Interview with Romy Bolton

Recently, I published a research paper on the presence of women in the computer science sector. I used a variety of sources, but I found that a personal interview with one of my girlfriend's moms would do the job perfectly.

To introduce her, Romy Bolton is the director at the University of Iowa's SiteNow program, which contracts the team to build a website for a city or University function. Bolton is also the creator of the eBongo bus tracking system, widely used throughout Iowa City and Coralville (and by me, personally).

Anyway, here's the interview. It's insightful and fun to read.


There's obviously a pretty large gender gap in the tech industry (oftentimes, <25% of positions are held by women). At what point during the educational process do you think this begins and why?

As with any problem that is challenging to solve, there are many things that come together to create the problem. I think in general many parents still create gender biases within their kids that often precludes girls from expressing interest in things like video games and legos that could lead them to a career in STEM generally but IT specifically. It is then reinforced in grade school where they play with other girls who experience the same things at home and many of girls that might be more interested in “non-traditional” things conform to have friends. They then don’t grow up with an active interest in math and science which leads them to stay away from STEM high school courses and the teachers don’t have the time to go and encourage them to stretch.

I am (far more often than not) the only woman in many of my daily meetings and sometimes I don’t even notice it anymore.


When did you decide that you wanted to work in development and what gave you motivation throughout your education experience?

I came to development in a pretty different way. My undergrad degree is in marketing and my MBA is in Quality, Leadership, and Teams, and I have a Six Sigma Black Belt and a Lean certification. In short I am all about solving problems for people - process engineering, re-engineering and efficiency. As I was working in those areas, technology played a very natural role.

First it is often a key tool in making a process more efficient. As an example one of my first projects was to help sales of telephone services move through the pipeline more quickly so customers could get their service faster. An application to gather sales information electronically and then move things along and proactively notify the next person in the online “assembly line” was at least one obvious way to do that.

Second, when you are getting ready to build a new application, (in the best executed app dev projects) you map out the process you are trying to automate before you gather requirements. The last thing anyone wants to do is automate a bad process.

And then there just some innate things about me that lead me here. I have always played video games with my brother, way back one it was an Intellivision (Google it :) ), later it was Oregon Trail in DOS format, then Sid Meier’s Pirates with at least 20 5 ¼ floppies, and then as adults we would set up a USB hub, connect two desktop PCs and play Civilization all night on holidays and finally MMORPG games like Dark Age of Camelot.

I took a couple programming classes in high school because I wanted to and I loved them. In the Business program at Iowa, you get a fair amount Management Information Systems coursework and I loved those too.

At the end of the day, though, it’s really my drive to solve problems that feeds my interest in coding and development.


What are some possible solutions to solving this problem?

I think there are several things in process and coming that could shift things for the better….

First is the consumerization of technology. So many (if not all) girls have smartphones now and recognize the way they integrate with their daily lives. That is more than anyone had when I was younger, even 10 years ago. I get girls and women telling me all the time that something should be made into an app for phones. Just that level of interest, knowledge and integration with technology will steer some girls in this direction.

Second, there are more games that girls are interested in – [my daughter] Allie, a big Sims player (and, obviously, Skyrim) and those more RPGish games play more to what girls like than first person shooters (for example). Allie likes to fight in Skyrim, but she was originally drawn in through the narrative and the relationships between the characters in the games (if that makes sense to you?). You can build a house and decorate a house and get married and adopt kids and all of that stuff – like playing house but in a XBOX game.

Both of these are making girls more interested in technology and some will gravitate here that wouldn't have before because it’s a not an external thing they read about, but it’s in their lives every day in a way that fits them and they want to understand more.

There is a new trend that is being discussed and studied right now in technology that should be pushed in high schools. There is a distinct move away from the hardcore technology people in the workforce, but this is just starting. As things move to the cloud for efficiency of hardware management and server virtualization really takes hold, there will be fewer system administrators and the ones there are will all work for Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure or large research universities. The people working with technology in individual businesses will now need to be proficient in things like communication, customer service and empathy, consensus building, understanding how technology systems can integrate to solve problems, documenting requirements, training end users, better ways lead and deliver technology projects; all things that are more in line with the way many women think and not so much solely manipulating bytes.

As you yourself know, many of the languages are becoming more based in human language than machine language. Integrated development environments, GUI interfaces are quickly replacing (or at least offering alternatives to) straight command line actions. Hardcore techies will still be necessary, but there is a tremendous realization that we have a huge gap [between] the staff who can help connect the technology that the super techies build to the humans who need to use it.

Finally, you have women like me who hopefully help change the way many men think about women in technology. I look actively for women to hire and mentor and turn in to leaders [and] female students to hire and train. Many men I work with do the same things.