XX Marks the Spot: Why Did Women Tech Experts Rule at DC Health Data Confab?

By MICHAEL L. MILLENSON

Three government experts on a health tech conference panel discuss
the urgency of releasing actionable data; all are women. A more senior
official, another woman, gives a TED-style talk making the same case. And a
four-person, private-sector panel debates privacy and ethics; three of the four
are female.

Health Datapalooza, a conference begun with government
sponsorship a decade ago, proclaims its goal as “data liberación” – freeing
health data from deep within federal agencies and giving it to patients and
entrepreneurs. But in 2019, women’s “liberación” seems to have become an
unspoken sub-theme.

Interestingly, while women’s status in tech was the focus of
a plenary panel on diversity and inclusion, the panelists seemed oblivious to
the robust participation of women in their own meeting.

To put some data behind my subjective impressions, I went
back and examined the list of speakers, who came from a wide range of organizations
and included individual patient activists. I counted 89 men and 99 women. Liberación,
indeed.

(Why did the feds adopt a Che Guevera-thowback rallying cry?
No idea.)

There are many barriers to women in tech, including overt sexism and covert cultural clues discouraging girls from entering the field.  The end result is that women hold less than 20 percent of U.S. computer science jobs. But why, exactly, did the experts at this conference with XX chromosomes outnumber the XYs?

Because the...

Source: The Health Care Blog - April 5, 2019 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Christina Liu Tags: Data Health Tech Datapalooza Michael L. Millenson Women in Health IT Source Type: blogs