Girl Geek Dinner - Dublin
This week saw the first ever Irish Girl Geek Dinner take place at the Odessa in Dublin. The night was organised by Martha Rotter, and for that alone I’m thankful of, as I know how hard organising large scale events can be.
To be honest I didn’t know what to expect from the night. I had seen Elly was going to the event via Facebook and after a bit of poking around I joined up and and sent a mail to a few others to come. I was amazed at the large turnout at the event. It was great. I knew 3 others going, Elly, Rach and Kevin, but it didn’t seem to matter if you knew anyone or knew loads. Everyone was very friendly and exchanged pleasantries, where they worked how they all knew each other and all agreed it was a great idea to have a night like this.
So firstly, let me just say as Martha said, it was not a male bashing night!! There were no plans developed to take over the world, jobs or the cars from the men! It was a night to meet like minded people who are working in the same field. Many may say, well why do you feel the need to exclude men and make it a female only event (Yes there were men there but let’s not start being pedantic). It basically comes down to the fact that why are there so few females in this industry, where do all your mates from college who were in the lectures with you go? Is it to the business side of things? Change field or what? By getting a number of all of us together we could ask these questions, come up with some ideas, what can we do?
A common thread from the night was a mailing list to be set up. I think this is a great idea. Why? Last year I organised a conference and out of a large number of speakers I had only 3 female speakers at it. Only one of which was Irish, thanks Rach 
. I flew in Val Henson and Kristen Accardi to the event, and while their talks were fascinating and extremely informative, I only wished I could have had more Irish female speakers. A mailing list would be a valuable source to organising events, seeking advice, networking.
The night itself was a great success and extremely enjoyable. I got a chance to meet some very entertaining people and catch up with others I hadn’t seen in a long long time. I was also introduce to twitter….. Elly took some fantastic photos of the night, so jealous of her camera.
I’m pretty sure everyone thoroughly enojoyed the night including the men that came along. The next Girl Geek dinner is to take place in Cork, so definitely looking forward to that.
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