In college, Washington State Sen. Patty Kuderer decided to take a programming class. She said she was excited about technology and created a simple program for the course, which she tried to print and hand in to her professor. But there was a problem: Her program had a flaw in it that caused it to…
In college, Washington State Sen. Patty Kuderer decided to take a programming class.
She said she was excited about technology and created a simple program for the course, which she tried to print and hand in to her professor. But there was a problem: Her program had a flaw in it that caused it to loop endlessly, which meant the printer spit out page after wasted page of code. Kuderer said she asked for help from others in the college’s computer science lab, who were all men, but no one would help her. One man, she recalled, finally turned to her and said: “You don’t belong here.”
“The atmosphere in there was very hostile toward me. It was very intimidating for an 18-year-old,” she said. “I quit the class.”
Kuderer, now a Democratic state senator representing the state’s 48th District, including the tech hub of Bellevue, recalled the story to an audience of about 1,000 people during Saturday’s Women in Cloud Summit on the Microsoft campus in Redmond.
Instead of a developer or tech executive, Kuderer became an employment discrimination attorney, which was its own kind of justice.
“I ended up suing companies that employ guys like that,” she said with a grin. The audience of mostly women broke into applause and cheered.
The Women in Cloud Summit, now in its second year, aims to create more women tech leaders in an industry where they are still woefully scarce. Only 5 percent of tech leaders are women and just 2 percent of all venture capital funding goes to women-owned tech ventures, Kuderer said. GeekWire reported this week that, of the 200 companies on the GeekWire 200, our ranking of the top Pacific Northwest tech startups, 16 are led by women, or 8 percent.
