GoDaddy did something quite special today to celebrate women and move away from their (sexist) Super Bowl commercials – they changed their name to GoWomen.

GoDaddy also featured several profiles of inspirational women including designers, musicians and TV personalities across their website and they promoted the hashtag #BalanceForBetter as part of the cause.

It was really the subtle switch of the GoDaddy logo to the GoWomen logo that seemed to have the most powerful effect for me. When a company changes its name, however briefly to support a cause, they are quite literally putting the cause before themselves – respect.

This also reopened my mind to how male dominated the tech and web field is. My work as a high school computer science teacher has seen a big emphasis on encouraging underrepresented groups to get involved in CS education – our recruitment work has focused on minorities and females.

A recent unit I’ve been teaching is about the bias that exists in algorithms, oftentimes accidental. If one gender/ethnicity dominates the field then there are consequences to the websites, apps, devices and fundamental algorithms that we experience the consequences of – often without knowing.

Things are starting to change, just in time because I have a new baby girl at home who I know will crush in tech if she chooses to.

In the spirit of this website, developed.nyc, and my goal of promoting the benefits of the .NYC domain extension – something suddenly hit me as I began typing this article – I think the whole of the Neustar/OwnIt.nyc team working with .NYC are women. There have been a few times when I’ve reached out to the team and I also met them at the NYC Best of Boroughs celebration in October last year.

I hope they don’t mind me posting about them below (and copying their LinkedIn pics).

Lori Anne Wardi – Vice President of Registry Services and Brand Strategy for .nyc

Kathy Nielsen – Strategic Partnerships and Channel Relations at Neustar

Chelsea Hurley – Business Development & Marketing, Registry Services at Neustar

Crystal Peterson – Strategic Partnerships, Global Channel Development and Sales at Neustar

This team and everyone else involved in the .NYC at Neustar are doing a great job nurturing the extension. The City of New York is fortunate to have this team as partners in making .NYC as strong, vibrant and exciting as the city itself.

So to all women crushing it in the tech field, and to GoDaddy, I tip my hat.