by, for, and about women in science, technology, engineering, & math

• Stubbornella writes about discrimination and affirmative action based on gender in the world of computing. Money quote: in response to an affirmative action critic’s comment, “as long as there are no barriers for [women], and I can’t think of one, I don’t see a problem”, she says: “Um, dude, if your site was loading in 18 seconds but you couldn’t think of any reason for it, would you decide you didn’t have a performance problem?”
• Restructure! at Geek Feminism starts a controversial discussion by asserting that if you were hacking by age 8, you were privileged (touching on some of the same issues I raise in my post about when students should start learning computer science). Of course, as always happens when someone suggests that computing may not be a 100% perfect meritocracy with success based on innate ability, people (mostly men) come out of the woodwork in the comments to complain about how they couldn’t possibly be privileged and of course their success is 100% a function of their ability and not any other circumstances.
• The Free Software Foundation’s Women’s Caucus has put together a list of mentoring/menteeing resources.

• Congrats to the winners of the Spring 2010 Systers Pass It On Awards, who win small amounts of funding to help them pursue their technical projects/careers!
• New blog My Fault, I’m Female collects stories of everyday sexism — with results both depressing and comforting.
• Eric Ries writes about diversity in startups, and how his perspective changed when he started doing “blind hiring” (having identifying information on resumes blocked out before he reviewed them)
• Attendees of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing are sharing their favorite memories of the event — did you go? Share your thoughts here on Stemming!
• The Free Software Foundation’s Women’s Caucus has published their recommendations on encouraging girls and women to develop interest in free software

This weekend was the LibrePlanet conference here in Cambridge — the Free Software Foundation‘s yearly gathering. (For those new to the idea of free software, here’s a little background — some people use the terms “free software” and “open-source software” interchangeably, but they have different connotations.)

Women are underrepresented in STEM in general; they tend to be even more underrepresented in computing (women make up about 20% of programmers); but in FOSS (free and open-source software) women are only 2% of contributors. There are lots of potential reasons for this: free software is mostly driven by volunteer work, and women are more likely to be responsible for childcare and “second shift” household duties and thus have little time available for volunteer code work; the free software community has a lot of participants who are, well, less than respectful of diversity; and there’s a perceived barrier to entry when potential new contributors worry that their code won’t be up to the project’s standards or that they’ll be criticized for not being up-to-speed with the project’s practices (revision control, packaging, etc.).

So, this year FSF membership coordinator Deb Nicholson organized a Women’s Caucus as a conference track including panels and talks about what women are doing in FOSS and techniques that some FOSS projects have successfully used to attract and retain women. (Notes from the caucus available on the wiki).

On Friday night, Deb organized a dinner for women attending the event and other local technical women — it was great to meet all these ladies, including people I’d only heard of online, and see what women in the area and at the conference are up to in the tech world.

The conference featured a panel on attracting and retaining women; Denise Paolucci, Chris Ball, Erinn Clark, and Hanna Wallach, from the Dreamwidth project (which is 70% women) and the Debian Women initiative (which quickly grew the community of women involved in the Debian project from 2 out of 900 to many more), talked about specific techniques which worked for their projects. Most of the techniques that work to attract and retain women will also work to attract and retain more people in general — those who are new to coding, or to free software, or who are underconfident in their skills or nervous about joining a new community. The Debian project learned that emailing people individually was much more effective than general calls to action; they also discovered that the more women joined their project, the more welcoming the project seemed to new women. And by getting men who were already active in the Debian project involved with Debian Women, they ensured that the new women who joined already had a connection to experienced participants in the bigger project, which helped them integrate into becoming fully participating members more quickly. Dreamwidth learned that naming specific groups or types of people in their now-famous diversity statement helped people see themselves as a potential part of the community. They also worked hard at mentoring newcomers and congratulating them on their contributions (even if the code didn’t work) — they found that highlighting contributors’ first code commits or other contributions in their weekly newsletter provided a form of recognition and a way to get a psychological boost from a “level-up” without encouraging the competitive culture that many women find intimidating.

Leslie Hawthorn gave a talk about mentoring (some takeaways: share your own mistakes and how you felt when you were new, don’t expect your mentee to be just like you, and don’t expect perfection from your mentee; and some links: the Google Summer of Code Mentoring Guide and an article on mentoring in open-source communities). Leslie works with the Google Summer of Code project, which gives stipends to students to work on open source projects over the summer — so she’s helped a lot of new contributors get involved in the FOSS world. And Selena Decklemann gave a talk about 50 ways to contribute to or help a FOSS project besides coding. Hopefully her slides will be up on her blog soon, since they were pretty awesome but unfortunately I wasn’t able to take notes on this one.

I also met some of the people from the OpenHatch project, which seems like a really cool way to help newbies get involved in FOSS projects — they’ve set up a website where project maintainers can post bugs or tasks that they need help with, and would-be contributors can browse for something that interests them or click the “I want to help!” button to add themselves to a list of people who are available and interested (so a project maintainer can contact them later).

Overall LibrePlanet was a great time! I loved meeting such a wide variety of people and learning about all the neat things people are doing in the free software community. If you aren’t already going to technical conferences — you should start! If you’re not up for the commitment of a registration fee or travel, you could see if there’s something like the BarCamp unconference in your area.

This weekend I’m going to some of the LibrePlanet events — I met some great ladies at the women in free software dinner last night, and tomorrow we’ll talk more about ways to increase women’s participation in the free software community.

I also gave my first technical presentation yesterday! I gave an introduction to WordPress talk. I was definitely pretty nervous and didn’t know what to expect with this presentation — I can tell that I still have a lot to learn about giving effective presentations, but overall it went pretty well and I am definitely glad I took advantage of this opportunity!

Some links of interest this week:

• Under the Microscope’s “Message 2 a Younger Me” series has collected a bunch of interesting stories
• They also collected information on Women’s History Month events that are science-related
• Lisa Barone at Outspoken Media speaks out against women in tech cutting each other down
• Ada Lovelace Day t-shirts!
• Nola at DevChix blogs about her experiments with remote pair programming

Here in Boston, it’s one of the first spring-like days: hooray! Here are some links for your weekend enjoyment:

• Brown University’s Artemis Program for 9th grade girls interested in science and tech is seeking funding.

• The Free Software Foundation is also seeking donations to their Women’s Travel Fund to help get more women to this year’s LibrePlanet conference in Cambridge

• The National Center for Women & Information Technology is offering an award for high school girls interested in computing.

• 15 Female Scientists Who Changed the World — who else would you include?

• Rebecca Skloot talks about her new book on Henrietta Lacks, a poor black tobacco farmer whose cancer cells were harvested without her consent — descendants of those cells have contributed to a lot of advances in cancer research and are still in use in labs.

• And just for LOLz: Scientific Americat!