Facebook Engineer Talks Tech to Women in Millbrae

The North Peninsula Branch of the American Association of University Women discussed women in technology on Monday at the , hoping to encourage more young women into the computer science field.

AAUW has partnered with Stanford to offer a week-long experience for girls to explore math and the sciences and announced three winners for the 2011 Tech Trek scholarship – Michelle-Au-Yeung from in Millbrae, Harley Sui from Parkside Intermediate School in San Bruno, and Evelyn Chen from Thomas R. Pollicita Middle School in Daly City.

Jocelyn Goldfein, director of engineering at Facebook, was the featured speaker. She began with a few Facebook statistics – that the fastest growing demographic is the 60 and older crowd, 52 percent of the active users are women, and 70 percent of ‘friending’ and page ‘likes’ are also by women.

She hopes young women will choose technology and the computer sciences as career choices.

“There are not enough software developers in the US. We are actually importing workers from other countries,” she said.

She noted that adolescents that play video games are more likely to be successful in computer science. More women are now playing more Facebook games than men, she said.

She tells her story of being “identified with geeky things early on,” which helped her excel in math and science. She embraced the logic and details associated with operating systems and apps in her computer science studies at Stanford.

She hopes to inspire young women and debunk the stereotype that women are inept at math or science, and increase the number of women studying computer sciences from 18 percent today to the 30 percent it was in the 1980s, and beyond.

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