lamees live in Egypt but works for a Dutch company. Carl Franklin handed us microphones and asked us to record some of our chat for DotNetRocks, only to find after the fact that the battery had run out on his recorder. Darn!

Lamees was really surprised when I told her that in the U.S. women represent about 10% of the IT workforce. She said in Egypt it's 50/50. For young Egyptians heading in to college or trade schools, I.T. is a very desirable job, so many students target this as their career.

The next night I spoke at the Amsterdam Girl Geek Dinner and this topic came up. Someone suggested that perhaps the reason is that in Western countries women have many types of opportunities and much more freedom (socially and economically) to choose a career or even to not have a career. The women who are in I.T. are more likely to be there because they were drawn to it, not because they were following a career path that would lead to a good job.

These were definitely interesting discussions.

A week later I was in Bulgaria at the DevReach conference. I spoke at the first DevReach two years ago and don't remember seeing many women attendees. So I was surprised at the great number of women at the conference this year. On Monday afternoon, I suggested that we have a Women in I.T. get together on Tuesday. We arranged it for lunch time but only had about 35 minutes.

During this get together, I asked about this question of percentages again, curious how it might differ here. There were women from Bulgaria and Macedonia, maybe Greece as well. Most of them seemed to think that they had a 50/50 ratio in IT as well, but that the women were more likely IT Pros and DBAs than developers. I think it's similar in the U.S. I asked why, then there weren't more women at this conference. Surely it wasn't anywhere near 50%. Although most of the women at this developer conference were, in fact, developers, that might have something to do with it. Did the IT Pros and DBAs just stay home?

On the other hand, I received a wonderful email from another girl geek who hadn't been able to make the little gathering. She told me that she had noticed in her job (where she says 10% of the geeks are women) that the women were being given tasks that were much less technical than their male counterparts. She pointed it out to her boss and it changed quickly. I think this is going to be the woman to start the Macedonia Girl Geek Dinners!

What all of these conversations taught me is that I have quite a lot to learn about girl geeks in other cultures.