Prepping for April Fool’s Day linkspam

The photo has nothing to do with the title, except that we are the lamp of knowledge and truth and anti-sexism shining into the dark corners of ignorance! Or maybe not. Anyway, linkspam:

• Haley Mlotek learns to make a WordPress site through Ladies Learning Code and discusses her experience and the organization’s implicit feminism.
  

  I’d assumed Ladies Learning Code was a feminist organization because of my own feminist bias. But it was also because of the language used. The words “empowering” and “democratic” were thrown around a lot; the phrase “even the playing field” was evoked more than once. Everyone talked about a commitment to equality. I took for granted that we were all speaking the same language….

• “In 2011 three young women swept the top prizes of the first Google Science Fair. At TEDxWomen Lauren Hodge, Shree Bose and Naomi Shah described their extraordinary projects — and their route to a passion for science.”
• Speaking of science fairs, here’s one Intel Science Competition semifinalist: a young female biologist studying mussels in marshes.
• The High Visibility project “is collecting the stories of women in technology…. This project emerged from chats among the students, teachers and other women involved with Girl Develop It Columbus.”
• “Affirmative action for women in math contests boosts participation without dropping results”, says a new report.
• Dan Shapiro’s “Startup dudes: Cut the sexist crap” does what it says on the tin.
• Sigh Geeklist, sigh Sqoot.
• Marco at Not Rich Yet: “What’s the Big Deal?”, reflecting on sexism, racism and privilege in light of recent sexist incidents such as the Geeklist item above.
• Controversy about a homophobic post that appeared on the Mozilla project’s Planet (blog aggregator):
  • Al Billings, Supporting an Open Mozilla
  • Christie Koehler on “The (Overdue) Need for Community Conduct Standards at Mozilla”
  • Mitchell Baker and others, discussion on Mozilla’s governance mailing list about community standards and a draft code of conduct for Mozilla.
• “Women in physics: A tale of limits”: “A newly completed survey of 15 000 physicists worldwide reveals that women physicists still do not have equal access to the career-advancing resources and opportunities enjoyed by their male colleagues.”
• The archives of Europe’s first female professor, Laura Bassi, will soon be available online.
• Women are more likely to buy three out of the four top consumer electronics.
• “Diversity in practice: How the Boston Python User Group grew to 1700 people and over 15% women” (video, 41 minutes) starring Asheesh Laroia and Jessica McKellar of OpenHatch.
  

  How do you bring more women into programming communities with long-term, measurable results? In this talk we’ll analyze our successful effort, the Boston Python Workshop, which brought over 200 women into Boston’s Python community this year. We’ll talk about lessons learned running the workshop, the dramatic effect it has had on the local user group, and how to run a workshop in your city.

• “In 1943, Euphemia Lofton Haynes became the first ever black woman to receive a PhD in mathematics, at the age of 53.”  A Pi Day celebration.
• “Some things to think about before you exhort everyone to code”: Miriam Posner reminds other digital humanities professionals that there are structural obstacles to women getting tech skills.
• Results from the Women and Wikipedia survey 2011.
• Empathy and community: “You’re making someone else’s life worse because you don’t want to make the smallest change to your own.”
• “I hate feeling like this – like being me is somehow a hindrance to my career.” From “You’re not like the rest, and that is okay – Letter to My Young self” by DNLee.
• Feminism and hackerspaces.
• I will not learn Rails:
  

  “I’m certainly not against using the right technology for the job. But Rails is no longer the only framework of its type, and if I have a choice, I’d rather not be part of a community which seriously thinks dick jokes are hilarious.”

• Dr. Jennifer Widom, Chair of the Computer Science Department at Stanford University, discusses crafting and teaching her fall intro to databases class, which about 60,000 students took online. “A particularly noteworthy student named Amy became an absolute folk hero: Over the duration of the course Amy answered almost 900 posted questions.”
• The GNOME Outreach Program for Women: deadline for application, April 6.
• A sad farewell to astrophysicist Susan Niebur, and to veteran astronaut Janice Voss.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

On Influence, Lists, Women, and the Confluence Thereof

Shira Ovide over at the Wall Street Journal’s Venture Capital Dispatch wrote a blog post on Friday that’s got a few people in a tizzy over the visibility of women in tech. Ovide’s piece is specifically about the lack of women in tech start ups, but at one point ranges into some criticism of male-heavy tech conferences. Mediaite’s Rachel Sklar namechecks Techcrunch Disrupt in this light, which Michael Arrington took exception to.

Don Dodge also called the slight an unfair one (because TechCrunch’s CEO is a woman! Enough said, right? Yeah, the mansplaining over there is pungent.), but his post accidentally reveals one of the major aspects of the problem Ovide is talking about. In his post he says: “All the top women in tech get more invitations to speak than they can possibly handle.”

All? Really? That’s surprising. It’s been my experience as a person with multiple intersections of minority that in situations like this, all of the individuals that belong to the underrepresented faction of a group are not in the spotlight so much. More often a sub-section of the minority that gets called upon over and over and over — to the point where they cannot possibly say yes to everything — while many other deserving and qualified people go unnoticed.

This is not always a purposeful repression, but the result is the same, nonetheless.

How does this stuff happen? I think it starts with lists. In Dodge’s post, he helpfully lists 30 Top Women in Tech, including Twitter lists. But his numbers are sad when compared to Engadget’s recent Who Should I Follow? focusing on women in tech, which includes over 70 women (including myself, I say proudly). There’s some crossover, and Engadget’s list includes many writers/journalists, but I still feel like Dodge doesn’t go deep enough.

Then there are lists that aren’t about gender but more about overall influence in the tech world, like this piece on the 25 Most Influential People in Mobile Tech at Laptop Magazine. Of the 25, there are just 2 women, which struck me as complete bollocks the moment I noticed it.

At this point you might be saying to yourself, “But K, didn’t you have something to do with…” and I would stop you and say: Yes, but for a lot of silly reasons I didn’t notice this until it was too late.

It’s not as if there wasn’t awareness that there should be women on that list, and perhaps that there should be more. But when measuring the nebulous concept of “influence” a lot of gut decisions are made that have more to do with personal perceptions than other factors.

I feel like that’s what’s happening on a larger scale in the continuing conversation around women in tech and getting more of them in the field. Yes, we need more, we always need more. But you know what else we need? Some extra acknowledgment for those of us already here.

Part of the solution is lists.

I see merit in having a TEDWomen conference, though I do understand why some people take exception to these types of events. I feel the same about lists. I’m glad that there are lists that highlight women specifically, but we need more balance in lists that have nothing to do with gender. It’ll be several months before Laptop Magazine puts together their Most Influential list again, but that’s no reason not to start building a list of women to include in it right now. Who would you suggest?

I’d love for the list to include some of the start-up stars we don’t hear much from, but who have great ideas nonetheless. Not just in this one instance, but across the media.