“Gangbang Interviews” and “Bikini Shots”: Silicon Valley’s Brogrammer Problem

I’ve had a few people ask me if this sort of behavior is the norm or the exception. As a long-time resident of the San Francisco Bay area and fringe participant in the tech startup scene, and a veteran of over 100 tech conferences, I can confidently answer this with: Brogrammer culture is utterly pervasive in this field. The norm, especially in hot new startups with lots of VC funding and the potential to cash out big, is brogrammer culture. In Silicon Valley and similar areas, it takes significant, deliberate effort to create a culture in which women don’t feel marginalized.

My opinion is that VCs should start insisting on anti-brogrammer measures in the companies they fund. Start early and the transition to obeying anti-discrimination laws when you hit 55 employees will be less painful. And the companies you fund will be more profitable, have a higher chance of success, and use less capital if you have women involved in managing the company.

My conclusion is that I have to be more careful about everything I say publicly (duh, Sherlock). That goes for my “personal” blog, too, so expect even fewer posts here.

Deciding to be more circumspect feels weird and scary, but worth it. Because I was not allowed to say the truth about our screwed up, abusive family situation when I was growing up, part of feeling safe as an adult has been saying the truth about screwed up, abusive things.

Sometimes people tell me that they think I’m brave because I spoke up about something controversial. This always cracks me up a little. What they don’t know is that I’m more afraid of not speaking up – my fear of saying something controversial pales in comparison to my fear of being a silent, helpless victim again. At some deep level, I’m afraid that if I don’t speak up, I’ll wake up tomorrow 14 years old, trapped in a trailer near Moriarty with my abusive parents.

But I truly want to change the world for the better, and this is only one of a number of personality changes I’ve had to make in order to give the Ada Initiative a chance of succeeding. If it will help other women, I will confront the fear and get through it. Bleargh.

I still need a venue where I can say what I think to a sympathetic audience without carefully vetting my words first. Fortunately, not all the world is Google+, and I can use locked Twitter accounts, private Dreamwidth posts, and pseudonyms. I have a really good pseudonym I’ve been meaning to try…

Unfortunately, we aren’t usually taught what “free speech” means. We get intensely nervous whenever someone says the word “censorship” to the point that people use it to manipulate us into things we’d never do otherwise. An example is people claiming that advertisers must buy ads on Rush Limbaugh’s show or else they’ll cause the downfall of the freest country on earth. (The geek equivalent usually involves a mailing list and misogyny or homophobia.)

The fear that we’ll end up a repressive autocratic state is a major one, and rightly so. But the stuff that people think they have to defend – forcing a private entity to publish speech it finds objectionable – is not what protects us from that fate.

Here’s what free speech actually means in the U.S. and how it protects us:

1. Free speech is shorthand for the First Amendment. It says:
   

   Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

   Notice that it forbids Congress from making a law abridging the freedom of speech. It doesn’t say anything about anyone else.

2. Free speech is about stopping government censorship. What is dangerous and leads us into a repressive system is the government using its massive power to silence people who threaten its power. The press is the watchdog of the U.S. government; without it the powerful will move to consolidate their power and we’ll be helpless. Look at Putin and the journalists he’s murdered – that’s what we’re worried about.
3. The First Amendment says nothing about non-governmental entities. Things like newspapers, radio, and book publishers don’t have a huge army, the police, the courts, or other major sources of power to abuse. (Media monopolies excepted, hence on-going attempts to prevent it.) The government can’t stop someone from saying racist things on the street corner, but you can sure as heck kick them out of your living room. Definitely no one has to pay to publish someone’s speech – try telling Random House that free speech means they have to publish your novel. Good luck!
4. Freedom to say what you want is not freedom from people reacting to what you say. It’s your right to say something hateful and rude. It’s my right to stop paying you to do it, to tell you that you are a jerk, to fire you, or to stop being your friend. Think about it, if free speech really worked the way people often think, then deleting death threats from your blog comments would turn us into fascist Italy. I think we can agree that that doesn’t seem too likely.

I hope that made sense. The main message I want to get across here is that you don’t have to allow people to say anything they want on your turf in order to preserve your freedom and your system of government. Your conference, mailing list, or company can ban or punish or delete whatever it wants without compromising the integrity of our country. Free speech and its power to keep us safe will continue to work even if we refuse to allow hateful commentary in our communities.


