Tech LadyMafia

cruello: Astronaut Anna Fisher John Bryson

cruello:

Astronaut Anna Fisher

John Bryson

And I am not advising younger women (or any woman) to tough it out. You can lash back, which I have done too often and which has rarely served me well. You can quit and look for other jobs, which is sometimes a very good idea. But the prejudice will follow you. What will save you is tacking into the love of the work, into the desire that brought you there in the first place. This creates a suspension of time, opens a spacious room of your own in which you can walk around and consider your response. Staring prejudice in the face imposes a cruel discipline: to structure your anger, to achieve a certain dignity, an angry dignity.

The Business Case Against Booth Babes

“The conference that figures out how to get more men talking to women and women talking to men, in an environment and atmosphere of creativity and openness, is going to be the conference that will attract the most interesting people. The brands that spend the most time in these environments are also going to be the ones that win.“

If you’re interviewing people for your job, and you haven’t interviewed a woman, don’t hire until you’ve at least interviewed one woman. And if your recruiter can’t get you resumes that are diverse, find another recruiter,

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Sarah Allen, computer programmer and founder of Blazing Cloud, challenges those who argue that it is difficult to find female programmers.

Allen runs free workshops on Ruby on Rails for women, offering the trainings on weekends and providing childcare. She has worked to create an environment where women feel welcome and notes, “Every single workshop we’ve ever held has had a waiting list.”

Read more about Allen’s programming career and her work to diversify the field: Blazing The Trail For Female Programmers : All Tech Considered : NPR. This is part of NPR’s special series The Changing Lives of Women.

Looking for more workshops? Check out Code With Me, a coding workshop which was co-founded by female programmer Sisi Wei. 

(via onaissues)

(via onaissues)

Blazing The Trail For Female Programmers

Sarah Allen has been the only woman on a team of computer programmers a few times in the more than two decades she has worked in the field. Most notably, she led the team — as the lone female programmer — that created Flash video, the dominant technology for streaming video on the Web. Since only about 20 percent of all programmers are women, her experience isn’t uncommon, and now she’s trying to bring more women into the field.

Loving this great NPR series. More here

I JUST noticed something strange on Wikipedia. It appears that gradually, over time, editors have begun the process of moving women, one by one, alphabetically, from the “American Novelists” category to the “American Women Novelists” subcategory. So far, female authors whose last names begin with A or B have been most affected, although many others have, too. The intention appears to be to create a list of “American Novelists” on Wikipedia that is made up almost entirely of men. The category lists 3,837 authors, and the first few hundred of them are mainly men. The explanation at the top of the page is that the list of “American Novelists” is too long, and therefore the novelists have to be put in subcategories whenever possible. Too bad there isn’t a subcategory for “American Men Novelists.

It’s not like someone specifically says, ‘You’re not welcome here anymore.’ It’s just a constant, subtle attitude that makes you feel like you don’t want to be there anymore. And that made me really mad, too, that the idea that someone could take something that I thought would be great, and sort of take it away from me and say, ‘Yeah, this isn’t for you. You’re not welcome here.’

Dearest Mama,

I must tell you what my opinion of my own mind and powers is exactly—the result of a most accurate study of myself with a view to my future plans during many months. I believe myself to possess a most singular combination of qualities exactly fitted to make me preeminently a discoverer of the hidden realities of nature.

[…]

Firstly: owing to some peculiarity in my nervous system, I have perceptions of some things, which no one else has—or at least very few, if any. This faculty may be designated in me as a singular tact, or some might say an intuitive perception of hidden things—that is of things hidden from eyes, ears, and the ordinary senses…This alone would advantage me little, in the discovery line, but there is, secondly, my immense reasoning faculties. Thirdly: my concentrative faculty, by which I mean the power not only of throwing my whole energy and existence into whatever I choose, but also bringing to bear on any one subject or idea a vast apparatus from all sorts of apparently irrelevant and extraneous sources. I can throw rays from every quarter of the universe into one vast focus.

Now these three powers (I cannot resist the wickedness of calling them my discovering or scientific trinity) are a vast apparatus put into my power by Providence; and it rests with me by a proper course during the next twenty years to make the engine what I please. But haste, or a restless ambition, would quite ruin the whole.

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Reconstructionist Ada Lovelace, the world’s first computer programmer, is very, very confident in her intellectual abilities in this 1841 letter to her mother. She was twenty-six at the time. (via explore-blog)

I believe today we would refer to this as “swagger”. 

(via jtotheizzoe)

(Source: , via jtotheizzoe)