Sarah Allen's Weblog

Gender Diversity in Web Conferences

I was doing a little research for a friend and found some nice resources for women speakers. Jason Kottle collected some great stats about representation of women at web conferences. Every year or so, someone asks me a question like this, so I thought I would post a few pointers.

It's pretty awesome that people are collecting and publishing resources for conference organizers. I find the focused lists most effective:

• Flash Goddess has the a great women speaker list , with topics and details about each speakers area of expertise


• LinuxChix offers Chix who Speak


• BlogHer, of course, has great women who talk about blogging 2007, 2006

Other lists are very broad, and it is hard to see what exactly people are expert at.

Know any lists I missed? Please comment and I will pass them on.

women talk about mentoring open source

I listened to a podcast interview with a number of women who are mentors in the google highly open participation contest (which offers prizes to 13-18 year olds who contribute to open source projects). It's got some interesting tidbits about community building on open source projects and some controversial banter about the role of women. Notes below -- my comments in italics.

Community managers are often women. Someone noted that this project had more women than any other open source project she had been involved with. Is this a great thing where we're seeing more women in open source? or is this the-women-taking-care-of-the-kids thing again? -- ouch. I'd say yes, to both questions.

...coding is fun, and it is an awesome feeling to fix a bug or add a feature, but the human connection is even more rewarding. -- yeah, I like the human connection stuff too, but sometimes it is really hard to carve out time to code. It certainly isn't one of those socialized female traits to ask whether this newbie's future contribution is really more valuable than whatever you are working on.

...Women may be drawn to these roles, but there are also a lot of men are very good at that. Absolutely.

...gnome love mailing list offers a great approach. People will give you something bite-sized to work on. The neat thing about these tasks is that it's not just easier for the new contributor, you also need a much smaller commitment from the mentor. It is a way for a contributor to start small and many folks start there and then take on more central tasks.

...should we target some kind of stamp-of-approval for a women-friendly project? No, we should lower the barrier for all contributors. Frankly, with open source, you do need to elbow your way in. It is pretty intimidating to a lot people not just women. If you make it less intimidating to join your project, you will get more kinds of people, not just women.

why women aren't interested in computer science

It is good to read about progress from some colleges in creating gender balance in computer science, since the overall trend has been a steady downward curve in the number of female cs grads. [see NYT article "Computer Science Takes Steps to Bring Women to the Fold" -- thanks Tucker!]

"Moving emphasis away from programming proficiency was a key to the success of programs Dr. Blum and her colleagues at Carnegie Mellon instituted to draw more women into computer science." The point is not that standards are being lowered, but rather a change in focus from drawing only those who already know how to program vs. an emphasis on "high overall achievement and broad interests, diverse perspectives and whether applicants seem to have potential to be future leaders."

Other tactics that are working...
* materials for tell high school students about computer science, that will be provided to teachers of math, science and English because girls have already opted out by then (Dr. Lazowska and Dr. Blum)
* a Web page for prospective students showing what computer science is for: "everything from designing prosthetics to devising new ways to fight forest fires" and deliberately featuring all women in the photographs (University of Washington)
* a college group called Women in Computer Science runs a program which brings ninth-grade girls from nearby schools to the university campus for five weeks each summer. It creates a “in a positive and encouraging environment.” for learning both concrete computer skills and abstract computer science concepts (Brown University, Artemis Project)

This discussion reminds me of Shirley Malcom's declaration at Grace Hopper 2004 that computer science has a marketing problem, referencing the well-known Edsger Dijkstra quote: “Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." If girls got the picture that computers aren't about programming, but that it is a powerful way to do accomplish incredible things, then maybe we would have more women getting CS degrees and appearing in software industry.