]]> http://blog.valerieaurora.org/2012/03/10/what-free-speech-really-means/feed/ 6 vaurora preamble http://blog.valerieaurora.org/2012/03/07/the-practical-reality-of-contraception-a-guide-for-men/ http://blog.valerieaurora.org/2012/03/07/the-practical-reality-of-contraception-a-guide-for-men/#comments Wed, 07 Mar 2012 08:05:51 +0000 vaurora http://blog.valerieaurora.org/2012/03/07/the-practical-reality-of-contraception-a-guide-for-men/ Continue reading →]]>


Image by Ceridwen CC-BY-SA-2.0-fr

If you listened to the scoffers of no-copay contraception coverage in the U.S., you’d think that preventing pregnancy was as simple as waltzing down to the local Walgreens and batting your eyelashes at the pharmacist.  This demonstrates with almost total certainty that the scoffer is male, since the vast majority of women in the U.S. have used birth control and know the expense, fear, danger, and pure frustration of preventing pregnancy.

I can understand the scoffers’ point of view a little.  As a kid, I also thought birth control was easy and simple.  That lasted up till the first day I took a birth control pill.  This blog post tells the anonymized stories of myself and women I know.  Like Sandra Fluke, I’m talking about regular everyday women, not medical rarities or my friend’s ex-boyfriend’s sister-in-law.  I hope this will help men understand the difficulty and expense of birth control, and perhaps even volunteer to help out with it in some way.

Let’s start with estrogen-based hormonal birth control and health.  I know women who get life-threatening blood clots on estrogen birth control (if the clot gets lodged in a blood vessel, effects range from loss of a limb to death).  Others have mood swings so bad that their partners threaten to break up with them and their boss calls them into their office to ask why they’re so mean and bitchy all of a sudden.  Don’t laugh – losing your partner or your job is serious shit, and many women decide to risk pregnancy and an abortion rather than the certainty of being abandoned and broke.  Another side effect is feeling like you’re going to barf, which usually goes away after a few weeks, but not for everyone.  More side effects and health problems abound, but those are the ones I know about offhand.

Let’s talk access now.  We’ll start with the easiest way to get the pill: go to your doctor and get a prescription and head down to the pharmacy.  Oh wait, it’s illegal to write a prescription valid for more than a year, so you have to go back to your doctor once a year.  Most doctors won’t write a prescription if you haven’t seen them in person in a year.  Also, they want to do a full pelvic exam every year, and some doctors won’t refill unless you have the exam as a way to force you to get the exam.  And I see why, it’s a pretty awful experience usually.  Many medical professionals learned how to do pelvic exams on unconscious women pre-surgery (many of whom did not consent).  As a result, they just kinda jam their hand in there and stab around, poking at things randomly, ignoring your winces and “Ow!”  Then comes the Pap smear, which involves scraping flesh off your cervix, which hurts even more than it sounds like it would.

The first time this I ran out of my birth control prescription, my doctor was booked for weeks in advance but I got an appointment for a pelvic exam a couple of days before I ran out.  Of course, if you’re in an HMO, your chances of getting an appointment in reasonable time are even lower.  If you don’t have health insurance, well, hope your local women’s health clinic has an opening.  Oh wait, you don’t have a local women’s health clinic?  I wonder who’s been fighting to close them down?

On the day of my first appointment to get my birth control refilled, I got stuck in traffic and missed my appointment.  They refused to let me in, at which point I broke down into tears and explained that I was almost out of birth control.  They were nice and gave me a one month refill, just that one time.  All of this was while I was a student and had a pretty flexible schedule.  Many women can’t just run off in the middle of the day for a non-life-threatening medical visit.  And if you miss 2 days of your birth control, you’re at risk of pregnancy for around a month.

When you have the prescription, refills are astonishingly hard.  Most health insurance companies refuse to refill a prescription until it’s within a few days of running out.  So you often have only 3 or 4 days to get your refill – god forbid you are busy or sick.  Sometimes the pharmacy is out of your prescription.  Sometimes your health insurance is having a random hiccup and suddenly thinks you don’t have coverage and it takes several days to fix.  I no longer fill a prescription without coverage and submit the reimbursement (a hellish process that takes months) because often it turns out that you’re violating some subtle rule that the pharmacy won’t tell you about unless they can run it through the insurance company software, which it can only do if it thinks you’re covered, which it doesn’t.  Then you’re stuck with some giant $70 or $200 bill or whatever.  And there’s always a push to allow pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions that violate that personal beliefs – hope you don’t run into one of them!

