Anita Borg had a dream: by the year 2020, half the graduates of computers science programs would be women. That’s a lot easier than having half the people in high tech be women, but it’s still a tall order. Anita passed away in 2003, but she still inspires people to work for the equality. She started a group called Systers that was one of the first online communities for women. Systers is a women-only group that provides an important network for women in science and technology. The Anita Borg Institute carries on some of Anita’s work. Recently, the Anita Borg Institute was given an anonymous challenge grant – every donation will be matched up to $15,000 through December 6. Here’s the message posted by Robin Jeffries of ABI to the Systers mailing list:

Systers,

The systers list is sponsored and supported by the Anita Borg Institute (ABI), a non-profit devoted to improving the lives of women technologies and helping technology improve the lives of women everywhere.

Like every other non-profit, they exist on the donations of others. Those donations provide systers with technical support (thanks, Kathy, for all you do), computing power, spam protection, support for pass-it-on grant reviewing, and may other things. In addition to systers, ABI runs the Grace Hopper celebration, administers several awards for women in computing – so that the male dominated industry will know who the brilliant women are, provides leadership training for women at various stages of their career, and a host of other things.

ABI has just been offered an anonymous challenge grant. From now until December 6, your individual donations will be matched dollar for dollar (up to $15,000), thanks to a generous grant from an anonymous donor. If they meet this goal, it will result in $30,000 in funding toward their many programs.

Please, consider giving to the Anita Borg Institute NOW (before December 6), while this challenge grant is active. I already have. Your donation makes a difference to our field, to many of the women working in it, and to women all over the world who want to better themselves through technology. Please pledge whatever you can (even $5 or $10) to help meet this $15,000 goal.

To learn how you can donate, go to http://anitaborg.org/get-involved/donate/

Thanks,

Robin Jeffries Her Systers’ Keeper

There are a lot of sexist jokes that go around, either verbally or digitally. Women in male-dominated fields, like computing, experience this regularly. When we complain, we’re often told that it’s “just a joke” or to “have a sense of humor about it”, or “it’s bad, but it’s not a really big deal”. Now there’s research that shows that sexist jokes encourage more tangible discrimination:

“We found that men with a high level of sexism were less likely to donate to the women’s organization after reading sexist jokes, but not after reading either sexist statements or neutral jokes,” Ford said.

In the second experiment, men were shown video clips of sexist or non-sexist comedy skits and were then asked to participate in a project designed to determine how funding cuts should be allocated amongst select student organizations.

“We found that, upon exposure to sexist humor, men higher in sexism discriminated against women by allocating larger funding cuts to a women’s organization than they did to other organizations,” Ford said.

“We also found that, in the presence of sexist humor, participants believed the other participants would approve of the funding cuts to women’s organizations,” he said. “We believe this shows that humorous disparagement creates the perception of a shared standard of tolerance of discrimination that may guide behavior when people believe others feel the same way.”

I like that the lead researcher, Thomas Ford, is a man. It’s good to have allies! Sometimes men ask how they can help women in computing, and being good allies is a great start. Not just by doing studies like this, but also by speaking out when someone says something stupid.

Kathy Sierra, author of the Creating Passion Users blog, posted today that she’s going to stop blogging, maybe for a while, maybe forever. The reason is because some people have crossed the line from offering immature criticism to making death threats and suggesting sexual violence.

Not only is that bad enough, but this has been happening on blogs where prominent bloggers participate, and they haven’t been criticizing these comments while continuing to participate in sites like meankids. So it’s not just what’s being said, but also what’s not being said. It seems like this behavior is accepted in the blogosphere, and Kathy doesn’t want any part of that any more.

