Tag Archives: women in computing

I’m pro-linkspam and I vote (3 May 2013)

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  • Can Videogames Teach Us About Race? “The conversation has moved beyond simply arguing for less revealing clothing and “more agency” for fictional women, towards dissecting a paradigm shift for the entire industry, highlighting the role of women as both consumers and producers of videogames. And while anyone at least casually interested in social equity will no doubt find this thrilling, the conversation is overwhelmingly white, with all these calls for industry-wide changes in favor of equal representation completely omitting race.”
  • Super Ladies: Missing Why not show female superheroes in ensemble shots??
  • Women Genre Authors Much Less Likely to Get Reviewed: “So, basically, there are tons of female sci-fi authors out there, but they’re not getting nearly the same coverage as their male counterparts.”
  • 30 Days Of Sexism: “From March 7 – April 7, I documented everything blatantly sexist anyone has said to me. None of these comments were provoked, none of them were replies to something I said, none of them were at all out of the ordinary and the vast majority of them (an original count of 77 images) have been taken out so that this post isn’t as long as it probably should be. This is a 10-picture indication of what it’s like to be a woman who endorses game culture, every single month.”
  • [TW: Harassment]Consent & Consequence at Cons: An Alliterative Appeal to Acknowledgement “You are not responsible for another person’s choices.”
  • Women in Science and Engineering (Boston): Jun 24-25, 2013: “Our goal is to help scientists and engineers become more productive by teaching them basic computing skills like program design, version control, testing, and task automation.”
  • White Men Wearing Google Glass: Making a point about who does (and, by omission) doesn’t worry about a collaborative panopticon?
  • This Is What The Next Generation Of Programmers Looks Like: “As sophomores in high school, none of the girls have made a decision about whether or not they want to pursue computer science careers. But if app building appears as accessible to others of their generation as it does to them, the future of programming looks very bright.”
  • 17 year old girl wins hackathon: “Let’s focus on how one teenage girl, Jennie Lamere, defeated a room full of smart, motivated, experienced, full-grown men. This would seem to be instructive to the greater argument about women in technology, and besides, it has the added bonus of being based in fact rather than opinion.”
  • What’s missing from the media discussions of Wikipedia categories and sexism: “It’s not always the case, but in this instance the system worked. Filipacchi saw something on Wikipedia that she thought was wrong. She drew attention to it. Now it’s being discussed and fixed. That’s how Wikipedia works.”

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You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

I’ll be post-linkspam in the post-patriarchy (30 April 2013)

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  • How One College Is Closing The Computer Science Gender Gap: “There are still relatively few women in tech. Maria Klawe wants to change that. As president of Harvey Mudd College, a science and engineering school in Southern California, she’s had stunning success getting more women involved in computing.”
  • Calling All Hackers: “Hackers treat the paradigm of “some people are in charge and some people aren’t” as social damage, and they invent ways to route around it.”
  • Reviews, Genre, and Gender ? Radish Reviews: In the recent dustup over whether female-authored SF/F books get reviewed, an entire review outlet was left out because its bread and butter is romance-novel reviews, even though its SF/F reviews are not limited to romance.
  • Feminist Hackerspaces as Safer Spaces?: “In the case of feminist hackerspaces, such safer spaces are not only about safer speaking spaces, but also safer making and trying spaces.”
  • Tech companies that only hire men: Quotes from job descriptions that specify gender. Really??
  • For all the women I have loved who were dragged through the mud: “I’ve read a lot of great essays about how fandom is female-majority and creates a female gaze and a safe space for women and etc. But spend five minutes in fandom and you’ll have an unsettling question. Why does a female-majority, feminist culture hate female characters so much?”
  • little girls R better at designing heroes than you: Superheroes based on costumes worn by little girls.
  • Journalists don?t understand Wikipedia sometimes: “Thus, a well-meaning attempt to include women in the main categorization for American novelists (where many of them were never listed in the first place) may result in women writers no longer being easily identifiable to those who might want to find them.”
  • Dropcam’s Beef with Brogramming, Late Nights, and Free Dinners: “[M]any startups in Silicon Valley, especially the ones I was familiar with, would only hire young, male programmers, people who didn’t have families and weren’t going to have kids in the next few years… We do maternity and paternity leave and all of the things that used to be things that only big, mature companies did. That has allowed us to hire from a bigger group of people than we would be able to if we were part of the brogrammer culture.”
  • Women Are Earning Greater Share of STEM Degrees, but Doctorates Remain Gender-Skewed: “Possible explanations include gender bias, the prospect of short-term postdoctoral jobs that complicate child rearing, and a lack of role models.”
  • Bacon is Bad For You: A talk about developer monoculture and how it puts all of us (even the vegans) at risk.

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You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

They Might Be Linkspam (23 April 2013)

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You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

The left hand of linkspam (19 April 2013)

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You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

Quick hit: WHO invented the internet?

