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Remembering a geek feminist ally: David Notkin, 1955-2013

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This is a guest post by Debbie Notkin, who is the chair of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award motherboard, a co-organizer of WisCon, and a science fiction and fantasy editor and reviewer. She is also the writer (with Laurie Toby Edison) of Women En Large: Images of Fat Nudes and (with Laurie Toby Edison and Richard F. Dutcher) of Familiar Men: A Book of Nudes. She blogs at Body Impolitic and on Dreamwidth.

No marginalized group can move forward without allies, and all of us have the opportunity to be allies as well as need allies. So it behooves us to look at what high-integrity, committed ally work looks like. And that’s why I want to tell you about my brother.

When David Notkin’s son Akiva was about two years old, he was fascinated by all games played with balls. (At 15, he still is.) We were on a family vacation together when David and I walked with the toddler past a ping-pong table, and Akiva instantly wanted to see what was up. I asked David why he thought Akiva was so much more interested in balls and ball games than his older sister Emma. David said, “I don’t know. We treated them exactly the same; it must just be something about him.” Having heard this from dozens of parents over the years, and rarely finding a productive response, I just let it go.

Years later, unprompted (if I recall correctly), David told me that he was no longer sure that was true. He had started to spend time with and pay attention to the serious feminists who advocate for more women in technology and the STEM fields, and he had done some listening and some reading. He said, “I think it’s perfectly possible that we responded to Akiva’s interest in balls differently than we would have if it had been Emma.” I had, and still have, very little experience with anyone changing their mind on these topics.

Melissa McEwen at Shakesville differentiates between what she calls the “Fixed State Ally Model” and the “Process Model,”

In the Process Model, the privileged person views hirself as someone engaged in ally work, but does not identify as an ally, rather viewing ally work as an ongoing process. Zie views being an ally as a fluid state, externally defined by individual members of the one or more marginalized populations on behalf zie leverages hir privilege.

The kind of shift that David made about his son’s interest in ball games is as good a step into the Process Model as any.

In this flash talk, given at the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) Summit in Chicago in May of 2012, we see more commitment to process in ally work.

In this talk, David says nothing about what women want, how to bring women into the field, or really anything about anyone except David. Instead, he describes the reasons to take another step on an ally’s journey, and advocates a way for teachers and professors to take that step, by voluntarily stepping into a learning situation where they are in the minority. As he says in the opening frame, he’s in a room full of brilliant women. As he doesn’t say, he knows he has nothing to tell them about being female, or being female in the computer science world, or anything else about their lives. What he can share is his own efforts to understand what it’s like to be marginalized, without taking on the mantle of the marginalized.

The NCWIT talk came in a deceptively optimistic period for David; he had spent the end of 2010 and virtually all of 2011 in cancer treatment, and his scans were clean … until June. In February of 2013, a few months after David’s cancer had spread and he had been given a terminal diagnosis, his department held a celebration event for him. Notkinfest was a splendor of tie-dye, laughter, and professional and personal commemoration. I hadn’t really followed his trajectory as an ally and mentor to women and people of color, and I was amazed at how many of the speakers talked about his role in making space for marginalized groups.

Anne Condon, professor and head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia told a longer story about Mary Lou Soffa, (Department of Computer Science, University of Michigan), who couldn’t be there. Dr. Condon said,

Mary Lou is a very prestigious researcher in compilers and software engineering, and probably the most outspoken person I know. Once a senior officer from a very prominent computing organization proudly unveiled a video about opportunities in computer science. Now in this video, all of the people profiled were white males, except for one little girl.

Mary Lou in true fashion stood up and she did not mince words as she told this senior official what she thought of that video. When she was done, there was total silence in the room. And then one voice spoke up, questioned the choice of profiles in that video and spoke to the importance of diversity as part of the vision of this organization.

And that person was David Notkin.

The speaker list at Notkinfest, aside from Dr. Condon, included somewhat of a Who’s Who in increasing diversity in computer science, including:

  • Martha Pollack, soon to be Provost for Academic and Budgetary Affairs, as well as Professor of Information and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, who has received the Sarah Goddard Power Award in recognition of her efforts to increase the representation of and climate for women and underrepresented minorities in science and engineering.
  • Tapan Parikh, Associate Professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and the TR35 Humanitarian of the Year in 2007. (check out his TedX talk on representing your ethnic background).
  • Carla Ellis, member and past co-chair of CRA-W, CRA’s Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research , past co-chair of the Academic Alliance of NCWIT. On her web page, Ellis says: “In my retirement, I will be pursuing two passions: (1) advocating for green computing and the role of computing in creating a sustainable society and (2) encouraging the participation of women in computing.”

Notkinfest was David’s next-to-last professional appearance. Here’s what he said at the open reception:

It’s important to remember that I’m a privileged guy. Debbie and – our parents, Isabell and Herbert, were children of poor Russian Jewish immigrants, and they were raised in the Depression and taught us the value of education and how to benefit from it.

Mom, especially, taught us the value of each and every person on earth. I still wake up and – You know, we have bad days, we have bad days, but we have plenty to eat and we have a substantive education, and we have to figure out how to give more back. Because anybody who thinks that we’re just here because we’re smart forgets that we’re also privileged, and we have to extend that farther. So we’ve got to educate and help every generation and we all have to keep it up in lots of ways.