From Kathy’s (last?) blog post:

As I type this, I am supposed to be in San Diego, delivering a workshop at the ETech conference. But I’m not. I’m at home, with the doors locked, terrified. For the last four weeks, I’ve been getting death threat comments on this blog. But that’s not what pushed me over the edge. What finally did it was some disturbing threats of violence and sex posted on two other blogs… blogs authored and/or owned by a group that includes prominent bloggers. People you’ve probably heard of. People like respected Cluetrain Manifesto co-author Chris Locke (aka Rageboy).

[Note: This post includes disturbing language and a picture beyond anything I’d normally say here, so some of you might not want to continue reading. But I felt it was important to be specific about as much as the police investigation will allow.]

BayArea Gender Changers is holding a free hardware workshop for women … and they’re having free childcare! I’m especially impressed when an event like this has childcare (BlogHer did as well; and the Do-It-Herself confabs). Childcare is a key to participation for many people, and it’s great to see another event offer it. I’ve slightly obfuscated the e-mail address so that it’ll be harder for spammers to harvest.

Computer Hardware Workshop for Women by Women

Date: February 24th 2007
Time: 1:00pm
Location: 369 15th Street, Oakland, CA 94612
Free event.

What: Take apart a computer, and take apart the parts. We’ll talk about how it all comes apart, how it all works together, and how it all assembles again. We will provide free childcare.

How: Email us at bayarea at bayarea dot genderchangers dot org to RSVP

About the GCA: The GCA is an all-women organization which offers computer and electronics workshops to women.

Definition: gender changer
A special intermediary connector for use with two cables that both have only male connectors or only female connectors

http://bayarea.genderchangers.org

CNet posted an article about the top women geeks. Except they called them girl geeks and included Paris Hilton, Darryl Hannah, and Lisa Simpson in the list (along with more obvious candidates like Marie Curie and Grace Hopper). The list is stupid for so many reasons … but one thing that has come out of it that surprised me is that Slashdot has an article criticizing the list with actually some positive info on women geeks (which I found out about through Systers). I’m used to Slashdot discussions bagging on women, but this one actually has some positive posts and some info on women who deserve recognition for science and tech. accomplishments.

To give you an idea of what the “Top ten geek girls” is like (without linking to CNet and giving them more traffic), here’s my impression of how CNet would have written …

Top ten geek boys

1. Alan Turing. World’s first computer scientist.
2. Neil Armstrong. Went to space.
3. Dennis Ritchie. Won a national medal of technology.
4. Keanu Reeves. Geek icon.
5. Thomas Edison. Inventor.
6. Aldous Huxley. Wrote Brave New World.
7. Jimmy Neutron. Boy genius.
8. Albert Einstein. Played dice with the universe.
9. Click and Clack. Hip car talk show hosts.
10. Fabio. Famous boy gamer.

The order is inspired by the actual list on CNet. The description titles are about as lame as the original ones. I don’t actually know that Fabio enjoys video games, but if he does, I think he’d be a perfect analog to Paris Hilton on the original list.

You too can make your own top 10 list! Bonus points for going further and Bio paragraphs like:

Dennis Ritchie

Ritchie was a quintessential geek. Not content with working on the Multics operating system, he wrote a compiler. His invention was called the Pascal programming language. Ritchie’s contribution to the world of computers cannot be underestimated …

You get the idea. ;-)

Stanford neurobiologist Ben Barres has an article in Nature about how women scientists face additional pressure. His article relies in part on personal experience (from the Washington Post:

After he underwent a sex change nine years ago at the age of 42, Barres recalled, another scientist who was unaware of it was heard to say, “Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but then his work is much better than his sister’s.”

And as a female undergraduate at MIT, Barres once solved a difficult math problem that stumped many male classmates, only to be told by a professor: “Your boyfriend must have solved it for you.”

“By far,” Barres wrote, “the main difference I have noticed is that people who don’t know I am transgendered treat me with much more respect” than when he was a woman. “I can even complete a whole sentence without being interrupted by a man.”

The examples that Barres gives of his treatment before and after his transition from a woman to a man are great to read – there’s no better apples to apples comparison than comparing your own skills to your own skills.

