With a name like linkspam, it has to be good (8th March, 2010)

• Role Playing Girl Zine, a yearly publication about women in gaming, is seeking “submissions of essays by women gamers, designers, researchers and others interested in role playing games.” Cartoons also welcome. The 2010 theme: “International Update.”
• 1999-2009 in news about women in tech.
• Small tech firms specifically looking to recruit women include Quilted, a web and print design co-op based in Berkeley and Boston, and Germany’s Openismus, which wants to hire and mentor women and minorities (training them to develop open source software).
• “Tech support girl”: a post on others’ expectations.
  

  So, when I feel most like a ‘woman’ behind the counter, it is when I am confronted with an older generation. A generation that is used to transferring the technical duties to men, because of the misperception that men are more inclined to understand these technical doo-dads than women.

• The Anita Borg Institute has announced the 2010 Anita Borg Women of Vision Awards winners. This year’s women honored for making significant contributions to technology are:
  • Kristina M. Johnson, Under Secretary for Energy, US Department of Energy. She’s led colleges and universities and won awards for her work in optics, and I get exhausted just looking at the summary of her resume.
  • Kathleen R. McKeown, a computer science professor at Columbia University. “Her research interests include text summarization, natural language generation, multi-media explanation, digital libraries, concept to speech generation and natural language interfaces.”
  • Lila Ibrahim, who went from a design engineer on the Pentium to general manager of the Emerging Markets Platform Group at Intel. She leads “research, definition, development and marketing of technology platforms specifically designed for education.”
• From Mary: A link possibly of interest to people who followed Terri’s discussion about hardcore gamers a while back: Status and Signals: Why Hardcore Gamers Are Afraid Of Easy Mode (via a comment on The Border House).
• An Indian anthology seeks submissions of feminist speculative takes on the Ramayana.
• Stemming’s Friday links.

If you have links of interest, please share them in comments here, or if you’re a delicious user, tag them “geekfeminism” to bring them to our attention. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links in comments and on del.icio.us (yes, I know they don’t care about the old-school URL anymore but I miss it).

Know a woman of vision? Nominate her!

The Anita Borg institute is one of my favourite organisations out there for women in the tech field. Among their many activities, they have an annual award for Women of Vision, who have made a significant contribution to technology as innovators, leaders, or in creating social impact.

Last year’s award winners were Yuqing Gao, Senior Manager, IBM Research, IBM, for Innovation; Jan Cuny, Program Director, National Science Foundation, for Social Impact; and Mitchell Baker, Chairperson, Mozilla, for Leadership.

Nominations for the 2010 award have been extended til December 18th. If you know a woman who’s made a significant contribution to technology this year, visit the Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision website and nominate her!

Some of my best friends are linkspammers (2nd November, 2009)

• The Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision 2010 awards, honouring “women making significant contributions in the areas of Innovation, Social Impact and Leadership” are taking nominations until December 11.
• the f word looked at salaries of men and women in science, engineering and technology on October 30, Equal Pay Day.
• David Eaves examines the alleged structurelessness of FLOSS through Jo Freeman’s The Tyranny of Structurelessness
• Felicia Day is taking all the fun out of galaxies colliding.
• Sun Labs has a technical report out on the success of their mentoring programs.
• Matt Zimmerman, who writes here, was interviewed by Amber Graner, and mentions his goals regarding women’s participation in the Ubuntu community.
• Mary Alice Crim reports on a workshop at the National NOW conference to explore feminists’ roles in shaping Internet policy: The Internet is a feminist issue
• Stephanie Pearl-McPhee was called away from the SOAR conference (a professional event) by family needs, and she’s not buying any pressure for a mother not to complain about having to do that.
• Casey Johnston (herself a woman gamer) wrote 10 Reasons NOT to Date a Girl Gamer aimed at heterosexual men. The wow_ladies community on LiveJournal tried to figure out what was up with it; tongue-in-cheek?
• Australian video game review TV show Good Game replaced host Jeremy Ray with Stephanie Bendixsen and Ray alleged that his gender was the primary reason. Sarah Stokely had a look at the PR issues involved.
• MindTouch has a list of the most influential people in Open Source (from an executive/business perspective) which doesn’t include any women. Mozilla Corporation’s chairperson Mitchell Baker (herself a woman) was not impressed at either women or Mozilla as a whole not appearing.

If you have links of interest, please share them in comments here, or if you’re a delicious user, tag them “geekfeminism” to bring them to our attention. Thanks to everyone who suggested links in comments and on delicious.

Quick hit: I am a technical woman!

This video was launched today at the Grace Hopper Celebration, and tweeted and retweeted by about half the people I’m following, it seems. Enjoy!