I've written about this before. Perhaps I should not be surprised that there are so few women in the field, since what I most love about it is not easily seen from the outside. Oliver Steele once summed it up well in conversation, when he said that in college they teach how to be a computer scientist, learning to be a software engineer is a side-effect. It is perhaps unavoidable that university classes are all taught by professors who are interested in computer science as an end unto itself, rather than as a means to an end -- you need to do computer science research to qualify. Most of us who are practicing programmers do it for fundamentally different reasons. Sure, programming is fun, but that's not the point. The point is to change the world in some small or large way, to have an impact on something or someone outside of the machine.

I would love to hear about more tactics that are making a difference ... what else is going on? do you know someone who is making a difference? are you? if you are a woman in CS, what made a difference for you?

Frances Allen: first woman to win ACM's Turing award

Frances Allen (no relation to me) recently won ACM's Turing Award for "pioneering contributions to the theory and practice of optimizing compiler techniques that laid the foundation for modern optimizing compilers and automatic parallel execution."

An interesting Business Week article highlights the state of women in computer science. "Right now, only 26% of the workers in America's information technology industry are women, and that's down from 33% in 1990. The ratio seems likely to decline even further in future years. These days, only about 15% of undergraduate computer science degrees at major universities go to women." In the mid-80's women received over 40% of CS degrees and it looked like we were going to get to 50-50, but by 1990 it had declined to 18% and apparently is still declining.

I find the gender-angle on these stories interesting and personally relevant; however, I find it somewhat sad that honoring her accomplishments seems to be eclipsed by the story of her gender. Of course, Peter Naur's award wasn't covered in Business Week :)

anybody got a slide rule?

As an introduction to computers at our local elementary school, the new tech coordinator had proposed a lesson where students would be given a set of "early computers" (abacus, calculator, slide rule) and asked to identify think about "Why are these tools considered computers? "

(my comments in italics, Mary's in plain text)

When I was taking Computer Science and Cobol programming at Mercer County Community College (near Princeton) the teacher was telling us the history of computers, "first generation computers, second generation, etc." -- fingers, the abacus, that huge one that took up a city block, etc. When she finished, I couldn't resist raising my hand and telling her about myself, that I was a first generation computer. She obviously enjoyed it and so did the class.

When I graduated, I was asked right away by NACA, Hampton, VA to come and work there. All math majors from Woman's College of the U. of N.C. (Greensboro, NC) were asked to come. Our math department had a great reputation, and my favorite teacher of all time was the head of the math department there. You didn't have to study. You just had to pay attention in class, do your homework, and you had it! I was so blasé about the job offer that I didn't answer until the end of the summer and into Fall. Jobs aren't that easy to come by any more, but at that time it was no concern. No application, no interview, just a job!

We used a Marchant calculator, although some offices used a Friedan calculator. The Marchant that I used was as big as an old fashioned typewriter.

I worked at Structures Lab, and there were 6 female computers in an office there. (This was at NACA, Langley Field, Va.) Most of the labs had computers (people) in them, although there was a section called The Computer Pool which was just a branch of nothing but people-computers. I think they worked for anyone on the Field who needed more computers, but I never saw the place.

When the engineers came up with very long equations for which they wanted values run through, we would set the equation up on a wide sheet of columnar paper and run the values through. Thank goodness some of the engineers would give us math to solve or parts of math problems to solve or I would have gone bonkers. Generally our materials were paper, pencil and Marchant calculator.

For example:

If an engineer gave us an equation like: x sq. + 3xy + z = A

We would put the letters and numbers in the headings of the numbered columns and find the value of A. I guess they would give us a range of numbers that they wanted run through:

1    2    3      4        5          6                                 7

x    y    z     x  sq     xy    3  * Col.  5      Col. 4 +  Col. 6 + Col. 3

I think you can get the idea from the above. Col. 4, for example, would have been the digit 4 written inside a circle which indicated a column. The paper we worked on was as wide as 3 sheets of typing paper. Some equation would take 3 or 4 sheets of paper to get all the headings on! The equations were verrrrry lengthy.

As I recall, they wanted most of the work shown because, of course, it would set up a pattern of a sort and would make errors easier to spot.

