What sorts of character traits do you think would recommend a woman to the industry?

Here's the thing. The reason that we called the event 'TechGirls' is that it's about technology. I go in to these talks and the first question I ask the students is 'How many of you have a mobile? How many of you use MSN? How many of you use the Internet?' All of the hands go up. The kids of today are more technologically gifted than any of the generations above them. They are already very comfortable using technology to solve problems, to do what they want to do, to communicate, to do assignments, whatever.

If you love playing with gadgets, if you love actually playing with technology, then I think you're quite suited to working in IT. If you like solving problems, if you like having challenges, learning, and being surrounded by smart people, I find IT has a lot of really great people that are a lot of fun, are very smart and challenging, and it's a great community to get involved in.

Because there's such a diverse amount of jobs out there, you don't need specific maths, science, programming, or even creative skills. There's a job for pretty much everyone in IT and so it's just a matter of jumping in feet first and having a bit of fun finding out what takes your fancy.

The industry you're describing sounds very inviting, but the fact is there is a very low ratio of IT women to men. Statistics compiled in 2005 by the Australia Bureau of Statistics show that women comprise only 20.5 per cent of the IT workforce. Why do you think this is so?

In Australia, apparently numbers are going down. This isn't the case in every country. I personally think that Australia is becoming more conservative, and thus the place of women is becoming more strictly defined - and I think that's really silly. I also feel that there is a lack of understanding about IT jobs in schools. Schools are about six years behind the industry and six years ago, we had a bust. So schools are actually telling their kids not to go into IT. Girls tend to be focused on careers at an earlier age than boys, so if a teacher tells them to not go into IT, they're probably going to listen more, and I think that contributes to it.

And there's this horrible stereotype of a nerd, that doesn't have much of a social life, or hygiene, and unfortunately that has gotten out there. So every time I get in front of these girls, I talk about how I'm very proud to be a geek, because a geek is a person who uses technology to do cool things.

How do you think companies or education providers can go about making the IT industry more appealing to girls?

The first thing we need to do is to assist teachers and careers advisors in schools to get a handle on the diversity of jobs available in IT, because at the moment, a lot of them just don't have the information and thus can't help encourage childrens interest when they do express an interest in computers. I've seen kids be told "no, don't go into IT, be a social worker" - not because the teacher is trying to turn them off IT, but because the teacher just doesn't know anything about IT. So the first thing that we need to do is to go to the younger education institutions and rectify the situation.

I think companies can make clearer what they're looking for. There are so many IT companies that don't care if you have a degree, for instance, because what they're looking for is experience. But if they better defined what they're looking for, perhaps we can build that into degrees and into TAFE courses and even into schools, so that the kids who don't have the experience are more likely to actually have the skills they're after. We have a massive gap between what's being taught is useful in IT and what actually is useful in IT. So you think that the IT industry is difficult for people to get into because they just don't know where to start?

Absolutely. I had an example where a girl contacted me just basically saying that she's doing a sysadmin course at TAFE, she has no idea where to go, no idea about what experience to get. I told her about the Sydney Linux user group. She hadn't used a lot of Linux before, but she was pretty keen - she drove four hours to come to Sydney for this Linux user group meeting, and three weeks later I'd helped her get a placement as a junior in a Sydney ISP.

She just couldn't get that [on her own] because there's just no pathway to doing that. Most companies are looking for three or four years on the job, and how do kids get that? My first IT job was difficult to get, but from there on it was really simple.

So I think we need to try and look after that a little bit better, and help students get work experience. Work experience is being [removed] from schools, so how are they supposed to be able to go into a job?

One of the things I talk to them [young people] a lot about is volunteerism. If you go to a Web development company and you can say 'here are six websites I've already put together - one for my parents, one for my school...' then you're building up a portfolio that will help you.

I think that the biggest thing that young people can do today is to heavily get into volunteerism and involved in communities because it's those contacts and the portfolio that will help them get a good career.