Barres wrote his article in response to the controversy that started with former Harvard President Larry Summer’s comments that women have a different “intrinsically aptitude” than men, which Summers thought was the cause of differences in representation. Barres thinks that more good could come out of continuing the discussion than thinking of it as resolved by Summers’ departure from Harvard.

Wow, that was the most fun I’ve ever had deciding not to go to a conference! Thanks to everyone who expressed an interest in trading me their time for an all-expenses paid trip to RailsConf. I’ve met a lot of people I think I’ll be working with in the near future, including Sarah Mei, the person I’m sending to RailsConf.

It’s funny … just the other day I was talking with Jason Wong about recruiting strategies. I was actually offering to sell him by RailsConf ticket. I knew he had been interested in going but was too busy to really think about it during his run for a position on the local Democratic Central Committee. Turns out Jason couldn’t go, either, but after the conversation with him, I thought, hey, why not try to combine transferring the ticket with trying to find some cool Ruby and Rails programmers to work with?

Some of the people who can benefit the most from the inspiration and knowledge exchange that takes place at conferences or seminars often can’t afford to go to them. Either they’re starting out as programmers or, like Sarah, they’re seasoned developers who are relatively new to Ruby and don’t work for a company that will sponsor them to go to something like RailsConf. Many people in this situation are women, who I’m especially sympathetic to since seeing our numbers decline so much in programming (for the curious, I didn’t choose Sarah based on gender; I chose her because she has great skills, works with non-profits, could take the time off, can work legally in the U.S., lives in San Francisco – a perfect combination!).

It was especially great how many people were attracted to the social justice parts of my post. That was so cool! There were several people that were actually more interested in just working with me than RailsConf itself.

It was all serendipity this time, but the experience was so good that I’m thinking of offering one or more all expenses trip(s) to RubyConf in exchange for programming hours, too, assuming there’s interest.

If the logistics work out, I’d also like to combine the offer with mentoring by an experienced Ruby programmer. Again, the offer will be open to everyone, but I’ll of course be making an extra effort to let women and other underrepresented programmers know about the offer.

I posted my original offer on Ruby mailing lists plus also on Systers (where Sarah saw it) and LinuxChix. Any suggestions for other places to post offers like this that will reach women programmers and programmers of color?

It’s so great that BlogHer 2006 has child care! I don’t have kids yet, but I’m still excited. Despite claims of living in an equal society, women still bear a much greater burden for child care in the U.S., and even as someone who’s not (yet) a mom, I think one of the best things that jobs and events can do to get more women involved is to provide child care.

It would be great if more conferences took this into consideration. BlogHer is the first technical conference that I’ve known of to provide childcare (although I don’t go to too many tech. conferences, so it could be more widespread than I think). Way to go! It’s both a great practical service and a great example to the tech. community!

I just got Akkana’s new book, Beginning GIMP: From Novice to Professional. I haven’t done much more than skim sections, but what I’ve seen is looks pretty good. There are sections that show how to do particular tasks with step-by-step instructions, which is really helpful for someone like me who has always found the GIMP interface confusing (and who only uses GIMP infrequently). Plus, it’s great that Apress splurged on the glossy pages so the images really stand out! It’s also great to see another addition to the list of books written by LinuxChix!

For those in the area, Akkana will be giving a presentation on GIMP and her new book at the Micro Center in Santa Clara this Saturday (5/20/2006) at noon.

I read a lot of programming blogs regularly, and subscribe to several feeds on Smalltalk. I think that’s how I came across an article on Ted Leung’s blog about how he and his wife are teaching their daughters to program using Smalltalk (they started with Python). I thought Julie Leung’s article on their daughters learning programming was even more interesting. I thought these articles were great because I think the lack of women programmers is one of our culture’s great ills (not that we have any shortage of ills, mind you), and it’s great to read stories about parents encouraging their girls to learn programming at a young age. Secondarily, it was great to hear how well Squeak Smalltalk and Stéphane Ducasse’s “Squeak: Learn Programming with Robots” are working as teaching tools. I loved where Julie wrote:

Abigail’s stopped hugging the book, but I do hope she and her sisters continue to enjoy programming.