Remember, at this time, there were no real computers and no handheld calculators.

what did they do with all these numbers once they were computed?
Apparently in engineering textbooks, there are lots of curves that have been plotted on graphs that are somewhat classic. After we "computers" came up with the data, the engineers would plot the data and compare the curves they got with those in the textbooks. It would show them how things behave when you vary the parameters. If a certain curve would appear, it would explain to the engineer why the thing they were testing failed in the particular way that it did. Thus, it would educate the designer.

Mary also told this story which gives a broader picture of what work was like in the lab...
In the lab, were many machines that they used to test I-beams, cross-section panels of wings, and other shapes and various materials. They would put strain gauges (reminded me of EKG things that nurses stick on you) on the material to collect data and then stress the item by bending, twisting, or compressing it. I'm sure our computer results were related to that in some way, but I don't know just how. Obviously, strength and flexibility of materials has to be built into airplanes. (Watch how the wings of an airplane flex up and down as you fly.) That has to be considered in advance.

You might be amused to know that in the lab there was a huge machine capable of compressing large things with a strength of a million pounds. (You can imagine the noise when a steel or aluminum beam snapped!) I remember one time, just for fun, taking a huge ball of tinfoil (may have been lead foil since I was a big smoker) that I had saved and asking if they would compress it. No noise, but we all got a kick out of what a small, neat cube it became and how very heavy it seemed when compressed. Engineers were always doing nutty things, and I guess I was no exception to the rule. LOL

I don't remember any measurements being made of the tinfoil ball, :-) but I'm sure they could have been had there been a need for it.

GNOME women of code

"GNOME had no Summer of Code applications from women, so the project said it's time to do something to encourage more women to join its development community." (DesktopLinux)

Gosh, I wish I was still a student. That sounds like a lot of fun. If you are a female student or you know one, check out the GNOME Summer Outreach Program. It's great to see open source projects encouraging women to join in the fun!

fewer women undergrads in computer science

According to a study by HERI/UCLA women entering college are less likely to be planning on majoring in computer science than any college freshman class since before the 1970s. David Patterson, President of the ACM, published a good article in the recent issue of Communications of the ACM (Sept. 2005). You can also read about this study on-line in Computing Research News, where I found the graph below:

One of the keynote speakers at Grace Hopper last year suggested that Computer Science has a marketing problem. Unfortunately, many girls learn what computer science must be like by the type of folks who hang out in the computer lab in high school. These are often socially-challenged boys who, despite being outsiders themselves, often have no idea how to make an outsider feel comfortable, or worse, they have no desire to. This stereotype is enforced by movies, television, and popular opinion. I have run into quite a few of these types in my professional career, but more often than not, programmers are real people with other interests and are nice folks. Teachers, in particular, have an opportunity to change these stereotypes. If you are a computer science teacher or if you care about this issue, please join CSTA (Computer Science Teacher's Association). If you join now, you can become a "charter member" for free!

Patterson suggests a few trends that might affect a student's choice of major (and potential profession). Particularly, he cites fear of offshoring IT jobs in North America; however, he points out that "US IT employment was 17% higher than in 1999 -- 5% higher than the bubble in 2000 and showing an 8% growth in the most recent year -- and that the compound annual growth rate of IT wages has been about 4% since 1999 while inflation has been just 2% per year." Whereas outsourcing is expected to affect only 2-3% of jobs per year for the next decade.

I believe that the biggest factor is the assumption that computer-related jobs are boring. (Patterson cites "the current negative view of the CS professsion by pre-college students, especially females.") I initially took Computer Science as a back-up skill to balance my seriously unpractical interest in studio art. I had no real idea of what kinds of professions a CS degree would offer me. To the degree that I thought about it, I assumed that I would always be able to get some kind of job if I were desperate for cash to support my loftier or whimsical other life plans. In all fairness, the kinds of jobs that I have held since graduating from college did not really exist when I started school.

