restructure posts

august links

posted by clara Aug 2, 2010 @ 3:43 PM • 0 comments

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.