Posts tagged ‘python’

When Chad Whitacre announced that he’d just released Testosterone, “the manly testing interface for Python,” a friend of his called him out, asking “what, exactly, makes it manly?” After a brief, polite back-and fourth, Whitacre slept on it, and apologized.

Science fairs, sexism, academics, empathy, heroines, Mozilla, Python, Rails, more, and a few goodbyes.

What’s working to help me learn to program? Gamification, with some caveats…

This week’s Wednesday Geek Women are Joanmarie Diggs, self-taught programmer and contributor to Orca; Máirín Duffy, interaction designer at Red Hat; Jessica McKellar, organiser of the Boston Python Workshops; and Stormy Peters, the Head of Developer Engagement at Mozilla.

I need to stop assuming that everyone else knows more about the tech than I do. Our sense of our own merit gets calibrated by feedback from the outside world, but sexism and impostor syndrome get in the way of that calibration. All the tentacles of this issue — the prejudice, the tokenization, the distorted self-perception, the discounting of one’s achievements and comparative lionization of others’ — bother me because they mess with proper judgement.

Maybe once a month, at a “girl geek” event, or once a year at a women-focused event at a conference, can technical women enjoy relief from a mental burden that they may not even consciously realise they are carrying. It is not the world’s hugest burden by any measure, but it exists, and can keep us self-silencing and self-doubting.

This is a guest post by Jessica McKellar. Jessica is a software engineer and an organizer for the Boston Python Meetup. This entry originally appeared at the OpenHatch.org blog. My name is Jessica, and I’m ...