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Feminist Reviews of Inappropriate Things
1. Star Mites My niece invited me to come see her in Star Mites. Yeah, that’s right, I’m the mean auntie critiquing a community theater performance. The kids were great- the play though… it’s based on the 1989 Broadway production, a science fiction romp of comic book heros turned real, and an adolescent girl as…
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On Dressing Girly At Work
Hanging out after a conference with another female programmer, or, “bragrammer,” I will admit that the first thing we talked about was our clothes. I had admired her dress during her talk, and I was wearing a kind of new sleeveless bike/street jacket vest with scarf, going for a monochrome grey-blue look. Later on in…
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No Social Network Day 2: Womenly Women
So, Day 2 of No-Social-Media. I feel a little isolated. Yesterday at work, I did miss the distraction of my “coffee break”- cruising my Facebook feed. A coworker offered to share some social media news, but couldn’t think of anything that interesting enough to re-share. I did accidentally log into Facebook, following a link from…
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Penelope Trunk’s Skewed Perceptions of the World, part 2
As usual, Penelope Trunk is fanning the flames and creating controversy (Part 1 is here). Her latest is in TechCrunch, Stop Telling Women to Start Start-ups (ironically linked to by a female start-up CEO friend of mine). If you don’t know P. Trunk, she had a blog 10 years ago about job-hunting (based on her…
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brogramming, and chickgramming
So, uh, there’s this thing going on right now in tech, that kinda sucks. Well, it’s funny, it’s a stereotype that was created and maintained somewhat faithfully by those that fit in it. But in general, there’s an underlying tone of – let’s keep it in the club. Brogramming on Quora Brogramming in a job…
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Why Journalists Shouldn’t Add “Tech” to Their Media Blog Posts
This morning I read: “Why Women Shouldn’t Go To Tech Conferences” written last week on Forbes. I found it via Jean Hsu’s great response – “Why Start-ups Should Hire Women.” Jean also respond to another post- Penelope Trunk’s “Are Start-Ups Better As Single Gender Affairs?”. OK, go read those then come back. Done? Alright. My…
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1%
That’s the percentage of women at 2010 iPadDevCamp (5 of 500, by my hallway count). 6% is what my friends saw at GoGaRuCon (golden gate ruby conference). I attended JavaOne around 1998/9, and counted around 10 per 1000 (another hallway count). So, uh, it’s gotten better? It’s not that the gender balance made the event…
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Girly Metaphors For Computers
I wrote a paper once in linguistics class that was the opposite- masculine metaphors for computers, in the sense of “from the male perspective.” It’s pretty obvious if you’re a programmer, and not a guy. I frequently kill, abort, execute, deploy, etc, in the line of duty! Reading this paper, to a friend, she was…
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Hack/Hackers Unite: We Will Judge Your Play
So I recently attended, at KQED, a “Hacks/Hackers Unite” project: get iPad developers and journalists together to tell a story. I struggled, pretty much entirely through the weekend, to be enthusiastic. I had to seriously rally the second day to attend. I’m not sure why it wasn’t as inspirational and energetic, focused, fun, etc. as…