Let’s talk cost.  The fantasy of Planned Parenthood handing out birth control like candy isn’t true.  While they often offer birth control at a discount to low-income women, I don’t personally know anyone who got free birth control from Planned Parenthood or anywhere else.  There are individual programs in certain areas that allow qualified women to get free birth control, but you can be ineligible for all sorts of reasons even if you are broke, right now (a great time to get pregnant, we can all agree).  Note also that Planned Parenthood clinics are few and often hard to get to, especially if you don’t have a car.  Often the idiots promulgating this fantasy utopia are the very same people who want to defund Planned Parenthood and close down their clinics.  Who’s going to pay for this free birth control?  Maybe it will fall out of the sky like manna?

I’ve seen articles quoting low prices for generic birth control, like $8 a month.  This works great if you are one of the women for whom the generics work.  However, there are hundreds of different birth control pills for a reason: Women are different, and the same birth control that works for one woman can make another woman desperately sick, and simply not work for another one.  They differ in dose, in timing, in the ratio of different hormones, and other ways.  Some rely on progesterone instead of estrogen.  I’ve switched birth control pills several times for these reasons as my body changed.  I’ve never paid less than $30/month for my birth control, even when I lived on $6000 a year in college.

For women who can’t take estrogen birth control pills for health or sanity reasons, things get waaaay more complicated – and expensive.  Let’s start with IUDs – hundreds or thousands of dollars, and I’ll spare you the graphic details of insertion and just say that your cervix is expressly designed to discourage you from this kind of activity (and they don’t use anesthesia, either).  Nuvaring is a low-dose alternative to oral estrogen, but it’s not low-cost (my copay was the highest allowed, $45/month).  Condoms, well, you do the math based on your own proclivities, but be sure to factor in use of Plan B emergency contraception several times a year (I paid $50) and if that fails (as it does), an abortion (several hundred dollars).  I’ve never bought a diaphragm so I don’t know how much it costs, but it also requires factoring in an abortion a year.  And don’t get me started about sterilization – most doctors won’t consider it for childless women or women under 30, and you can guess the cost, pain, and risk of death involved.  We’re not talking $8 a month here for most women, no matter what.

Now let’s talk failure rates.  You have to take the birth control pill every single day, within a few hours of the same time, to get that 98% or 99% effective rate.  Big whoop, you may think.  I take my blood pressure medicine every day.  Usually.  Actually, it’s pretty hard, even with those little day-of-the-week labels on the pills.  I was always scared to death of being caught away from home overnight without my pills and occasionally did, due to car breakdowns or unreliable friends or snowstorms.  Now I pop out 3 of my pills and carry them with me in a little pill box everywhere I go, even out to the grocery store.  This works only because I have a version of birth control with the same dose all the time, which not all of them do.  And I’ve never lost my pills in my luggage or something like that.  If that happens, insurance won’t cover it and you’ll have to pay full price, if you’re even in a place where you can get your prescription filled.

Then there’s just plain forgetfulness or confusion.  I put my pills on my bathroom sink where I have to see them everyday, but that’s not an option for everyone.  I once got up so early that I took my birth control, and then an hour later was so tired that I thought it was the following day and took the second pill.  That took weeks to get my cycle back to normal and safe from pregnancy.  It only takes two days of missed pills before you’re having to convince your boyfriend to use a condom, and he’s all whiny and “Why do we have to, it’s almost no chance,” and of course just forgetting because you’re used to not needing them, and whoops, the condom came off and now you have to get Plan B within 72 hours, what, your pharmacy is closed on the weekends and your doctor isn’t answering your phone calls and you have to work a double shift on Monday?  Sucks to be you.  Good thing Plan B isn’t offered over the counter, that really makes America a better place to live!

Try taking a pill every single day, without fail for a year, and then tell me it’s easy.  I have to take a lot of pills every day, so I put them in one of those pill cases with the day of the week, and I still screw it up all the time – at least once a month.  Most medications are a little more forgiving of missed doses than birth control.  Throw in international travel and whee, even more fun.