When I spoke at his funeral, not three months after Notkinfest, the main thing I did was repeat that plea.

Interdisciplinary computer science at Mills College

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This is a guest post by Ellen Spertus, who is a professor of computer science at Mills College and a senior research scientist at Google. She has been active in geek feminism since 1991, when she released a widely distributed report on women in computer science. Her many publications include a chapter in She’s Such a Geek, and she has contributed to several open source projects, including the software behind the Systers mailing list and App Inventor. She is perhaps best known, however, for being named Sexiest Geek Alive in 2001.

Everyone knows that the computer science pipeline leaks women. Once a young woman decides not to take computer science courses in high school or in college, it is hard for her to reenter the pipeline, and earning a PhD in computer science after a bachelor’s degree in sociology, for example, might seem impossible, even though an interdisciplinary background might make someone a better computer scientist.

In 1984, department head Lenore Blum (who has continued to be a leader in women and computer science) founded the New Horizons certificate program at Mills for women and men with bachelor’s degrees in other fields. (The graduate programs at Mills are coed.) It consists of eight undergraduate computer science courses and prepares students for either careers in industry or for graduate study in computer science. Certificate students have been admitted to computer science PhD programs at MIT, University of Virginia, University of Washington, and other schools.

The more revolutionary program, however, is the Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Computer Science (ICS), founded a few years later, which aims to build on students’ past background and not just supplant it with computer science. In addition to more demanding coursework, ICS students need to complete an interdisciplinary thesis that combines computer science with another field, usually their prior one. For example, Erica Rios, who had a background in political activism, developed a technology-enhanced community organizing model to raise consciousness among Latinas over the value of their unpaid household work. Jeri Countryman developed and deployed a computer science curriculum for middle-school girls and went on to work for Techbridge and Iridescent on tech outreach programs for girls. Amy Dewey, whose undergraduate degree was in dance, developed a database to preserve swing dance moves and routines. Whenever a student proposes a thesis topic, I always ask two questions: First, what is the computer science content? Second, what about it couldn’t be done by someone trained only in computer science, like myself? I like to make the point that, rather than being deficient for not having an undergraduate CS background, their diverse experience enables them to accomplish things impossible for a more traditional computer scientist.

Appropriately, the Mills motto is “One destination, many paths”. Students have entered the program through various means and at various stages of life. Constance Conner had partied her way through college, ending up in low-paying dead-end secretarial jobs, where she became the expert on the dedicated word processing machine and early spreadsheets and databases. After a cocktail party conversation with a Mills graduate at age 30, she entered the ICS program part-time. Her first summer internship paid more than twice what she was making at her secretarial job ($15/hour vs. $7/hour). After graduating, she had five industry job interviews and got five offers. She accepted one, which paid well but that she found “uninspiring”. When an ICS alumnus, Allan Miller, remembered an interest she had once expressed in teaching and let her know about a part-time teaching position at College of San Mateo, she jumped at the chance to teach, something she had always wanted to do. In 1995, with the help of another ICS alumna, Dana Bass, she began working full-time at City College of San Francisco, one of the country’s largest community colleges, where she’s taught computer programming to an estimated 400 students/year.

One of Constance’s students, Karina Ivanetich was working in a bike shop after earning a BA in Anthropology and an MA in Sociology from the University of Virginia and pursuing her goal of mountain biking for a few years. She was planning to just learn programming but was so inspired by the material—especially compilers, which Constance frequently mentioned in the introductory programming class—that she entered the ICS program. ICS led to opportunities for her to participate in machine translation research at the University of Pittsburgh and to intern at Google and Wind River, where she implemented an instruction scheduler for their compiler. She is now a Senior Engineer in their compiler team.

Lisa Cowan learned to program as a kid and found it “super fun” but majored in Anthropology at UC Berkeley, not taking any computer science classes but “noodling around” on the pre-web Internet via dial-up. She found work at a start-up and realized she wanted a career in computing, so she entered the ICS program, where she appreciated the small class size and the camaraderie among the students — very different from Berkeley. After Mills, Lisa earned a PhD in computer science at UCSD, applying her anthropology background to studying mobile social media and human-computer interaction.

Alison Huml had planned to major in science at UC Berkeley but got off to a discouraging start. On the first day of her honors chemistry class, she was the only woman in the section. Before she could take a seat, the TA tried to redirect her to the general chemistry class down the hall. Alison stayed in the course but decided to major in English instead, graduating summa cum laude. She worked as a tech writer during the Internet boom but knew that she wouldn’t go far without an understanding of computer science, so she entered the ICS program. She has since co-authored books on the Java programming language and led writing and product management teams at Google, where she is now employed.

Other graduates (and drop-outs) of the program have gone on to work at Apple, Disney, Google, IBM Research, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Splunk, as well as many smaller companies. Marianne Marck is currently Senior VP of Software Engineering for Starbucks. It is tremendously rewarding as a faculty member to help students go from unfulfilling jobs to creative, high-paying ones, even if their starting salary sometimes exceeds mine as a
professor.