Patterson suggested we get the word out about CS, so here goes...

What is so great about being a software engineer?

Dress code I never have to wear stocking or heels or lipstick. Sometimes I do, but it feels different when I'm not obligated to. When I used to work at Macromedia on the Director team we had "dress-up Fridays," in stark contrast to our friends in other professions where the cooler companies let the employees have "casual Fridays" where they can wear jeans and such.

Flex time I rarely need to be in the office before 11am. 9am meetings are almost forbidden in engineering. When not in crunch time, most workplaces consider it acceptable to come in late because you need to go wind-surfing. Even in crunch time, during the school year, I take off one morning a week to volunteer in my kid's classroom. "Flex time" can just mean "more time" if you aren't careful, but there is an opportunity to make it work for you. Most engineers set their own schedule.

The work is fun. It is intellectually stimulating and creative. Most engineers have quite a bit of autonomy in their work. The technology is always changing. You constantly get to learn new things, but at the same time, we just apply the same principals to new problems or new technology to old problems, so there is familiarity in the new stuff too.

You can work at home. This can be a double-edged sword and you can be sucked in to just working more, but it sure is nice to sleep late and roll into work in your pajamas. If your kid is sick, you don't have to miss a day of work.

All professions need computer skills. You don't need a PhD in biology to do ground-breaking research if you have a CS degree. Unlike many other professions, when you graduate with a CS degree, you have all the practical skills needs to start working. Strong computer skills will give you entry into almost any profession. Compter science goes well with other disciplines. There is tremendous growth in opportunities where people are combining CS with other interests in other seemingly-unrelated fields.

What about you? If you are one of the technical folk, what makes it great? What should a college freshman know about this work that would help them make an informed decision?

Feminist hip-hop blogger

I was intrigued by this blogher session with the subtitle: "negotiating a space dominated by men." As a software engineer, I often find myself the lone woman in a roomfull of men. I was interested in the perspective of a woman in a completely different industry facing a similar gender imbalance.

Lynne D. Johnson gave a fantastic presentation which unexpectedly challenged some of my own assumptions about rap lyrics. I enjoy hip hop -- the music, the poetry of the lyrics -- but I have felt disturbed and alienated by some music of that genre which has explicit lyrics which degrade women and celebrate violence. It was enlightening to hear from a woman in the industry.

She spoke about starting to blog without a particular topic in mind, just about her thoughts and reflections on life. She became known as a "feminist hip hop blogger" without seeking that as role because she sometimes wrote from a feminist perspective about hip hop. Its funny how an audience can set their own expectations for a writer. I like hearing about how she thinks about staying true to her own voice.

Lynne spoke about being challenged as a woman in a powerful role (as an editor of Spin and Vibe) that she and other sisters were not outspoken enough against mysoginistic lyrics. She responded with a thoughful post, who's gonna' take the weight?, that cites many excellent articles written on the subject. In particular, she posted in its entirety an essay by Bell Hooks, "Misogyny, gangsta rap, and The Piano," ZMagazine, February 1994.

Bell Hooks notes that "gangsta rap as a reflection of dominant values in our culture rather than as an aberrant 'pathologica' standpoint...Rather than being viewed as a subversion or disruption of the norm we would need to see it as an embodiment of the norm."

Isolated in my bourgeois, predominantly white world, where mysogyny is discussed in safe discussions amongst the like-minded, it never occurred to me that these young black men are just telling it like it is. George Fox, one of the founding Quakers, did not merely create a creed of non-violent action in his peace testimony; he spoke about taking away "the occasion of all wars." Could we take away from our society the underlying currents of hatred and violence that produce such lyrics?

role models

Where's my damn role model? by Troutgirl got me thinking about my own role models. I struggled early in my career as a woman in a male-dominated field. I loved writing software, but pursued it in college as a practical fall-back to my other love of studio art. I felt that I didn't fit in and it took me a long time to acknowledge that I really did love the work. I was put off by the guys who would stay up all night configuring their X-windows settings. Despite doing well in my classes, it always seemed to come easier to the guys. In retrospect, I realized it was this alpha-geek thing to just act like was easy after solving the problem. All of my professors and most of the students in my classes were men. I was lucky to find myself starting a company straight out of school with a few of my best friends (all of them men). They never made me feel less capable because of my gender, but like an odd fish and I certainly didn't have any female role models there.