I’ve left a lot of the difficulties of contraception out of this post because it’s already too long.  Suffice to say, birth control is hard to get, expensive, and error-prone.  It’s also often painful, life-threatening (or life-saving), and humiliating.  Health insurance companies want to encourage women to use birth control anyway, because women on birth control cost them less money than the reverse, on average.  Insisting that they be allowed to provide no-copay contraception to their female clients regardless of their employers’ ideas strikes me as totally reasonable.


Tagged: feminism ]]> http://blog.valerieaurora.org/2012/03/07/the-practical-reality-of-contraception-a-guide-for-men/feed/ 11 vaurora Image http://blog.valerieaurora.org/2012/02/20/i-am-disabled/ http://blog.valerieaurora.org/2012/02/20/i-am-disabled/#comments Tue, 21 Feb 2012 04:53:55 +0000 vaurora http://blog.valerieaurora.org/?p=708 Continue reading →]]> Most of my friends know this already, but it’s time I made a public statement.

I am partially disabled, permanently.

I will become more disabled as time goes by. The most visible effect is that I have cut way back on my travel. International travel is so painful that I do it only when absolutely required.

I have Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, type I or II (genetic testing hasn’t discovered my exact variant yet). I was diagnosed at a UCSF research facility based on a physical exam and the medical histories of myself and some of my family members. I am grateful I don’t have type IV, which often results in early sudden death. Instead, I have normal life expectancy, I’m just disabled and in pain starting a couple of decades earlier than the usual aging process.

I’ve done a lot of research on Ehlers-Danlos, and I’ll explain it in more detail later in this post. But first I want to say what ED means for me. It means I’m in pain most days of my life. It means sometimes I can’t walk more than 20 feet (once I had to beg someone to bring me a rolling chair so I could get to the bathroom and back by myself). It means that travel for more than a few hours causes me intense pain, and takes me several days to recover from. It means I sprained my ankle 40 times and broke it twice before I had surgery to stabilize it. It means any time I attempt to exercise, sooner or later I injure something that won’t stop hurting without a week of bed rest. It means I can’t work a “desk job” because I can’t sit at a desk without pain.

Ehlers-Danlos is a disorder affecting certain types of collagen. Its outward signs include flexible joints and soft, sometimes stretchy skin. People with ED often injure themselves easily, dislocate joints repeatedly, scar badly, have organ prolapses, and experience other wonderful symptoms.

Initially, ED just made me exceptionally flexible. As a kid, I excelled in gymnastics. I could always touch my toes – actually, put my palms flat on the ground. I was incredibly active as a kid and teenager: besides gymnastics, I rode and trained horses, slung 80 lb bales of hay around, carried 80 lbs of hot water at a time to the animals on cold mornings, and hiked. I was very proud of being strong and took every chance to lift boxes or carry things.

The first sign of trouble came when I sprained my ankle as a teenager, so badly I fractured it. I followed the physical therapy instructions carefully and thought I had recovered. Then I sprained my ankle again, stepping off a curb. And again. And again. Four sprains in one year.

The doctors kept telling me that I needed to strengthen my muscles. My calves were already huge and I was a weight-lifter, but I followed their instructions anyway. Another sprain. I bought every ankle brace on the planet. I sprained my ankle while wearing the different braces. I bought enormous hiking boots. I sprained it wearing the boots. (I remember now that I bought a pair of “nice” hiking boots to wear to my first Linux conference because I was too ashamed to wear my regular boots.)

Eventually, 40 sprains later, I had surgery to stabilize my ankle. I’ve had zero sprains since then, for which I am hugely grateful. I never knew when I would be walking around on my daily business and suddenly fall on my face and be stuck in bed with an ice pack for a week.

It’s been like that ever since, just with different parts of my body. Once I’ve injured a ligament or other connective tissue, it never completely recovers. Some things they know how to fix, others they don’t. Most of the time I am misdiagnosed or treated incorrectly because they assume my ligaments will behave like normal people’s.