My ulterior motive in writing this guest post is to reach Geek Feminism readers and their friends who might be interested in entering the program or applying for our visiting industry faculty position. I can honestly say that feminism is front and center at Mills, a women’s college. Most of the Mills administrators and faculty, including the president, provost, and all of the full-time computer science faculty are women (by happenstance, not design); male faculty are equally committed to women’s advancement. The school is diverse in race, national origin, and sexual orientation, and has a growing awareness of issues faced by transgender and gender non-conforming students and advocacy for their full inclusion. (Editor’s note: Current students at Mills who have questioned administrators about policy have alleged that Mills continues to have an unofficial policy of rejecting women undergraduate applicants whose government-issued identification documents have a male gender marker.) Our biggest problems are (1) finding potential students, since they don’t know that a program like ours exists and (2) keeping them after they get great job offers before finishing the program.

not a beard

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This is a guest post by Mari Huertas (@marihuertas).  She is an Obama for America Technology (#ofatech) alumna and instructor at the University of Chicago. She currently is working on an idea to shift self-publishing with fellow OFA alum Nick Leeper (@lucky33). She lives in Chicago with her husband, bossy cat, and an ever-rotating supply of tea. This post originally appeared on her blog.

It was a tongue-in-cheek joke on the campaign trail, and I smiled about it for a while – the recurring meme about the “bearded” Obama Technology team, a group of dudes who wore flannels and didn’t shave and didn’t care at all about either, thankyouverymuch. I smiled about it because it was true, to a point, and I felt we were a family, and family made jokes like that, even if not everyone was into it.

Then came the post-election press, some of which picked up the “beards” gag and, fawning over its delicious cleverness, wrapped it into numerous mentions of the Technology team’s accomplishments. Andrew Sullivan even wrote a post that referred to the Technology team as “Obama’s Bears”.

Now, let us be clear about a few things:

  1. I was on that team.
  2. I’m not at all bearded.
  3. I’m definitely not a bear.
  4. Nerdy? Sure. I’ll own that one.

And other women were on that Technology team, too – smart, savvy women. One managed the creation of an incredible system that our vendor integration and other technology components all could hit so we could operate as synced as possible (Carol Davidsen). One trained an entire digital SWAT team of interns and volunteers to handle Dashboard support (Brady Kriss). One spearheaded the development of our voter outreach and GOTV technologies (Winnie Lam). One reached into the tech community and rallied volunteers to help us build certain pieces of our infrastructure (Catherine Bracy).

Yet some articles skipped mentioning women almost entirely. Rolling Stonenamed one; Mother Jones listed zero before backpedaling under scrutiny and adding a handful at the bottom of the article. Both were chided and scorned for it. It was surprising but not unexpected that so few of my sex were included in articles about winning the election – recognizing women has been a historical, long-standing problem. But these women in particular had done outstanding, difficult work – they had just re-elected a president, for heaven’s sake – so if not now, when should they expect to be recognized for their contributions?

I write this now, in the waning halo of winning the election, because in the past few months, I’ve come to see in a painfully clear light how important it remains to rally and recognize women working in technology. From the dearth of women as speakers and panel members to the lack of diversity on development, IT, and product teams, we have a serious listing that needs to be righted. As I wrote at the end of 2012, we need to elevate the profiles of successful women so that others will see them and want to work alongside them – so they will know what roles are available and what roles they can make.

I want other females, young and old, to feel encouraged by the women who worked on this re-election campaign and in technology, civics, and government as a whole. I want girls and young professionals to find their way by the determined wakes we leave. We’re doing important, satisfying, fun work – we should broaden and extend our purview so more can wade into the fray.

Now, I want to make this next point as clear as the glass ceiling beyond which many women in technology have yet to climb: I love, support, and cheer on my tech brethren, bearded or bare-faced, because they are completely, indisputably awesome and deserve every word of the recognition they receive. I have sat in the front row of the conferences at which they presented and beamed and clapped hard while they stood and spoke. I have touted them publicly on social channels and privately in emails and discussions with others. I wish them every success and am fantastically proud to call them friends and co-workers.

But equal consideration and recognition for the work, contributions, and fur-free faces of the ladies who rocked alongside them?

We need that – not just for this campaign or election, but for all we do. Let’s make that happen.

Resources:

Re-post: When sex and porn are on-topic at conferences: Keeping it women-friendly

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During December and January, Geek Feminism is republishing some of our 2012 posts for the benefit of new and existing readers. This post originally appeared on October 1, 2012.

This is a cross-post from the Ada Initiative blog. Discussion is extremely welcome!

We’d like to start a discussion: How can the Ada Initiative extend the example anti-harassment conference policy to explicitly allow respectful, woman-positive discussion of topics like sex and pornography when it is on-topic, without creating loopholes for sexist and exclusionary behavior to creep back in?

First, let’s be clear: harassment and unwelcoming behavior at open tech/culture conferences are far from over. For example, one recent conference tried to “break the ice” using slides with sexual messages and/or animals mating and ended up getting racism and prison rape jokes (unsurprisingly – see this list of higher risk activities for conferences to avoid). That’s why the Ada Initiative’s advice on including pornography or sexual discussion at technology conferences is “don’t.”

