Two hundred computer programmers and developers walk into a bar . . .

Sounds like the start of a really bad joke, right? In fact, it’s a fitting description for the second convening of the Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners (BAGGD), a recurring soiree for techies where—gasp—women are in the majority.

In June, at a swank downtown San Francisco nightclub, the capacity crowd sipped citrusy caipiriña cocktails, noshed on fresh spring rolls with peanut sauce and discussed the finer points of apps—applications, that is—for social networks like Facebook that let users play Scrabble, rate movies, send hugs and join in virtual food fights.

A recent Harvard Business Review research report reveals that 52 percent of highly qualified women working for private science, engineering and technology companies quit their jobs due to hostile work environments and extreme pressures.

Angie Chang can understand why.

“I wanted to create events with 90 percent girls and 10 percent guys because, when I was working as a developer, I was going to events that were predominately male, and it wasn’t very pleasant,” she says. “It was kind of macho.” Chang, a product manager and former developer herself, founded the Bay Area chapter of Girl Geek Dinners after hearing about successful, and successfully sponsored, dinners in London and elsewhere around the world.

“It was the weirdest thing that this wasn’t happening in our backyard, where there are so many girl geeks,” she says. Chang graduated from Cal in 2004 with a double major in English and social welfare and, in 2006, cofounded Women 2.0, another networking group for female entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.

Hosted at Etiquette Lounge and sponsored by Facebook, the event featured a panel discussion on apps with Annie Chang (B.S.’02 EECS, no relation), cofounder of LOLapps; Alina Libova, a UC Berkeley L&S student who sold her Easter Egg Facebook application in March with over 300,000 users; and others.

“As a female, you have a unique point of view that’s underrepresented among developers and product designers,” says Annie Chang, who was a developer for Adobe and a product manager for SquareTrade and BitTorrent before starting her own company. “Most consumers and users of social networks are female, so as a female you are better suited to designing for users than your male counterparts.”

Bonnie Soohoo (B.S.’01 ME), a business consultant at Chevron Corporation who takes part in Women 2.0, showed up because she heard good things about the European meetings from her friends abroad. She called the BAGGD “uniting, encouraging and motivating.” Attendee Diane Ko, an EECS senior who learned about it from a coworker at Intuit, where she interned as a software engineer over the summer, says, “It was nice to see so many women in engineering-type fields in one place.”

That’s just the point. To learn about past and future dinners (rumor has it that Adobe is an upcoming sponsor), check out http://www.bayareagirlgeekdinners.com.

By Megan Mansell Williams