How to be an IT Grrrl: My Life in Tech (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781764572903)

Carol is, as she's too often been told, not your typical IT techie. And if you look at the subset of technical workers who spent the nineties playing grunge violin by night while stringing together PC networks by day, who became obsessed with the arcane specialisation of Identity and Access Management in the noughties, and who ended up writing a memoir about it all in the twenty-twenties, then she's certainly not typical. But of course, that's not what all those informants were referring to. The source of their surprise, the weightiest evidence in their estimation of non-typicality, was how she could build computer systems while simultaneously in possession of lady parts.

Carol never understood what the problem was. If she could do the work, there was no reason other women couldn't as well. In a burgeoning profession where the most important muscle was the one between your ears, there was absolutely no logical reason for IT not to have gender parity. But what she saw around her was defying this logic. Instead of the steady rise she'd expected in the percentage of women in her profession, the numbers kept going down. For thirty years.

This is a book about how one woman defied the odds, and forged herself a career that supported, accommodated and inspired her through life-upending events, international moves and raising a family. A career that, despite persistent rumours about tech being a 'young person's game', she's still at in her mid-fifties.

This memoir will provoke many nods of recognition from tech folk, but more importantly, it will speak to anyone who loves what they do but doesn't see anyone who looks like them doing it.