A brief explanation of why pornography and sex are off-putting to women and LGBTQ people of any gender: Most pornography shown in this situation assumes that the audience is male and heterosexual, and sends the message that everyone who is not a heterosexual man is not the intended audience. Also, shifting people’s minds towards sex often triggers people to view women as sexual objects, in a context in which women want to be treated as humans with a shared interest.

Cindy Gallop

Cindy Gallop speaking

But showing pornography and talking about sex in public are not necessarily a “women not wanted” sign. Women are using open tech/culture to create erotica by and for women, and to have open discussions about sexuality in general.

For example, Archive of Our Own is a “fan-created, fan-run, non-profit, non-commercial archive for transformative fanworks,” designed and created by a majority women community, and hosts erotic fan fiction written by women among many other fan works. At the Open Video conference, Cindy Gallop talked about ways to change pornography to be more women-friendly, as well as more “open source” (and launched a startup actually doing it). for women in open tech/culture also need to speak about what keeps women out of their communities, which requires talking about pornography and sex.

Valerie Aurora speaking at AdaCamp DC

Valerie Aurora speaking at AdaCamp

What we want to do is support conferences that have organizers, speakers, and attendees who are sufficiently aware of sexism, homophobia, racism, and other forms of harassment in order to distinguish between, e.g., trying to “spice up” a presentation with a little off-topic pornography, and a discussion of ways to change pornography to be more women-positive. Our own AdaCamp is an example of a conference in which sex and pornography are on-topic.

The Ada Initiative’s current anti-harassment policy includes the following paragraph:

Exception: Discussion or images related to sex, pornography, discriminatory language, or similar is welcome if it meets all of the following criteria: (a) the organizers have specifically granted permission in writing, (b) it is necessary to the topic of discussion and no alternative exists, (c) it is presented in a respectful manner, especially towards women and LGBTQ people, (d) attendees are warned in advance in the program and respectfully given ample warning and opportunity to leave beforehand. This exception specifically does not allow use of gratuitous sexual images as attention-getting devices or unnecessary examples.

We then add a blanket provision approving discussion about topics that are appropriate for the specific conference.

What do you think? Comments are open (but heavily moderated).

Food for discussion: A few examples of anti-harassment policies from conferences where sex and pornography are on-topic: BiCon, Open SF, and Open Video Conference.

Wednesday Geek Woman: Estelle Weyl, expert web developer and standards evangelist

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This is a guest post by Melanie Archer. It originally appeared on her blog for Ada Lovelace Day..

Photograph of Estelle Weyl speaking, by David Calhoun

Estelle Weyl, by David Calhoun

By late afternoon that day in September 2002, I was getting pretty grumpy. The sandwich at lunch had dissipated into low blood sugar; the files I’d placed on the server just moments before had disappeared (and we had neither backups nor version control); the room was stuffy on an uncharacteristically hot day in San Francisco. And here comes this woman from one of the rival teams in the hackathon, introducing herself, trying to make friends, or at least, acquaintances.

I don’t remember being very effusive. The day had been grueling-I was on a team of four, working feverishly to develop an an accessible, yet visually appealing, Web site in just a few hours here in the Mission High School computer lab. But we shook hands. I recognized this woman’s name from the discussion list for SFWoW, at the time indispensable for finding out about tech events like this one. I hadn’t known how to pronounce it.

“Estelle Weyl. Like ‘while,’” she said. Within moments we all learned how excited she was about CSS, a technique new to many people at the hackathon, which was just one day of the Accessible Internet Rally. At another gathering we’d learned about various accessibility techniques, such as supplying text alternatives to images, offering keyboard shortcuts, and using CSS for presentation. The last had been my M.O. for three years already-I was puzzled how slow acceptance of it was.

I’d recently left a job at a software company which assembled a bunch of open source superstars, both actual and self-proclaimed, and then hired some front-end types like me to rework the clumsy, visually unappealing interface for the superstars’ application into something more usable. The low status of front-end work became obvious to me upon my introduction to one of the engineers.

“Oh, one of the pixel people,” he sneered, then lumbered off, leaving me to read the absurd style guide the UI lead had delivered. CSS was too “unsupported,” the guide admonished. Use <FONT> and <CENTER> to render the design atrocities we build in the browser. I didn’t stay long at this pointless gig.

So Estelle’s bouncy enthusiasm for CSS didn’t seem infectious to me, but instead, rather naive. Do you really want to investigate a technique with near-universal applicability, great community support, a bright future?

Learn Perl. Yeah, that’s where it’s at.

Thank goodness she didn’t. Instead, Estelle dug into CSS to a level few of us do. She opened multiple browsers, on multiple operating systems, to ask one question: what happens when I do this?

The results are bookmarked by anybody who cares about cross-browser CSS, but not enough to commit these fugitive details to memory. I’ve placed I-don’t-know how many fancy list separators via li:after, but dang if I remember the ASCII code for them. Oh, look-Estelle’s catalogued them! Meanwhile, as WML gave way to near-complete HTML support in mobile browsers, Estelle was there, checking CSS support on an ungainly gamut of devices-so we didn’t have to.