Right now the worst is a recurring back injury that I first got on the way home from a Linux conference in New York City. That injury has no fix, so I have to avoid aggravating it. This means no sitting in most chairs, limited standing, no lifting, no carrying things on one shoulder (not even a MacBook Air!), walking only a few blocks at a time, no running, no bicycling. I re-injured it a couple of weeks ago and had to teach a workshop wearing a back brace, before going home to spend a week on the couch.

It’s been 4 years since I was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. It’s taken me that long to begin to accept the new me, and the changes in my life. I did stupid things like hike the Grand Canyon when I was in between injuries because I thought that hey, maybe I had this thing licked, I was strong enough now to avoid injuring myself. I was wrong.

This blog post is one more step along the path of acceptance. While I still believed that I would get better at some point, I tried to hide my disability. No point in telling people about something that’s going to go away, right? Now I’m realizing that it’s a downward slide. By taking really good care of myself, I can slow things down. That means letting people know that I can’t fly to Switzerland for a talk, that sitting in an office chair for 8 hours puts me in pain the entire next day, that I will never, ever take you up on that skiing trip.

I’m disabled.

A note on the mechanics of Ehlers-Danlos

There’s kind of a cool application of combinatorics in Ehlers-Danlos. The deal is that collagen proteins are made of 4 pieces, arranged like a capital ‘E’. The backbone is made of one protein subunit, and the 3 short arms are made of 3 identical protein subunits. The collagen protein only works if all 4 pieces are correct.

What happens in Ehlers-Danlos is that one of your two copies of the gene that makes the proteins for the 3 short arms is bad – it makes a deformed protein. So half of the short arms made are bad. When the collagen assembles itself, it randomly acquires 3 short arms from the available supply, which is 50% good subunits and 50% bad subunits. There are 8 equally likely possible arrangements:

GGG BGG GBG GGB BBG BGB GBB BBB

The only one that actually functions correctly is the GGG arrangement. So 7/8ths of the collagen your body produces is unusable, and ends up recycled or digested or otherwise thrown away by the cell protein checking mechanisms.

Having only 1/8th of the usual supply of a particular collagen type (there are several different types of collagen, and different Ehlers-Danlos types are related to defects in different collagen genes) is surprisingly unnoticeable for some collagen types. If you have Ehlers-Danlos type IV, the walls of your arteries and organs are weakened and you are often die suddenly of an aortic aneurism or ruptured bowel or something similar. More obscure types of Ehlers-Danlos have pretty awful manifestations. But in most cases, the only obvious sign is flexible joints.

Read more on Wikipedia.


]]> http://blog.valerieaurora.org/2012/02/20/i-am-disabled/feed/ 2 vaurora http://blog.valerieaurora.org/2012/02/13/politicians-should-ban-super-pacs-in-self-defense/ http://blog.valerieaurora.org/2012/02/13/politicians-should-ban-super-pacs-in-self-defense/#comments Tue, 14 Feb 2012 00:12:48 +0000 vaurora http://blog.valerieaurora.org/?p=686 Continue reading →]]> If this season’s Republican primary battle seems even more wacko, out of touch with reality, and farcical than usual, you’re not alone.  There’s a simple explanation: Super PACs allow a select few individual people or organizations who are notably out of touch with reality – the super rich – to heavily influence political campaigns.

If you’re like me, you’ve wondered how so many candidates who clearly could not win in a contest with Obama are still stumbling around the primaries like the living dead. The most obvious example is Newt Gingrich: the vast majority of Republicans don’t believe he has a chance of winning and wouldn’t want him to be president anyway. What keeps his campaign going? Answer: one eccentric old billionaire who likes his position on Israel. Before the days of Super PACs, Sheldon Adelson would be able to express his opinion up to $2,500 per campaign. Now, he can single-handedly keep a failing candidate in the presidential race.

Think of the billionaires you know. Most of them are no Warren Buffets. Now imagine them having 100,000 votes to your one. Yeah.

This should frighten and discombobulate any political party that actually wants to win. In the end, while money is powerful, only so many votes can be influenced by campaign financing. By allowing individual super-rich people (or organizations) to heavily influence the early campaign, parties may end up with unelectable nominees competing in the final contest.

Oh yeah, we’ll also end up with even more incompetent and out-of-touch people in office. But who cares about that?


