Enjoy!
- “Giving Women the Access Code” – a profile of Dr. Maria Klawe of Harvey Mudd, leading efforts to get undergraduate women at Harvey Mudd to major in computer science. Fun fact: all first-year women at Harvey Mudd get a free trip to the Grace Hopper conference.
- Etsy Hacker Grants. Etsy is “announcing a new scholarship and sponsorship program in collaboration with Hacker School, focused on bringing more women into Engineering jobs at Etsy and across our industry.”
- Archival photos of women in science from the Smithsonian Institution (AASWOMEN newsletter). Also: Emmy Noether, a mathematician whose work provides crucial underpinning for modern physics.
- A profile of the Ada Initiative on the Wikimedia blog, mentioning that Mary Gardiner has been chosen to keynote this year’s conference for the Wikimedia community.
- Jessa Crispin interviews programmer and novelist Ellen Ullman, author of memoir Close to the Machine and novel The Bug. (Excerpt from The Bug, previous interview.)
- New Debian diversity statement, and discussion at LWN.
- Andromeda Yelton’s “my first hackathon; or, gender, status, code, and sitting at the table”.
- New hackerspace starting in Berkeley, California. “We are the first women’s hackerspace….. Because our kids learn by watching us, we provide on-site childcare every time we meet.”
- “A little over sixty years ago, a young, intelligent black woman named Gwen was graduating from Allenby Junior Public School in Toronto.” Followup and discussion.
- Elizabeth Naramore suggesting more LEGO and less punchbuggy:
The dynamic the kids have when putting all things aside and just being creative is completely different than the Punch Buggy game. In theory, they could argue that the car isn’t really a car, because it doesn’t really look like a car, and the door isn’t a door at all, and that it really should be used for a window. But they don’t. They just create. They don’t criticize. They don’t try and convince each other that the other person is wrong. They don’t make assumptions about what the other person’s intentions were, or how they are feeling. They just create. They encourage, they discuss, and they create.
This is the tech culture that I want…
- “Well it was wonderful for awhile”: on Wonder Woman.
- On affirmative action and the quality of end results. Relatedly, the Royal Society of Edinburgh releases “Tapping all our talents. Women in STEM: a Strategy for Scotland”.
- On the “Girls Around Me” app: “Misogynists around me” and “A picture’s worth a thousand words… thoughts on internet privacy.
- A suggested commitment to improving the situation of women in technical fields:
- Commit to treating women as professionals in your field.
- Commit to calling out situations in which women in your field are being treated unprofessionally.
- Make your commitment visible somehow.
- The magazine Computer Science for Fun from Queen Mary, University of London has published their annual issue focusing on women in the sciences.
- “The first European girls-only “mathematical Olympiad” competition is being hosted by Cambridge University.”
- “Programmers being dicks.”
- “Mirror, Mirror” breaks a few gender stereotypes.
- “Let Me Tell You About the Birds and the Bees: Gender and the Fallout Over Christopher Priest” by Catherynne M. Valente.
- Decoding Dragons on an issue with Geek Chic Cosmetics.
Disappointing a few customers who like a pun is not the same as being respectful of your customer base at large and the issues that face women everywhere….The context doesn’t obscure or render it neutral and harmless.
- Dr. Barbara Corkey is pioneering metabolism research and fighting anti-fat bigotry.
- Nichelle Nichols & Barack Obama signing “Live long and prosper.”
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.