Somewhere along the line Estelle decided to start talking about CSS. In just a couple years Estelle had attracted an audience. Soon there were few CSS-focused events that didn’t include at least one presentation by Estelle Weyl. And there were, increasingly, more CSS-focused events. It sounded like Estelle’s life was pretty much spent going from one glamorous conference to another.

These days she addresses standing-room-only crowds, many of whom include engineers like the one I met ten years back, now anxious to learn CSS to “keep current.” If Estelle’s story proves anything, it’s not the superiority of CSS, it’s the superiority of the person who uses passion, focus, and sheer dogged persistence to get somewhere. Pixel people or Perl people, we all stand to gain from such an example.

See also: Lorna Jane Mitchell’s post about Estelle Weyl.

Want to highlight a geek woman? Submissions are currently open for Wednesday Geek Woman posts.

Wednesday Geek Woman: Heather Walls, designing for connection on Wikipedia

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This is a guest post by Siko Bouterse, Head of Community Fellowships, Wikimedia Foundation. It was originally published at the Wikimedia blog and is re-published under a Creative Commons Attribution licence.

Heather Walls, photograph by Guillaume Paumier, CC BY-SA

Heather Walls, by Guillaume Paumier CC BY-SA

When Heather Walls designed the Wikipedia Teahouse, she was inspired by the name to create a space with “a sort of zen feeling” where new editors could relax, have a cup of tea, and get help learning the ropes from experienced Wikipedians. Her design for the Teahouse, which is full of gentle colors and images of people and nature, aims to create a “softer entry point to Wikipedia, where you can see there are other humans, and they’re the ones talking to you.”

When she’s asked about the project or about her work as a visual designer, Walls often comes back to the theme of human connection. “The Teahouse gives people a chance to see each other, to see that Wikipedia is other human beings,” she said. “I love watching the hosts give patient and supportive answers to all kinds of questions, and how thankful guests are in return.”

In the eight months since it was launched on English Wikipedia, new and experienced editors have come to enjoy the Teahouse’s warm atmosphere. “It’s surprising how relaxing the site design is,” said Teahouse host Writ Keeper. “I’m not an artsy type…so I never would’ve thought that site design would make such a difference, but it does.”

Walls says what she likes best about all the projects that she works on is the purpose and dedication of the people involved. “My hope is that as many people as possible can feel ownership of this mission.”

In 2011, Walls started contracting with the Wikimedia Foundation, creating outreach materials for hackathons and recruitment, and soon moved on to projects like Teahouse, Wikipedia mobile, a Funds Dissemination Committee portal, and a portal for new editors on Arabic Wikipedia. With a background in architecture and a degree from Harvard Graduate School of design, she has experience designing both real and virtual spaces. She’s also an active Wikipedia editor in her spare time, patrolling new pages and serving as a host in the Teahouse.

The WikiWomen’s Collaborative logo — which features an image of hands forming a “W” shape — is another one of Walls’s designs that focuses on people finding common ground. The WikiWomen’s Collaborative project supports women’s participation in the Wikimedia movement by celebrating inclusivity and diversity, and this ideal brought some challenges to the design process. “We were definitely going for not-pink,” says Walls, “though this logo can be any color and it doesn’t change the recognition.” The idea for the logo came from a photo taken at the WikiWomen’s lunch at Wikimania in 2012, where over 100 women from around the world gathered. “Looking through our hands creates a sort of window we share,” she said. “We do things with our hands, everyone around the world, we have that in common. The WikiWomen’s Collaborative is about women everywhere contributing to the voice of the world.”

Addressing Wikipedia’s gender gap is, at its core, about widening representation and incorporating more perspectives into the sum of human knowledge. Walls recognizes the unique perspective that she brings to her own design practice. “Every individual brings their experiences, and as a woman I do have a different viewpoint. My view and experience, the fact that I have learned to understand the importance of invitation, that is in what I do now, even if a project is not specifically aimed at women.”

Wikipedia Teahouse design palette, by Heather Walls CC BY-SA

Wikipedia Teahouse design palette, by Heather Walls CC BY-SA

Proving that a Wikimedian’s work is never done, Walls just completed a redesign of the Teahouse to make it even easier for guests to find the help they need. “As we added features and explanations to the main pages of the Teahouse over time, simplicity and some of the visibility of the Teahouse organization was lost.” Some editors were attached to her old design and initially opposed the updated version, and Walls said she also felt some nostalgia while rolling out the changes. Ultimately, thanks to lots of community input, the original colors and Teahouse logo were retained in the new design, because they play an important role in the emotional connection users have with these pages on Wikipedia.

Come stop by for a cup of wiki-tea in the newly revamped Teahouse on English Wikipedia, or visit the WikiWomen’s Collaborative on Facebook to continue the conversation. Heather Walls and other WikiWomen look forward to meeting you there!

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Want to highlight a geek woman? Submissions are currently open for Wednesday Geek Woman posts.

Wednesday Geek Woman: Anastasia Lvova (Анастасия Львова), prominent Russian Wikipedia editor

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This is a guest post by Netha Hussain. It was originally published at the Wikimedia blog and is re-published under a Creative Commons Attribution licence.

Anastasia Lvova’s story should be an inspiration to women editing Wikipedia. She started editing Russian Wikipedia in 2007, because she found volunteering very interesting and useful to society. She has been one of the most active editors of Russian Wikipedia since. After writing her first article (certification) and improving her first good article (RFID), she became dedicated to Wikipedia.