Tagged: politics ]]> http://blog.valerieaurora.org/2012/02/13/politicians-should-ban-super-pacs-in-self-defense/feed/ 0 vaurora http://blog.valerieaurora.org/2012/01/10/snowed-under-in-australia/ http://blog.valerieaurora.org/2012/01/10/snowed-under-in-australia/#comments Wed, 11 Jan 2012 00:32:53 +0000 vaurora http://blog.valerieaurora.org/?p=682 Continue reading →]]> Currently, I’m sitting in a coffee shop in a suburb of Sydney, scandalizing the owners by pouring my green tea into a cup of ice. They even came out and asked me questions about my iced tea, whereupon I listed all the different kinds of iced tea: rooibos, black, decaf, mango, green, etc. This makes up slightly for my embarrassment last night when I asked the server where the rest of my bento box was. (Answer: underneath the first half of the bento box.)

My task this morning is to merge the CiviCRM and PayPal databases of donors to get the addresses for sending people’s scarves, pendants, and stickers. I am doing this a week late. I am stricken with guilt but I had to finish other things before I got on the plane to Australia on Saturday. I finally sent the thank-you gifts to various people who were instrumental in starting the Ada Initiative this week, about 5 months late. I still need to hand deliver about half of them to people in San Francisco or Australia.

Next I am meeting my co-founder Mary in a few hours after the movers are done packing her house up, and we’re going into Sydney together to give an interview. Then we’re going to write several of the seven or so documents and presentations that are also a week late (or several weeks, or three months…).

The upside is that I love love love working with Mary in person. We originally planned to meet up twice a year, but we couldn’t swing it this year, so it’s been a year since we’ve met. We’re determined to make two visits happen this year. It’s like the sun coming up, working with someone else physically and in the same time zone, instead of toiling away on the Ada Initiative from my couch.

I theoretically had a week of vacation between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. It was my first week off since July, and I needed to relax badly, but instead I moved to San Francisco, which is almost but not quite entirely unlike taking vacation. I drove through Joshua Tree National Park for a teeny tiny mini-vacation.

I’ve never worked so hard so long without a break, and I can see the toll it’s taking. I make more mistakes, I’m less creative, my judgement is off, exercise is a distant fantasy. I need a real vacation, but if I take one in the next month or two, I might kill the Ada Initiative. So I keep going. I’m not at my best, but I just need to be good enough, for a little while longer.

I’m learning to appreciate what I can. My shabby-chic little Victorian-esque hotel in Chatswood has a balcony looking out on to what is to me exotic tropical jungle. I sit with my cup of tea and listen to the bizarre “oook-ook” animal noises and the “thwock” of the unknown form of sportsball taking place on the other side of the enormous eucalyptus trees. I eat enormous mangoes of some variety that never gets imported into the U.S. I wear perfume.

Inbox zero used to be a weekly occurrence for me. Now I am failing to even keep up with my work email. If all goes as planned, I’ll be able to catch up in March, maybe even February. I suspect a normal social life will have to wait until we’ve hired a part-time temp to do things like merge databases.

I’m officially on retransmit status on email: If it’s important, and I haven’t replied – go ahead and email me again. I’m on Twitter a lot, too. Things like @horse_ebooks take about the amount of time I have available for wasting time on the ‘net these days.


]]> http://blog.valerieaurora.org/2012/01/10/snowed-under-in-australia/feed/ 0 vaurora http://blog.valerieaurora.org/2011/12/13/a-personal-appeal-to-donate-to-the-ada-initiative/ http://blog.valerieaurora.org/2011/12/13/a-personal-appeal-to-donate-to-the-ada-initiative/#comments Tue, 13 Dec 2011 13:08:49 +0000 vaurora http://blog.valerieaurora.org/?p=678 Continue reading →]]> Cross-posted from Geek Feminism



I’m writing to ask you to donate to the Ada Initiative.

A year ago, a friend of mine was groped at an open source conference. Again. I’ve personally been groped twice at conferences myself.

But what shocked me most was the reaction to her blog post about it. Hundreds of people made comments like, “Women should expect to get groped at conferences,” and “It was her fault.” Many of these people were members of the open source community. Some were even prominent leaders – that I was forced to work with directly in my job as a Linux kernel developer! I realized I’d felt alienated, unwelcome, and unsafe as a woman in open source for many years. I was furious and determined to make a difference.