As I transitioned from one job to the next, I found few women to work with. Even in my 20s, most of the women were less senior than I was or in less technical roles (program mangers, QA engineers, marketing). I became an evangelist for hiring women and gave talks to groups of women about becoming a software engineer. In the early days of the web, there was (and still is) tremendous opportunity to get into the field, even with little or no experience. I settled into a routine of being a female role model while never really having one.

Despite the scarcity, I relentlessly sought contact with women and generally was well-recieved. When Betsy Nelson became CFO of Macromedia and I was one of hundreds of engineers at the company, I asked her to lunch which she accepted without question. Even though her work was completely different from mine, it was great to hear her story of how she got to be where she was. I sought advice from Mary Furlong, founder and CEO of Third Age Media. I met Anita Borg at a SFWoW event. From these women and others, I learned that I should "just do it," that success comes from pursuing what I am interested in, from writing about it and speaking about it. I learned to suspend disbelief. Like my love of jumping off high cliffs into water, I took on challenges despite my fear.

Since I didn't find women engineers for role models, I picked men as mentors. Harry Chesley, a colleague at Apple and my first manager on the Shockwave project at Macromedia, taught me all about the Internet. He de-mystified the protocols and, through his story-telling, I learned more of the history of the net and computing. I learned that all of this technology that seems so rigid and official was just made up by a bunch of folks who were seeking to solve a specific problem and some of their choices were better than others, some well-thought-out, some based on strange techno-belief-systems, and some truly arbitrary. He also demonstrated a genuine love of writing software, but not to the exclusion of other parts of his life. I remember one Friday when we were at Apple and another engineer really wanted to Harry to add a specific feature and suggested that he just do it over the weekend, to which Harry responded by holding up a photograph and saying, "if I do that, it means that these two little girls won't get to play with their daddy this weekend." I don't remember whether he actually added that feature, but I'm sure he spent at least part of the weekend playing with his daughters. There are no rules for work-life balance when you love your work and your family. Work-life balance is actually a bit of a misnomer when work is an important part of your life.

Later, I worked with Jonathan Gay, who is as famous for writing Dark Castle as for writing the Flash Player. Jon was, at that time, a Vice President at Macromedia, but he still wrote code now and then. From him I learned to stay grounded in technology. His familiarity with the source code and practical experience of new technology enabled his strong technical leadership. Later when I wondered about the security model of the Flash Player, I looked at the code to figure it out, instead of the standard manager response of asking an engineer on the team to provide an overview. This allowed me to be an active participant in the discussion. It reminded me of my high school teachers who required us to reference primary sources when writing a research paper. Jon also led me to question the corporate wisdom of consistently working to improve your weaknesses. Why do we require that of individuals? Why not just focus on what we do well? He also loved to code and create software. Jon used to keep a wonderful site called "software as art." The pages aren't there any more, but are happily archived. Despite written in 2000, I think the essay is still relevant. I hope he doesn't mind me linking to it after all these years.

Even with plenty of success in my career and the opportunity to work with a number of great engineers and managers, I still felt isolated. As I became more senior, I was frequently the only woman in the room, and if there were other women, I was the most senior technical woman. I had gained confidence and no longer felt like I was jumping off a cliff every morning. However, I longed for a female role model whose passion for technical work mirrored my own. A friend of mine gave me a great book, which I still haven't read all the way through, "Nobel Prize Women in Science: Their Lives, Struggles and Momentous Discoveries." There in chapter 4, I read about Emmy Noether, who became and remains my favorite role model.