Photograph of Wikipedia editor Anastasia Lvova

Lvova’s contributions to Wikipedia and the Wikimedia community are impressive. She runs a bot, which does automated tasks on Wikipedia. It is now active on multiple language Wikipedias. She is also a Toolserver user — where she works on the Connectivity project — and an agent for Wikipedia’s volunteer customer service group, OTRS. She has created more than 2,200 new articles and authored some good and featured articles about Ireland and the arts. She has made as many as 404 edits in a day, 23,777 actions with flagged revision in a month and more than 60,000 edits in all! She was at the lead in organizing Wiki Loves Monuments Russia in 2011. She is an advocate for free knowledge and took part in organizing protests against internet censorship in Russia. A large part of her collection of images on Wikimedia Commons are photos from her foreign trips, because according to Russian law, photos of still-in-copyright buildings are not free.

Outside the Wikimedia network, she is a photographer and writer. She graduated with a degree in management and is currently pursuing her graduate degree in psychology. She maintains a blog where she posts about her activities within and outside Wikipedia. She is also involved in charity and volunteering, and likes spending time writing letters to the elderly and children in orphanages. For her, these hobbies contribute to her activities within Wikipedia, as her hobbies help her create ideas for writing Wikipedia articles.

For Lvova, being a woman editor is a positive. She says that the Russian community is receptive to woman editors, and fellow editors have helped her from time to time. She has met like-minded individuals from the community, and has done collaborative projects with them. She has noticed that the Russian wiki-community sometimes expects feminine behavior from women editors, but she says it’s not really a problem for her. She also noted that in the past, when it was hard for women to teach in universities, they became teachers, fighting against the odds, even disguising themselves as men to be able to teach. Women should be inspired by the past and feel empowered to contribute now, she argued. “Dear women, we can do it, and sharing information has always been our competence,” she said with a smile.

Lvova enjoyed meeting other women editors in Argentina during the WikiWomenCamp, a meeting of women Wikimedians from around the world that took place in May 2012.

“WikiWomenCamp was helpful for me not only because I got new contacts and a new perspective of things, but also because it gave me some courage to work for women’s issues,” Lvova said. She was grateful to receive a grant from Wikimedia Germany to participate in WikiWomenCamp and she has been supported by Wikimedia Poland to attend two Wikimanias and several wikiconferences.

After WikiWomenCamp, Lvova started a project for new woman editors to write articles about notable women on Russian Wikipedia (they have written about 50 articles so far). She said she wishes to be helped by both men and women in her community to bridge the gender gap in Wikipedia. She thinks that this is an issue which has to be dealt with urgently. “Statistics show that around 6 to 23 percent editors are women, but we can’t be sure yet as many women prefer to disguise themselves as men because they think that a man’s opinion would be preferred over a womans,” said Lvova. She, therefore, likes to research about women’s participation in her home wiki.

Her activities on Wikimedia have helped her visit interesting places, but the most rewarding experience for her has been meeting fellow Wikimedians. Through these events she has met new people who have helped her learn fresh ideas for problems, many of which were not raised in local discussions. If you want to say a ‘hi’ to Anastasia, the best place to drop by would be her talk page, where she says she would welcome the discussion.

A Russian language version of this post is available in the original profile.

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you keep using that word

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This is a guest post by Garann Means. This post originally appeared on her blog.

I keep seeing the word “meritocracy” pop up, mostly in discussions that seem to have stemmed from Faruk Ateş’ “A primer on sexism in the tech industry”. Do yourself a favor, don’t go googling. It’s the same shit:
“Sexism isn’t real because I’m a woman and no one did the sexism to me!”
“Women resent being treated as women instead of being evaluated solely on their capabilities!”
“You’re a sexist!”
“Some people called me a sexist after my sexist blog post and it hurt my little feelings and I’m leaving the internet!”
“You GUYS, remember this is supposed to be a meritocracy.”

Except no. No it fucking isn’t. Because a meritocracy is not a real thing. It is a joke.

The word meritocracy comes from a political satire. It was never meant to be something we should aspire to. It was the opposite, actually, a warning about how we rationalize what we believe we’ve “earned”. If that sentence doesn’t seem to you applicable to the tech industry and our cyclical discussions about sexism, racism, and even occasionally classism, go get yourself another cup of coffee.

There’s some dumb bullshit in one of the current crop of reaction posts waxing poetic about “hacker culture,” and its freedom of speech and lack of PC dogma. Hacker culture was a bunch of white dudes. Hacker culture is a great example of a meritocracy. Some of the most privileged of the privileged got together and formed a community around the idea that they were smarter than everyone else. They created an arbitrary set of metrics for membership and according to their metrics, they triumphed. This was the first time in the history of the world white men had experienced the elation of peer recognition.