So I quit my job and co-founded the Ada Initiative with Mary Gardiner. We are the only non-profit dedicated solely to increasing the participation of women in open source, Wikipedia, fan culture, and other areas of open technology and culture. Currently, women make up only 2% of the open source community, and 9% of Wikipedia editors, down from 13% a year ago. We want to change these trends.

You can help by donating or by spreading the word about our donation drive now:



Help spread the word

We’re proud of what we’ve accomplished already. Since our founding in early 2011, we helped over 30 conferences and organizations adopt an anti-harassment policy, organized the first AdaCamp unconference, provided free consulting on high-profile sexist incidents, wrote and taught two workshops on supporting women in open tech/culture, and ran two surveys, among other things.

http://adainitiative.org/what-we-do/

We need your help to achieve our upcoming goals. The Ada Initiative is funded entirely by donations. Without your financial support, the Ada Initiative will have to shut down in early 2012.

http://supportada.org/donate

Your donations will fund upcoming projects like: Ada’s Advice, a comprehensive guide to resources for helping women in open tech/culture, Ada’s Careers, a career development community, and First Patch Week, where we help women create and submit their first open source patch. You can learn more about how the Ada Initiative is organized and operated on our web site and blog.

Whether or not you can donate yourself, you can help us by spreading the word about our fundraising drive. Please tell your friends about our important work. Email, blog, add our donation button to your web site, and tweet. You don’t have to stand on the sidelines any longer. You can help women in open technology and culture, starting today.


]]> http://blog.valerieaurora.org/2011/12/13/a-personal-appeal-to-donate-to-the-ada-initiative/feed/ 0 vaurora Valerie Aurora Donate button - 2 in http://blog.valerieaurora.org/2011/12/06/three-shocking-reasons-to-donate-to-the-ada-initiative/ http://blog.valerieaurora.org/2011/12/06/three-shocking-reasons-to-donate-to-the-ada-initiative/#comments Tue, 06 Dec 2011 22:58:31 +0000 vaurora http://blog.valerieaurora.org/?p=671 Continue reading →]]> I was at a Girl Geek Dinner last week, talking to a recruiter about the Ada Initiative and our new fundraising drive:

“So the thing that made me quit my job and start the Ada Initiative was when a friend of mine got groped at an open source conference-”

“NO! Shut up! That didn’t happen!” she says, utterly shocked.

“Yes, it did, it’s documented all over the Internet-”

“NO! I can’t believe it! Are you serious?”

“Yes, I’ve been groped twice at an open source conference myself-”

“Oh my god! Really?” At this point she seemed to start believing me and I was able to get in one or two sentences in between expressions of shock and dismay.

She went on to tell me how in college her boyfriend went to CMU, which is the university that achieved 42% female enrollment in their undergraduate computer science program (and later wrote a famous book about how they achieved that, Unlocking the Clubhouse). In her experience, women were always welcome and respected in computing, and the realization that it wasn’t like that everywhere was a complete surprise to her.

I’m so used to living with these facts that I often forget how shocking they are to people who don’t know about the dark side of open technology and culture. The cultural phenomenon that has the most potential to overcome all the old prejudices and oppression is doing worse than the mainstream “closed” versions in many cases – e.g., 2% vs. 20-30% women in open source software vs. closed source software. I don’t know the numbers for “closed source” encyclopedias, but only 9% of Wikipedia editors are female.

We’re working hard to change that. We believe that unless women are involved in designing and creating the Internet, it won’t serve women’s needs. Right now, there are 994 pages in the Wikipedia category “Female pornographic film actors” and only 58 pages in “Women computer scientists” – at the same time that many pages about important female computer scientists have been deleted for “non-notability.”

You can help change this by donating to the Ada Initiative today. If you can’t donate yourself, please consider telling your friends about the Ada Initiative donation drive.


]]> http://blog.valerieaurora.org/2011/12/06/three-shocking-reasons-to-donate-to-the-ada-initiative/feed/ 1 vaurora http://blog.valerieaurora.org/2011/10/07/ada-lovelace-day-sandra-k-johnson/ http://blog.valerieaurora.org/2011/10/07/ada-lovelace-day-sandra-k-johnson/#comments Fri, 07 Oct 2011 15:22:19 +0000 vaurora http://blog.valerieaurora.org/?p=652 Continue reading →]]> There are two ways to answer the question, “Why are there so few famous women scientists and technologists?” One is to point out the obstacles women faced (and still face). For example, Lise Meitner, co-discoverer of nuclear fission, wasn’t allowed to go to graduate school, had to work for free for many years, and was blatantly excluded from the Nobel prize for discovering fission. This was absolutely typical treatment for women at the time – and for quite some time afterwards. Caltech didn’t admit women until 1970!

