Dinner 01 - Picnic in the Park

International Women's Day 2008 is a great reason for women to get together to celebrate our achievements and discuss what still needs to happen to help women in the world.

Since there are so many events happening on that day, GGD Sydney is organising a Picnic in the Park at the Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney on Sunday the 9th of March (yes, the day after IWD) with the intent being to extend the celebrations by one more day :)

This event is not sponsored but if your company would like to sponsor, let us know!

Details

When: 11am - 2pm on Sunday 09/03/2008
Where: The Camellia Garden enter via the Woolloomooloo gate (see map) @ the Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney
Why: International Women's Day

Bring: A throw rug, a plate of food to share and whatever you'd like to drink
Wear: A flower of some sort so we blend with the gardens
Speaker: stay tuned - same fruitbat time - same fruitbat station

RSVP: By Wednesday the 5th of March

GG Dinner Zero Delivered!

The first Girl Geek Dinner to be held in Sydney was a major success. We had 40 fabulous women and a few male-geek-girls turn up for a delicious dinner and lots of drinks at Chinta Ria restaurant in Cockle Bay, Sydney.

There was a lot of girly geekiness on the night - Pia's not so well-formed shirt brought out the obsessive compulsiveness in a lot of us; The many references to Hitchhiker's and the mice being in charge; and a fabulous line about "not having to explain myself tonight" really summed up the night.

There are more pictures from the night on the facebook group.

Big thanks to our wonderfully generous sponsors - ThoughtWorks and Google!

Dinner Zero Venue Change

New Dinner Venue: Chinta Ria, Cockle Bay
Time: 6pm (get there early to grab a seat)
Specs: On the roof terrace of Cockle Bay Wharf, next to the Pyrmont Footbridge entrance


Reason for change: Although I expect to be lynched for denying a lot of fabulous women access to free chocolate, it can not be helped. We expected that even if all the geek girls in Sydney turned up, there would be no more than maybe 15 of us at Dinner Zero. We were wrong.

Who would have known that there are at least 35 of you? :)

We can't complain that there are too many because too many still isn't enough in this industry! So the outcome is that the venue has changed to accommodate the new numbers. Lindt Chocolate Cafe just wasn't big enough or helpful enough to fit us all in.

See you all there, ladies!

Please RSVP on facebook event or email me to confirm venue change

Eat Chocolate and Geek It Up On ThoughtWorks

Thoughtworks has kindly volunteered to sponsor the first chocolate-filled Girl Geek Dinner Sydney on the 21st of February at the Lindt Chocolate Cafe in Cockle Bay. Spread the news. Bring a geek girl friend along and enjoy our introduction dinner.

This is a great chance to find out what we have planned for 2008 and how Girl Geek Dinners plans to make playing amongst those geek boys more enjoyable.

Is competitive drive a result of biology or culture?

Via Melissa Lafsky at the Freakonomics blog,

A working paper on gender differences in competition by Uri Gneezy, John List, and Kenneth Leonard:

Our experimental results reveal interesting differences in competitiveness: in the patriarchal society women are less competitive than men, a result consistent with student data drawn from Western cultures. Yet, this result reverses in the matrilineal society, where we find that women are more competitive than men. Perhaps surprisingly, Khasi women are even slightly more competitive than Maasai men, but this difference is not statistically significant at conventional levels under any of our formal statistical tests.

Star performers are not portable unless...

Via Bob Sutton,

A Harvard Business Review article on the difference in portability of male vs female star performers:

A star performer in one company will shine in another, right? Wrong. When stars switch firms, their performance actually dims, along with their new company’s market value, author Boris Groysberg argues. Everyone loses.

Except when the stars are women.