As a girl that liked science and wanted to learn code, the only women in tech I could see were the very very extraordinary ones like Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper or Margaret Hamilton. 20 years later, chances are that if I ask you to tell me who are you female role model in tech that you’ll quote those names.

And those names are good names. Those women are role models. But they are GREAT role models. The kind of model most of us can’t really identify with. Even with a pretty healthy ego, I don’t see how most women could think “I am the next Ada Lovelace”.

So those extraordinary women end up having the opposite impact they should have. Because we only have very extraordinary women as role models, we feel like if we’re not as great, as extraordinary, we don’t belong in tech. And this is simply not true, we don’t need to be geniuses to work in tech.

In this talk I will try to show how having only great women as role models ends up being toxic for women and we will try to find a way to have more ordinary role models and we will ask ourselves what should a role model be ?