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

In addition to blogs and other public online resources, one of the great ways the internet can support women in technology is through mailing lists. Lists have the advantage that your message asking for advice or suggesting a meetup goes directly into people’s inboxes — but even more importantly, lists and the messages on them can be private, so you can complain about a co-worker or ask about a delicate situation on a private mailing list and feel safe saying things you wouldn’t want to share on a public blog. Women-only or women-primarily lists are also great places to ask technical questions with less fear of embarrassment for asking something that might be obvious to someone with more experience (most of these lists have policies explicitly supporting “newbie” questions and requiring a polite, friendly attitude from anyone who responds).

Here are some of the lists I’m on:

• Systers — this list has been around since it was founded by Anita Borg in 1987(!). It’s a big list with a lot of members. People on the list share job offers, ask for advice, or just rant about their experiences. Systers is part of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, and in addition to running the mailing list, sponsors the Pass-It-On Awards (which are funded by donations from members).

• Linuxchix — this organization for women interested in Linux/free/open-source software (motto: “Be polite. Be helpful.”) has several lists with different purposes. Grrls-only is a private, non-archived list only for women (which makes it particularly suitable for discussing sensitive issues); to join the list you have to confirm that you are a woman and interested in Linux. Part of the point of this list is to provide a resource for women trying to learn more about Linux to ask questions without encountering the condescension or sexism that Linux-using men in other fora are sometimes prone to. Men are welcome in the other LinuxChix lists, like Programming or Techtalk, but the lists will still be more women-dominated than your average technical mailing list.

• Devchix — this list is specifically for women who are programmers (while the other lists above are broader in scope, encompassing fields like system administration or simply using Linux). There are a lot of vocal members who are Ruby programmers, but the list isn’t Ruby-exclusive and you can probably find “chix” on there who use whatever your language of choice is. Devchix also has a group blog on technical issues.

I don’t know if there are similar lists available for women in other areas of STEM — if you’re in a non-computing field, please share your experiences with mailing lists in the comments!

• 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

• At Geek Feminism, they’re putting together a thread collecting pointers to (legit, scientific) research on women in CS/STEM.

• Tracy at Skepchick explains that even though she’s female, Sex and the City isn’t her Star Wars, Star Wars is her Star Wars. Bonus: comment thread addresses the issue of women bragging about/being respected for liking “guy things” and/or disliking “girl things”.

• Palo Alto Online profiles several female entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley startup world.

• Geek feminists speak out against a campaign from Electronic Frontiers Australia which promotes an open internet and anti-mandatory-filtering stance (good!) via the sexist moms-are-the-least-technical-demographic-we-can-think-of trope (bad!).

• Misty at Shakesville highlights a promotion from an agile technology vendor whose name assumes programmers are men — and their response to complaints, well, leaves something to be desired.

• Female Science Professor responds to an email from a man who feels left out because his department-wide email list received an invitation to a women-only networking event.

• Check out Diaspora — this fall, they’re planning to launch an AGPL’d, GPG-secured, distributed, decentralized, host-your-own-profile social network, helping users regain control over their data. Awesome! I also love how they funded this project using Kickstarter — the four programmers (all dudes, alas) pledged to work full-time on the project this summer if they could raise enough money to pay their bills (which they did, and more!).

As always, submit your own links in the comments or in a separate post! Happy weekend!

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.