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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

This is like some logic interview test: a woman signs up for a technical conference. You can assume that two women will show up. But no more women will sign up if only one is on the list. Will women ever increase in attendance? (Answer: no). The Sarahs of RailsBridge were joking once that it’s […]

At She’s Geeky last weekend, I put up a sign to propose a talk: “Cootie Catcher, Games for Girls.” I was running late from other sessions and ran over the semi-circle of chairs and a white board in the center of the room. There I noticed 4 or so girls that had been waiting for […]

My good friend Sarah over at Ultrasaurus got me thinking the other day. I was diving into some open source code, testing it, playing with it, installing it, etc. And I’d bitch about little things that annoyed me. She’d reply, “well, that sounds a way you can contribute.” “That’s an area of improvement you can […]

(part of a series on feminism in tech, in web2.0 world) On Friday, I witnessed some intense, intense cattiness. On Saturday, I was part of a great event – co-teaching Ruby on Rails to 80 some odd men and women who wanted to learn. It was truly touching, the companies and organizations that extended real […]