Last week, I had a great conversation on The Week on rAVe Radio, with Jennifer Willard of Women in AV and Sara Abrons of rAVe Publications. We talked about women in the current AV workplace. One of the things I brought up with them was the low ratio of women in certain hands-on technical portions of the business, especially in the systems installation area. It’s a subject we should all be interested in, because in an era of increasing demand for field talent, we as an industry have done a poor job of attracting women as applicants for some jobs.

So I thought about why. And I talked to a number of other guys (OK, my field installation technicians) about why we got into the industry. It was for a number of different reasons but without exception we all developed an interest in how technology works at a very young age.

Now, for many years before I got involved in AV, I was a technology geek. In high school, I ran both the school’s TV station and photo lab, and was a consistent leader of the AV club, saving many teachers from painful encounters with “Green Monsters” from Bell & Howell, and extorting from them a permanent hall pass for my services.

But the path started a lot earlier than that.

For me, it started with a birthday gift at age 8. A Crystal Radio kit. An inexpensive collection of electronic components in a bag, for which you provided a cigar box or piece of wood to anchor them to. I remember assembling it all in a day, learning to identify all the parts in the bag, and assembling them myself, learning a little about how they all worked in the process. I remember stringing a hundred feet of bare wire from my bedroom window to a tree, carefully winding the ends around insulators, and then connecting them to my cigar box and donning the cheap headphones. And I remember staying up late, late at night, experimenting with tuning it and listening to crackling voices in strange foreign languages for the mention of a city name I recognized.

…and it never wore off.

I don’t think my sister, who is a truly brilliant person, ever got one.

So I have a great idea for the future of our industry, and one which is cheap and easy to accomplish. I want each of us in the business to go out and get a cheap crystal radio kit. Then, give it to a bright little girl. And walk away.

JRR