women and careers

Ada Lovelace Day – Blogging About Women in Technology

Ada Lovelace
Ada Lovelace
Who is Ada Lovelace?

She is mainly known for having written a description of Charles Babbage’s early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine. She is today appreciated as the “first programmer” since she was writing programs–that is, manipulating symbols according to rules–for a machine that Babbage had not yet built. She also foresaw the capability of computers to go beyond mere calculating or number-crunching while others, including Babbage himself, focused only on these capabilities.

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology – entrepreneurs, innovators, sysadmins, programmers, designers, games developers, hardware experts, tech journalists, tech consultants.

There are lots of women who are extraordinary in their fields. Here are just a few…

  • Frances Allen, IBM Fellow Emerita, the first woman to win the Turing Award, the highest honor in computing (and a member of ABI’s Board of Trustees)
  • Karen Banks, who pioneered the use of ICTs for the empowerment of women around the world, 2004 Anita Borg Social Impact Award
  • Helen Greiner, whose iRobot products save lives and clean floors, 2008 Women of Vision Award for Innovation
  • Susan Landau, whose work at Sun Microsystems on encryption, surveillance, and digital rights management has influenced both corporate and public policy, 2008 Women of Vision Award for Social Impact
  • Duy-Loan T. Le, the first woman and first Asian to be named a Fellow at Texas Instruments, 2007 Women of Vision Award for Leadership, and whose inspiring acceptance speech has had thousands of viewings on YouTube

And on a Personal Level…

Lisa Linn – Web geek extraordinare and interface designer at SAS. I met Lisa through my wife Stephanie – they became friends through an online community of New Beetle enthusiasts. Lisa created an innovative website All Pods Go To Roswell – that documented the annual caravan trek to a New Beetle car show in Roswell, New Mexico by broadcasting the cross-country roadtrip live in real time, through streaming webcams attached to her Beetle. What a geek.

Melissa McEwan – Veteran blogger and champion of feminist ideals. She runs the online community blog Shakesville, where she is an intelligent, witty and insightful leader of an ever-growing social network that comments on current events, cultural norms and issues of gender and equality.

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Why Women Leave Technology Careers

Interesting article in Computer World on Why Women Leave Technology Careers that fits some of what I’ve experienced. And it’s not “to have kids” if that’s what you’re thinking…

The most important antigen is the machismo that continues to permeate these work environments. We found that 63% of women in science, engineering and technology have experienced sexual harassment. That’s a really high figure.

They talk about demeaning and condescending attitudes, lots of off-color jokes, sexual innuendo, arrogance; colleagues, particularly in the tech culture, who genuinely think women don’t have what it takes — who see them as genetically inferior. It’s hard to take as a steady stream. It’s predatory and demeaning. It’s distressing to find this kind of data in 2008.

Is this data global or national? We studied private-sector employers in the U.S., and then we looked at three large, global companies with women working across the world. We also did a bunch of focus groups in Australia, Shanghai and Moscow. The data were pretty consistent. Actually, India is a little better than the U.S. But there’s not much variation across geography.

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Kathy Sierra, hate comments, and women bloggers

I’ve avoided blogging about this because it’s very difficult to explain, really. I’ll try to keep it really short:

Kathy Sierra is a tech guru who got her start in Java, published some really popular books, and became well-known in the tech community for her ideas about technology and writing user-friendly web applications. She writes a popular blog called Creating Passionate Users, and speaks regularly at industry events. She was a keynote speaker at SXSW, a panel I attended. I’ve been subscribed to her site since last year, when Rich and Jerrod saw her at SXSW and raved about her when they got back.

Over the past several weeks, Kathy has, like several prominent female technogeeks before her, become the target of anonymous personal abuse that rose to the level of criminal threats of violence and murder. The reasons for why that occurred aren’t terribly clear, because Kathy’s about the closest thing to sunshine and puppies that you can get.

But the basic sequence of events seems to be this – some high-profile tech geeks who are more cynical and caustic got together and created a site called “meankids.org” to talk smack about their fellow wonks in the technology world. Kathy and some other women she knew were common targets of their cynicism and abuse, partly because they are women. This online sandbox for maliciousness bred more meanness in the forums and comments of the site as anonymous readers stepped up the abuse to increasing levels.

(Gee, that sounds familiar. I wonder where I’ve seen that happen before? Oh, yeah. I remember, we have our own version of this kind of virulent crap here in Indiana.)

When the women complained, the abuse increased even more, to the level of violent threats posted in anonymous comments on the abuse sites, and on Kathy’s site. The level of the threats were such that Kathy began to feel unsafe, and even canceled a prominent speaking engagement because of it. After she wrote about it on her blog, discussion of the whole incident has exploded across the internet.

One of the interesting things that has come out of this is discussion from numerous prominent women in the tech industry, who have come out with their own revelations of this happening to them. There is, it seems, a systemic problem in the industry.

I’ve been following the story for the last several days, mainly because all the big name web designers who’s blogs I read have weighed in, because either Kathy or the mean kids are their friends. But what made me actually decide to comment on the whole issue is this small quote from a BBC interview of Kathy on the threats she received:

She also thinks it could be time to re-examine whether the blogosphere needs to be completely uncensored.

“There is an unwritten rule in the blogosphere that it is wrong to delete nasty comments. It suggests that you can’t take criticism but now there is a sense that this is nonsense,” she said.

I happened to agree with that sentiment – I’ve practiced it for quite a while. I get 5-10 comments a day that are basically anti-gay trash directed at me. Most of the time, they’re caught in my spam filter (I have some unique keywords entered to catch them) and I simply delete them. Occasionally one or two will slip through live, but I usually delete them pretty quickly. Lately, though, the number of vitriolic posts and anti-gay comments has increased pretty drastically – it’s about double what it’s been in the past, so I have to monitor the comments more closely.

As far as I’m concerned, my website is my real estate. If you visit and decide to plant some flowers in my garden, that’s awesome; you’re always welcome back. If you visit and you graffiti my house, you’re not welcome and your contributions will be removed. Just like a newspaper that chooses not to publish every letter to the editor, I’ll choose to publish what I think adds substance.

It’s not a free speech issue as far as I’m concerned – you only have free speech in a public setting. My website isn’t a public space, it’s my space. No one’s stopping you from starting your own blog, or standing on a street corner preaching, or otherwise speaking out in public places. But you can’t come to my house and insult me and expect to stay.

For the past several weeks I’ve had a post rolling around in my head about my feelings about homophobia and anti-gay hatred and abuse, and how my feelings have developed and changed over the past 20 years that I’ve been “out of the closet.” Sometime soon I need to actually sit down and write that post, when I have a bit of extra time.

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