A meritocracy is not a system for locating and rewarding the best of the best. If it were, the “best of the best” in almost every goddamned industry or group on the planet would not be a clump of white men. I’m having trouble finding good stats on this, but white men are something like 8% of the world’s population. When you go to a fucking conference and you look around at all the white dudes, do you really honestly think, “Wow! What a bizarre fucking statistical anomaly it is that basically everyone with the special magic gift of computer programming happened to be born into a teeny tiny little demographic sliver of the population”? Of course you don’t. You don’t think about it. You focus on telling yourself that you’re supposed to be there, because you’re so fucking smart, and if other people were as smart or, if you prefer, they were “technically inclined,” they could be there just as easily.

A meritocracy is a system for centralizing authority in the hands of those who already have it, and ensuring that authority is only distributed to others like them or those who aren’t but are willing to play by their rules.

Somebody on twitter told me that when the computer industry was overwhelmingly female, it was due to merit. I think that makes a really good counterpoint to this meritocracy bullshit. Because no, it was not due to merit. Merit didn’t fucking enter into it. Most of those women had no experience in the industry and – even if we accept the lol-worthy premise that merit can be objectively measured – there was no way to evaluate their merit as computer scientists. That’s not to say we shouldn’t use that as a template. We absolutely should. Those women had jobs and were happy to have them. They worked hard. Those who stood out did so because they had demonstrated that their work was good (through their work, not through their savvy) and because standing out and advancing the field was necessary to their work. I would rather work with a roomful of those women than with the arrogant, privileged brats our industry too often recognizes “merit” in these days.

If we met the utopian ideal we toss around in blog posts, we’d still have lots of middle-aged women in this field. We’d have black people. We’d have Asian people – not a smattering, but a majority, cause the world is mostly Asian people. We’d have an even ratio of men and women. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned after sixteen years in this career, it’s that if a middle-class white boy who literally never had a job before getting a sweet internship at some cutting edge technology company can eventually, through practice, become a passable computer programmer, anyone can do it. If there’s one thing I’ve learned after thirty-three years of being alive, it’s that if you see middle-class white boys flocking in droves to a particular career path, it’s a pretty fucking easy job and you should try and get yourself one like that.

I guess that’s a little mean. Sorry, middle-class white boys. I’m not calling you dumb. I’m calling you soft. I’m calling myself soft, also, and everyone else who works in this field. What a meritocracy really protects us from is challenge. If we don’t even allow most people through the gates, we don’t have to worry that we might pale in comparison to them (pun intended). There will always be a place for us in an industry we keep others out of. That’s why we should seek out diversity – because the lack of it makes us weak.

If you give a shit about this industry’s goals beyond making yourself look smart and cool, for fuck’s sake, stop calling it a meritocracy.

When sex and porn are on-topic at conferences: Keeping it women-friendly

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This is a cross-post from the Ada Initiative blog. Discussion is extremely welcome!

We’d like to start a discussion: How can the Ada Initiative extend the example anti-harassment conference policy to explicitly allow respectful, woman-positive discussion of topics like sex and pornography when it is on-topic, without creating loopholes for sexist and exclusionary behavior to creep back in?

First, let’s be clear: harassment and unwelcoming behavior at open tech/culture conferences are far from over. For example, one recent conference tried to “break the ice” using slides with sexual messages and/or animals mating and ended up getting racism and prison rape jokes (unsurprisingly – see this list of higher risk activities for conferences to avoid). That’s why the Ada Initiative’s advice on including pornography or sexual discussion at technology conferences is “don’t.”

A brief explanation of why pornography and sex are off-putting to women and LGBTQ people of any gender: Most pornography shown in this situation assumes that the audience is male and heterosexual, and sends the message that everyone who is not a heterosexual man is not the intended audience. Also, shifting people’s minds towards sex often triggers people to view women as sexual objects, in a context in which women want to be treated as humans with a shared interest.

Cindy Gallop

Cindy Gallop speaking

But showing pornography and talking about sex in public are not necessarily a “women not wanted” sign. Women are using open tech/culture to create erotica by and for women, and to have open discussions about sexuality in general.

For example, Archive of Our Own is a “fan-created, fan-run, non-profit, non-commercial archive for transformative fanworks,” designed and created by a majority women community, and hosts erotic fan fiction written by women among many other fan works. At the Open Video conference, Cindy Gallop talked about ways to change pornography to be more women-friendly, as well as more “open source” (and launched a startup actually doing it). for women in open tech/culture also need to speak about what keeps women out of their communities, which requires talking about pornography and sex.

Valerie Aurora speaking at AdaCamp DC

Valerie Aurora speaking at AdaCamp

What we want to do is support conferences that have organizers, speakers, and attendees who are sufficiently aware of sexism, homophobia, racism, and other forms of harassment in order to distinguish between, e.g., trying to “spice up” a presentation with a little off-topic pornography, and a discussion of ways to change pornography to be more women-positive. Our own AdaCamp is an example of a conference in which sex and pornography are on-topic.

The Ada Initiative’s current anti-harassment policy includes the following paragraph:

Exception: Discussion or images related to sex, pornography, discriminatory language, or similar is welcome if it meets all of the following criteria: (a) the organizers have specifically granted permission in writing, (b) it is necessary to the topic of discussion and no alternative exists, (c) it is presented in a respectful manner, especially towards women and LGBTQ people, (d) attendees are warned in advance in the program and respectfully given ample warning and opportunity to leave beforehand. This exception specifically does not allow use of gratuitous sexual images as attention-getting devices or unnecessary examples.