Emmy Noether was born in Gernmany in 1882, at a time when girls did not pursue higher education. It was in fact, not permitted for women to get credit or degrees from a university. She was one of two women auditors of nearly one thousand male students at Erlangen between 1900 and 1903. She pursued Mathematics because she loved it. Initially, she taught without pay under someone else's name. She took on students and encouraged them to publish her ideas. Noether was one of the leading founders of abstract algebra. She worked closely with Einstein, providing mathematical formulations for several concepts in his general theory of relativity. Her biography shines light on a woman who pursued her passion without regard to what others expected of her. She ignored barriers and persisted despite lack of monetary compensation and with only the acknowledgement of her peers.

Thankfully I grew up in the latter part of the 20th century. I get paid for my work and relative to Emmy's experience, there are many, many women in my field. With her as a role model, I stopped worrying about gender for a while and focused on pursuing my passion for the work.

If you've stuck it out and read this longer-than-usual blog entry, I'd love to know... who are your role models -- famous or not, women or men? Who inspires you and why?

Don't Worry Your Pretty Little Head

Larry Summers, the president of Harvard, has incited some debate about whether innate gender differences contribute to why relatively few women become professional scientists or engineers.

William Saletan defends Summers and provides some details about what he actually said in his recent article Don't Worry Your Pretty Little Head, The pseudo-feminist show trial of Larry Summers:
"He spoke after the morning session of a conference called "Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce: Women, Underrepresented Minorities, and their S. & E. Careers." He offered three possible reasons for this gender gap. The biggest, he suggested, was that fewer mothers than fathers are willing to spend 80 hours a week away from their kids. The next reason was that more boys than girls tend to score very high or very low on high-school math tests, producing a similar average but a higher proportion of scores in the top percentiles, which lead to high-powered academic careers in science and engineering. The third factor was discrimination by universities."

Summers' words may have been blown out of proportion, but I would expect a University president to frame a better argument.

1) Spending time away from your kids. Girls and boys decide whether or not to pursue math and science long before they are aware of the details of how much time different careers might require of them per week. Also, more women these days decide not to have children. I would guess that if you lined up those stats, it would still not explain the disproportionate number of women. And most importantly, why must we assume that you have to work 80 hours per week to be successful?

2) High test scores in high school. Setting aside the fact that biology now has a far greater number of women than men pursuing undergraduate degrees, with respect to other fields that are still dominated by men, it would have been fantastic had Summers used the opportunity to highlight that the problems really start in elementary and high-school education. By the time students get to Harvard, there are already fewer women than men pursuing engineering and computer science. Perhaps Summers sees this as inevitable, but discrimination against girls in early education is well-documented. We could do a lot better in educating all children in math and science in this country. I also wonder: do high test scores in adolescence necessarily correlate with great scientific research later in life?

3) Discrimination by universities. Why spend 80 hours away from your kids if you aren't going to get anywhere in your career? People who underestimate the effects of discrimination have probably not experienced it themselves.

There is clear evidence of biological differences between men and women, aside from the obvious sex organs and hormonal fluctuations, some research has shown that the corpus callosum (the major pathway that connects left- and right- brains) is more developed in women. While some might argue there is biological evidence that women are smater, I feel strongly that the debate is inane. Some people are smarter than others. We must teach each of our children as if he or she were the next Albert Einstein or Marie Curie.

In closing, William Saletan notes: "But the best signal to send to talented girls and boys is that science isn't about respecting sensitivities. It's about respecting facts."