The second way to answer is to point out all the women who did and are doing important work in science in technology despite these obstacles, and not getting very much credit for it. On Ada Lovelace Day, we raise the profile of women in science and technology by blogging about less well-known women and including memorable stories and details, so that you’ll remember them the next time someone claims “There are no women in $FIELD.”

Dr. Sandra K. Johnson: Parallel processing expert and first African-American woman electrical engineering PhD in the U.S.



Dr. Sandra K. Johnson (also known as Sandra Johnson Baylor) got interested in electrical engineering through an invitation to go to a high school summer camp program at Southern University, a historically black university in Baton Rouge. At the time, she thought engineering was all about “driving a train” but she decided she’d go anyway and get out of town for the summer. She loved engineering camp and went back to Southern to get her bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, and ultimately went on to become the first African-American woman to get a PhD in electrical engineering in the United States.

While working as a researcher at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Lab, Dr. Johnson worked on the prototype of the SP2 processor for IBM’s “Deep Blue” chess machine, as well as a variety of topics in the extraordinarily difficult field of highly parallel computing, including memory and IO behavior of parallel programs, cache coherence protocols, scalable shared-memory systems, and the Vesta Parallel File System. (If you’re looking for her publications, many of her papers are published under the name S. J. Baylor.) She held a number of high-ranking positions at IBM, including Linux Performance Architect, and managing the Linux Performance team.

Ironically, Dr. Johnson is currently working as an IBM business development executive in the United Arab Emirates, a relatively progressive country next door to Saudi Arabia, where she is not allowed to drive, among other highly discriminatory laws against women.Often when people claim we have already achieved legal gender equality (in their own country, of course), they forget that science, technology, and business are global activities, and career advancement often depends on working in several different countries. [Correction: The original said women weren't allowed to drive in UAE, which was me confusing Saudi Arabia with UAE.]

Sandra Johnson’s books are representative of her career: She was editor in chief of Linux Performance Tuning, author of Inspirational Nuggets, which encourages people to reach their full potential, as well as co-author with her brother of Gregory: Life of a Lupus Warrior, about her brother’s fight with lupus (Sandra was subsequently diagnosed with a non-life threatening form of lupus). Dr. Johnson is a combination of intellectual powerhouse and kind mentor. She’s on her way to the top, and she wants to bring other women (and especially women of color) along with her.

I was lucky enough to meet Dr. Johnson at the Grace Hopper women in computing conference in 2010, and I was deeply impressed. She was not only intelligent and competent, but incredibly supportive of other women. Dr. Johnson on how to become an IEEE fellow (or get any other award): It’s not magic, you have to tell your friends and mentors, “I want to be an IEEE fellow,” and then get someone to take responsibility for bugging your friends to write letters to nominate you. Don’t feel bad about asking for recognition, that’s just how it works.

Sandra Johnson is also a public speaker, with booking information on her web site. I highly recommend her as a speaker. She’s clear, informative, and inspirational in a practical and realistic way. If you get a chance to see her speak, jump at it! Personally, I hope I get to meet Dr. Johnson again.

So, next time someone says there aren’t any women in electrical engineering or processor design, you can pipe up with, “Oh, I can’t believe you haven’t heard of Dr. Sandra Johnson! She did all kinds of work on parallel processors and cache coherency for highly parallel systems and, oh yeah, the Vespa parallel file system too. She even worked on the prototype for IBM’s Deep Blue! Did you know she was also the first African-American woman to get a PhD in electrical engineering in the U.S.? Right now she’s working in the Middle East, can you believe that irony? If you ever get the chance to see her speak, take it!”

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!


Tagged: ada lovelace day, feminism, kernel, linux ]]> http://blog.valerieaurora.org/2011/10/07/ada-lovelace-day-sandra-k-johnson/feed/ 1 vaurora