-
Women Rarely Attend Alone: Notes on Diversity & Women in Tech
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…
-
Cootie Catcher
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…
-
New to Open Source
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…
-
Fearing Failure
A director friend at dinner the other night mentioned that people fear failure so much they won’t try new things. That it stunts the creative process, too. I’ve never had a problem learning in public- a contentious issue when I was learning Ruby on Rails recently. I asked this on FriendFeed the other day– “name…
-
Feminism in Web 2.0: Cattiness gets me down.
(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…
-
Career Day
I’ve been thinking a lot about careers, day jobs, etc. and Too Beautiful, writer Mark Pritchard’s blog today talks about Janice Erlbaum’s post, which was an email from a student attending one of her talks. The student asks 5 questions, and Janice, and Mark, both answer them. I thought I’d take a stab at it…
-
Do Women Buy iPhones?
Funny comment and observation in MediaPost’s bulletin: Do women own iPhones? I can’t tell from the latest set of ads, where only men gush about the device. One man loves the visual voicemail, although he chooses to skip the 4-minute message from the guy that owes him money. That would be the one I skip…
-
La Cloche
I love these kind of skull caps. It’s a riff on the 1920s style cloche (French for bell) hats. Funny to think this was a feminist icon for so long, when now it seems fuddy duddy (Thoroughly Modern Millie and Bernice Bobs Her Hair). The modern (or poor, in its time perhaps) variant is knit…
-
Sacrificing the Bawdy
Just took a break to the coffee room and realized I just wanted to be playing this old video game tonight instead of going to the gym- sacrificing the body for the mind. In college lit classes my friend Ann and I (now an English literature professor!) had this inside joke that every time someone…
-
I’m a Bad Feminist
I went to the pro-choice rally today – to protest the Supreme Court upholding the partial ban on abortion. And I wrote some pro-women comments on the whole Spock flare-up. I get pretty passionate about these ideas, but – and is it superficial and lazy of me- I only want to talk about them with…