"Facts" like our innate differences cause girls to not excel at math and science. Seems like fuzzy science to me.

just do it

"Everyone is scared to get up there and lay it on the line. I've learned that from men who let me in on their secret, that they are just as scared as anyone, but are expected to JUST DO IT. I think women are often given permission to be scared of things like public speaking and BACK AWAY from opportunities, instead of move towards them." -- Halley's comment on misbehaving.net

A few years ago, I met Anita Borg at the 1999 top 25 women of the web awards. We struck up a conversation at the bar and after introductions and a bit of small talk she said to me: "you should publish." I got the sense that she meant, you, as in every woman in technology, and of course, me in particular. When I asked her what I had to write about, she looked intently serious and a bit exasperated when she replied, "whatever you are working on." She didn't need to tell me that's what the men write about. She didn't need to ask: what makes you believe that your work and your thoughts are any less significant than the latest technical article or paper that you have read?

Fast forward to five years later and I haven't published an article or paper. I could argue that in between family and work that I don't have the time. I really don't. However, that's not the whole story. In truth, I'd like to write something that is more than a few paragraphs. Writing English is not like writing code. It's harder (at least for me). There's no compiler. You can't run it afterwards to see if makes sense and feels right. It's a different thing entirely.

One of the reasons I keep a web log is for writing practice.

"In 2 years of following the blog phenomenon closely, I can safely say I've seen all the criticisms before. They're almost always written by someone who hasn't sat at my keyboard. Many times they turn things that have long been considered virtues in other contexts directly on their head. A writer a-borning is always urged to face the blank sheet of paper, each day, every day, without fail. Fill it. The better part of writing then becomes deciding what not to include. For blog critics, filling the page is a vice. The budding writer is also urged to find her inner voice, to speak from the heart, because the only writing that truly matters, that will be remembered, is the writing that comes from a distinct point of view. For blog critics, writing from your point of view is considered egotism. I even saw someone quit weblogging because he felt there was something wrong with writing statements that were not immediately challenged, an interesting social phenomenon born perhaps of chat rooms and newsgroups.

"I see these potshots and I'm flabbergasted. We're to bury ourselves? We're to wait until we have something Important(tm) to say before speaking? Until our design is an award-winner?

"I say, Go to hell. I mean it. Maybe this form means nothing to you. Well, fine, because I am not writing for you. I am writing for me. I am writing for what I get out of the process of thinking about a political issue or a scientific discovery and explaining it to my readers. I am writing for the responses I get from my readers. I am writing for the interplay with the larger community of webloggers.

"I'm doing nothing different than writers have done for millennia. I just have better tools. Fan-fucking-tastic better tools." -- a weblogger's manifestito

(this quote from a now obsolete web page was resurrected thru the magic of the wayback machine)

read more top ten reasons for a web log

Mars landing of "Spirit" Rover

My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas. I found this effective mnemonic at the-solar-system.net. It helped me remember the order of the planets which I felt important to get right this weekend. Inspired by the Mars landing, I visited the Chabot Space & Science Center today and watched an interesting episode of Nova.

About half way through the television program, I wondered... are there any women who work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory? Of the dozens of engineers who appeared on screen, I spotted two -- one on the parachute team and one software engineer. I suppose a few brief appearances are better than none. Perhaps my son didn't notice, more excited by his toy replica of the Viking lander than the testimony of boring grown-ups, but I believe that such experiences have a subconscious effect. I had hoped that our generation would be offering more gendered balanced role models by 2004.

On a lighter note, something else I learned today: do you know why Mickey Mouse went to outer space? to see Pluto, of course.

Anita Borg's influence...

Anita Borg influenced my life in an unexpected way. She organized a conference, "The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women and Computing," which I attended in 1997.

I thought I had overcome the feeling of being an alien in the workplace. Perhaps you know what it is like, to look around the room at a meeting and feel alone in a roomful of people. Or to talk seriously to someone and then realize that they were only talking to your haircut.

This conference was unique. It wasn't just a women's conference. It was a technical conference. Over a few days, I listened to more women speak publicly about gory technical details than I had in my lifetime.

I caught myself thinking... I could do that. And I thought that it had never occurred to me that I couldn't.

Anita Borg died last week. You can read more about her on the pages of the Institute for Women and Technology.