Much has been written about the need to encourage young women to seriously consider IT as a possible career choice.  Blog posts such as Women in Technology – Answering the Call by Stacia Misner and Sometimes Saying Yes is all About Not Saying No by Audrey Hammonds speak to the desire of the current crop of lady geeks to ensure that young women know that IT can be a great career choice.

Well, this issue is near and dear to my heart.  And this is the reason why:

Deanna and I

My daughter, Deanna, just turned 18 this month.  And next week she starts her Senior year in high school.  So, the question “What I am I going to do with my life?” is very much on her mind.  And on mine.

But as much as I would like to push promote the idea of IT to my daughter, I temper my words for two very good reasons:

1. My daughter is the least geeky member of the family.  I am geeky, my husband is geeky, our son is…well he is so geeky I am convinced that he took all of the geekiness out of the family gene pool and didn’t leave any for his sister!  Seriously, when Deanna was 14 she took a computer fundamentals class and just hated it.  So, at that point, I did not dare suggest she should consider IT as a career choice.  That’s because a long time ago I learned that trying to push people into something they did not want to do was a waste of time…and I learned that from the next reason…
2. During my teen years, my mother was a nurse.  She loved her job caring for premature babies and worked with several women who loved it as well.  My mother knew the last thing I wanted was to work in a hospital with sick people (Yuck!).  But well-intentioned co-workers, friends and relatives kept asking me, “You are going to be a nurse when you grow up, just like your Mom, right?”  I cringed every time I heard this line and promised to myself that I would never treat any child like this.

So, I never pushed my daughter toward IT at all.   I encouraged her to take challenging classes in high school and do her best in them.  And I kept telling her that she could take on the hardest classes and do well in them.  And she did do well in all of her classes.

But this summer I got the shock of my life:

“Mom, I am going to take AP Computer Science next year”

Amazing!  Here is my daughter, who four years ago didn’t even want to take a computer class to learn about word processing, now willing to study programming!  Wow!

Now, she still doesn’t know what she wants to do after college.  But I am so glad that she is willing to try different subjects, including those she’s rejected in the past.

So, the moral of the story is this:  You may be having a large influence on someone and not even know it.  And it may not reveal itself until many years later.