We then add a blanket provision approving discussion about topics that are appropriate for the specific conference.

What do you think? Comments are open (but heavily moderated).

Food for discussion: A few examples of anti-harassment policies from conferences where sex and pornography are on-topic: BiCon, Open SF, and Open Video Conference.

If you like our work and want to support our work making conferences more women-friendly, please donate now.

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Announcing the release of the Interactive Feminist Bingo Card

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This is a guest post by Elizabeth Yalkut and Betsy Haibel. Elizabeth is a front-end developer and writer in New York City; she is a A Very Uncommon Cook. Betsy is a Rubyist who wishes that anarchist punks and open-source geeks talked to each other more. She can be found on the internet at a usually-silly tumblr and a usually-less-silly github account. Together, they are the Irregular Gentlewomen.

This post originally appeared on Elizabeth’s tumblr.

The Irregular Gentlewomen are proud to release version 1.0 of the Interactive Feminist Bingo Card! An open-source project (CC BY-NC-SA), the Interactive Feminist Bingo Card is meant to be an easy way for commenters in online feminist venues to identify sexist and misogynistic trolls, provide validation of a commenter’s judgement that a troll is genuinely trolling and not just clueless, and suggest responses to some of the remarks the troll has made.

Bingo cards are common in the geek feminist community; there are several existing ones linked in the Geek Feminism wiki, and Betsy & I relied on them heavily while creating the bingo card. We’ve both used those existing cards when participating in or reading passionate exchanges in feminist spaces, and felt the need for a card which collated the contents of many of the existing cards and made the game aspect of the card more true to life. (We’re not aware of any other interactive bingo cards in the social justice blogosphere; the cards we have encountered have all been either table-based or images, many of the latter very pretty.)

There are dozens of different squares in the many existing cards, which sometimes made it frustrating to play using one card — “That comment should get me bingo, but it’s not on the card!”

The color scheme is the “girly girl” palette from earlgrey at colorlovers, and the fonts are Emily’s Candy and Miss Fajardose; the names were a part of our decision-making process. We rejected at least one font because the name included a masculine reference. This bingo card is, in part, about embracing the female and the feminine and the feminist and not being ashamed of those things — so we looked for color schemes tagged “girly,” with lots of pink in them, we filtered through the display fonts at Google Fonts to find ones with girls’ names and curlicues and hearts over the i’s. But pink and swirly and all of those quote-unquote traditionally feminine qualities aren’t the only way of being feminine, much less being female, and certainly not the only way of being feminist (in fact, it can be argued that embracing the girly and feminine is a very specific kind of feminism, very third-wave feminism, which isn’t always accepted as feminism). We wanted to make sure to include some iconic feminist references, which is why, upon clicking a square, the text transforms into white-on-red with a black-and-white background — it’s meant to evoke the Barbara Kruger (your body is a battleground) photograph, which was designed as a poster for the massive pro-choice march that took place on April 9, 1989 in Washington, D.C. I would have loved to make that reference more explicit by using the actual face in the Kruger, or treating a stock image similarly, but we were concerned about copyright issues. Hence, the classic “female” symbol is the background of the “used” squares. (Yeah, we probably could have gotten away with a fair use argument, but that was just not the hill we wanted to die on.)

The animation is there for a few reasons: one, because this project was partially a lab space for us to push the boundaries of our code knowledge, and I haven’t gotten a chance to mess around with CSS animations and transitions and whatnot at work much; two, because animation on a web site, unless very discreet, is the kind of stuff that gets disparaged as the realm of amateurs*, the kind of thing you would have seen on a Geocities site, the sort of visual flourish which would only appeal to (and imagine this said in a tone of deep contempt) girls. Obviously, we regard this as bullshit. Animation is a key part of a lot of things that are not seen as girly — where, for example, would video games be without animation? So we wanted to juxtapose the very femininely-styled text, in a feminist context, against the kind of powerful effects which are either sneered at as unsubtle when it’s in a context coded as female or lauded as creative and daring when in a context coded as male. How well we succeeded, well, that’s for the audience to decide. The code is available on github, after all, and if you hate the animations, you can fork it and strip the CSS.

(Also, I really like the zoomy effect. VROOM VROOM FEMINISM.)

In general, we strongly encourage people to fork the project! One of our design goals was ensuring that the content-source files, particularly, would be easy to edit — hopefully, even easy to edit for the less technical. We hope that other people will add to our list of trollish comments & rebuttals, and perhaps even that our code can provide an engine for other anti-oppression bingo cards. (While we’d love to see, for example, anti-racist or anti-cissexist bingo cards, we felt that as white cis women from privileged economic backgrounds we would not be the right people to make them.)

Good luck never getting bingo, and if you have to, we hope the kitten video (oh, did we mention that if you win, you get a kitten video? Thanks to Skud and Emily for that idea.) helps balm your soul.

* See, for example, Vitaly Friedman’s article, in which he remarks, “designers of CSS-based websites tend to avoid extreme interactivity and instead use subtle, refined effects sparingly”. And yet Anthony Calzadilla‘s Spiderman animation, later linked in Friedman’s Smashing Magazine as an example of CSS3 animation, is about as in-your-face as it can get.