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I’m betting there’s some of you who’ll want to discuss this awful article that starts by claiming that MEN invented the internet. But rather than quote the irritating original article in this post, I’m going to quote part of this rebuttal from Xeni Jardin:

You guys, ladies suck at technology and the New York Times is ON IT.

Radia “Mother of the Internet” Perlman and the ghosts of RADM Grace Hopper, Ada Lovelace and every woman who worked in technology for the past 150 years frown upon you, sir. Women may have been invisible, but the work we did laid the groundwork for more visible advancements now credited to more famous men.

“Men are credited with inventing the internet.” There. Fixed it for you.


I ragequit this article like, 10 times, and couldn’t get past that awful opening line.

Read the rest of the rebuttal on BoingBoing, or read the original article.

So, uh, yeah. Here’s a post so you can have a comment thread on the topic that is moderated by feminists.

From comments: this is what a computer scientist looks like

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From comments on Women in science: contrary to popular belief, some of us are actually alive!, Lindsey has started a Flickr group for “This is what a computer scientist looks like”. The group itself has this description:

This group collects photos of computer scientists, with a particular focus on women (may change later to include other underrepresented groups in CS).

If you are a woman in computer science, feel free to contribute a photo of yourself. If you’re contributing a photo of someone else, please make sure it’s a public photo that you have permission to share, preferably one taken at a public event such as a professional conference or workshop.

In the spirit of Photos of Mathematicians, we’re looking for modern, candid photos of currently active, not-necessarily-famous computer scientists. We’re not looking for historical photos.

So far, I am the only computer scientist. Fear me or displace me at the front of the queue!

Wednesday Geek Woman: Gertrude Blanch, algorithm design pioneer

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This is a guest post by Beth. Beth is a C++ programmer outside of Boston, MA.

A pioneer in algorithm design for both human and mechanical computers, Gertrude Blanch (February 2, 1897–January 1, 1996) ran the Mathematical Tables Project in New York City and continued to work on algorithm optimizations for mathematical questions until her death in 1996.

An early pioneer in numerical analysis and computation, she received her Ph.D. from Cornell University in algebraic geometry in 1935. She published over thirty papers on functional approximation, numerical analysis and Mathieu functions and became a pivotal figure during the transition from human computers to mechanical, digital computers.

Having run a team of 450 human computers at Mathematical Tables Project in New York City she was in an excellent position to discuss the construction of algorithms during the early days of punch-card machines. In her interview with the Smithsonian she discusses constructing parallel processing algorithms such that the non-mathematicians employed as computers could calculate the tables without understanding the complex math involved, and the use of smoothing function to produce checksums that allowed manuscripts to be proofread for typing errors. Later on she continued with mathematical research, finding ways to make up for mathematical deficiencies in computers designed for industry and quantifying practical considerations when investigating theoretical mathematics on computing machines. She was one of the three women to attend the 1948 customer conference of IBM computer customers. Essentially she stood at the intersection between theory and practicality at a tipping point in the history of mathematics.

She was at one point denied a security clearance after World War II due to suspicions that she might be a communist. In addition to her sister being a member of the Communist party, evidence offered against her included that she had never married or had children. When a hearing was called, her name was cleared and she later became a mathematician and instructor at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in California. She was elected a Fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1962 and was given the Federal Woman’s Award from President Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

Wikipedia: Gertrude Blanch
If you have access to IEEE Annels of History, you can read more about here in a piece they did: Gertrude Blanch of the Mathematical Tables Project.
Her papers are available at the Charles Babbage Institute.
You can read the Smithsonian oral history interview with her.

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This post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Kids these days spend so much time linkspamming they don’t know what real friendship is (14th January, 2010)

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  • tigtog has some tips for bloggers at How I minimise the online abuse I receive: So here is an assortment of technical tips & tricks whereby bloggers can cut down the volume and the repetition coming from this cyberbullying cadre of keyboard jockeys, making the harassment little more than a tiny hiss of background noise instead of an overwhelming flood of spite.
  • “Amazingly, less than 1 per cent of Silicon Valley investment money goes to women-founded technology companies. Less than 3 per cent of the money goes to companies with women as CEO.” From Melissa Clark-Reynolds’ Diary of an Entrepreneur
  • Eleni Stroulia writes about Women, Computing and Other Minorities “It seems to me that the fundamental reason why there are few women in CS is because our society still (and always) has a gender-specific value system”
  • Shameful Gender Discrimination at UC Davis Veterinary School: I thought at first that someone might be messing with me. It was unbelievable to me that someone would treat a pregnant student this way, leaving her [grades] to the [vote] of her classmates.
  • Syne Mitchell’s History in Code: After this initial taste of programming success, I decided I wanted to learn computer programming “for reals.” I knew that computers thought in binary, but I wasn’t able to find a binary programming book. So I settled for something called Assembly language. Unfortunately, I had no 8080-assembly compiler handy, so it quickly became an exercise of writing PEEK and POKE code calls on paper to store and recall variable amounts and then checking my work manually. Even a truly geeky thirteen-year-old girl will find this dull after a while.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the geekfeminism tag on delicious or the #geekfeminism tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.