Last night's London GGD event was wild, fun and eye-opening. There were 150 people signed up. I'm not sure how many were in the room.

The event began with a presentation by Elizabeth Kernan about research that she has been doing on gender in the workplace and it's impact on innovation. Their study was broad sweeping in terms of subjects - they worked with teams from over 100 companies in a variety of industries ranging from Volvo to Symantec. The teams were of various sizes up to 30 people on a team and ranged from all women to all men with many ratios in between. So far they have done the quantitative portion of the study which will help them determine where to go with the next stage which will be qualitative through observation. Elizabeth defined for us factors that lead to innovation and showed us statistics about looking for those factors on the different teams. The study found that the teams with the 50/50 balance of men & women were the ones who most prominently displayed the facets that lead to innovation. They didn't spike off the charts, but they were consistently a little higher in each category that was measured. It was really interesting and led to a lot of discussion. She also talked about stereotypes and used as a great example how Nokia made their cell phones pink as a "feature" for women.

After our dinner break (pizza, just like at our user group meetings!) it was time for me to talk about "Defining the -ette in Geekette". I talked a little about my own history and how in the 80's I learned that I needed to cover up my girliness in order to get my geekiness noticed in our industry. But then in the last 5 or 6 years (for me starting with Marcie Jones' DataGridGirl.com website) I realized it was okay to be a girl again (although now that I'm older, the definition is a little different for me) thanks to observing the younger women in our industry who have not been made to feel they need to cover up who they are.

Then I steered from that into ... so if we *do* want to get noticed, what feminine qualities make us stand out in our industry? I showed a cleavage shot that is from someone's conference speaker photo, a beautiful and very smart young woman. It pains me to hear the guys sniggering over that photo. Then I showed a photo of matronly, maternal moi accepting a volunteer of the year award from INETA. This juxtaposition took over much of the rest of the night. We had a spirited , passionate and engaging discussion/debate about where the lines are, if there should be lines and who has the right to determine where they should be drawn. At the same time that we celebrate being able to let our feminine qualities show, is a free-for-all needed/appropriate/professional?  Believe me there were definitely women who thought that this speaker photo was very liberating and that others in the room who were critical of it were being judgmental.

We also spent some time talking about taking advantage of being a minority (and women certainly aren't the most minor monority here) in our industry to open a door or two and the importance of following that up with doing a bang-up job. This too led to debate. The last bit of this talk was about the all important "Street Cred".

It was a rousing evening and not quite what I had planned but I was thrilled to turn it loose when I saw the effect that some of the points I was making was having on the women in the room.

I don't know if I've ever been in a room with 100+  brainy, professional, powerful women talking about our boobs. It was quite amazing.