Hugging the book! That’s great!

Julie started her article with a link to an article on misbehaving.net that in turn lined to a writeup on Grand Text Auto on a talk by Hanna Wallach on women and computing (how’s that for indirection?). Some stuff that came out of that talk:

• Women make up 28% of programmers in the proprietary software world, but only 1.5% in the FOSS world.

• Men first get computers when they’re 15 on average; women don’t get their first computers until they’re 20.

Julie also writes about the passion that many programmers find for their art:

Most of all I want my daughters, like Elliot, to have a passion for discovery, creativity, logic and design, and to love learning, whether it is Squeak or Python or a language or book yet to be written.

I hope that there are more parents like the Leungs who are encouraging their daughters to learn programming at a young age! And that more parents follow Jill of misbehaving.net’s advice: “Buy your daughters computers!”.

If this happens, it’ll go a long ways to having more young women interested in programming and computer science as they enter college, or have that skill to apply to whatever they do. But what do we do about keeping women in computer programming positions? Back in the 1980s, we had a lot of women in CS programs in college. We’ve slid downhill a lot since those days, and not just in FOSS (I have doubts about that 28% figure in proprietary programming – it’s certainly far from true at most Bay Area companies I’ve seen). While encouraging intial interest in programming is a big problem, retaining women in the field of programming after they’ve started working professionally seems to be an even bigger problem.

I know some very successful women programmers. But I also know many who have dropped out of the field entirely. Not because of lack of interest, but because they felt there were so many barriers at work. In fact, of the female programmers I’ve worked with, I think fully half are now doing something other than programming.

The reasons aren’t mysterious, and there’s a long list that includes:

• Child care is a problem in this country (and others). Both in that it’s not as valued as it should be, and also that it falls unevenly on women. As bad as it is at most companies, it’s even worse for FOSS projects – I don’t know of any FOSS projects that include child care collectives (although that would be really interesting to see!).

• Discrimination and harrassment. Things have gotten better over the years, but this is still a big problem. In FOSS, it’s even worse, because there is no HR or other department to intervene when something happens. There’s always the community, but … well, not all communities are friendly to women programmers.

• Unintentional discrimination and exclusion. It’s just weird being the only one (or few) of anything in a large group. And given the strict gender divisions in so many aspects of our society, being the only woman, or one of a few women, in a group of men can be troubling even if no one means you ill.

How do we address these and other issues? I’m not sure, but one thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of women (myself included) have struck out on their own. Starting your own company is a great way to have control over your future (no more consternation about who gets the promotion, ‘cause you’re the boss!). And maybe it’s also a good way to start companies that will be women-friendly as they become bigger (of course, there’s no need to grow super big – it’d be great if there were tens of thousands of small women-owned, women-friendly companies flourishing).

So, parents, in addition to buying your daughters computers, maybe teach them something about starting their own businesses!

As for FOSS … it’s so great to hear that people like Hanna are making strides in the quest to make established FOSS projects like Debian more women-friendly, via efforts like Debian Women. Those efforts are important, and I look forward to seeing how they develop.

But I’d also really like to see more FOSS projects get started by women. I think it’s easier to start out with gender equity than to try to achieve it after a project has become established in a very uneven way. I don’t know of many FOSS projects that were founded by women – I’d love to hear of any, though, especially ones where groups of women are involved. And, if I ever find the time, maybe start one …

Here’s a great holiday recipe: Take one kernel hacker, one red dress, and the Honeywell H316 Kitchen Computer. Mix well, then roll out with a rolling pin. Take picutres and put on the Web. Serves millions!

Check out this photo essay of my friend Val and the Kitchen Computer at the Computer History Museum!