Be your own princess charming

I recently came across this lovely series of photographs from photographer Jaime Moore in Austin. She wanted to take photos of her 5-year-old daughter, Emma, on her birthday. While looking for inspiration on the net, all she could find was how to dress one's daughter like a Disney Princess. So she took matters into her own hands -

It started me thinking about all the REAL women for my daughter to know about and look up too, REAL women who without ever meeting Emma have changed her life for the better. My daughter wasn’t born into royalty, but she was born into a country where she can now vote, become a doctor, a pilot, an astronaut, or even President if she wants and that’s what REALLY matters. I wanted her to know the value of these amazing women who had gone against everything so she can now have everything. We chose 5 women (five amazing and strong women), as it was her 5th birthday but there are thousands of unbelievable women (and girls) who have beat the odds and fought (and still fight) for their equal rights all over the world……..so let’s set aside the Barbie Dolls and the Disney Princesses for just a moment, and let’s show our girls the REAL women they can be.

Here are a few of these remarkable photos:

The rest of the photos are here: http://www.jaimemoorephotography.com/2013/05/09/not-just-a-girl/

I would love to see the marketing industry, toy industry, and Hollywood follow Jaime Moore's lead. K-12 STEM outreach is great and all, but if we want to make a significant impact we need to get ImagesOfGreatness (beyond beauty) into the minds of young women on a daily basis.

Signal Boost: Help get GoldieBlox off the ground

This is absolutely, positively awesome.

It's called GoldieBlox, and is a new engineering toy marketed to 5-9 year old girls, developed by Debbie Sterling, a female engineer from Stanford. It's meant to inspire girls in the same way legos and erector sets inspire boys, and uses storytelling to do it. (Reminds me a little of Computational Fairy Tails, actually :-))

I think it's brilliant. I always hated the "pink aisle" at the toy store, and agree that we definitely need more toys geared toward girls that engage their spatial and problem solving abilities.

She has a KickStarter campaign to get her toy into production, and is 25% toward her goal. So go watch the video, then donate some money if you are able. Even $5 could go a long way.

And, Debbie - kudos for a great idea. I wish you lots of luck!

Kudos to Margo Seltzer

Margo Seltzer, fellow FCS, profesor at Harvard, and well known in the CS blogosphere, was featured in a great article in Txchnologist about women in CS. You can read the article here.

I love just about everything about the article, in particular Margo's comments on polo shirts:

Txch: The computer science community may not be able to control the way programmers are portrayed in the press, but it can at least control the image it projects. What are the big things they shouldn’t do if they want women to apply?

MS: Here’s my favorite. I was chatting with a group of university reps from a very large high-tech company. The reps were both men and women, and they were bemoaning the fact that they found it very difficult to attract women programmers. I looked at them and I said to one of the women, “Are the company shirts you’re wearing men’s polos or women’s polos?” She said, “Oh, it’s a men’s polo shirt.” I said, “Why? Why don’t you buy women’s polo shirts? They would fit better.” And she says, “Well, there aren’t very many of us and it would cost more.”

Now, this is a multi-billion-dollar corporation. I looked at them and I said, “I run a company of 25 people, and you know what? We buy men’s and women’s polo shirts. You’re sending a message that says men are the norm and women are second-class citizens, so we have to put up with what they give us.” I’m sure not many women look at the polo shirts and say, “This isn’t for me,” but I still think it sends a very strong subliminal message.

The other data point is—look at the big annual events that these companies hold for all their customers. How many of the featured speakers are women? The answer goes from zero to one, amidst twenty or thirty speakers. You see this over and over. I think it sends a message that says, “We’re a guys’ company.” There are little things that a company could do to send a message that says, “We’re gender agnostic. We actually hire both boys and girls.”

And her comments on how sexism is less of a big deal to companies than racism:

Txch: Does it behoove companies to narrow the gender gap?

MS: In the same way that we would not tolerate an environment that was blatantly racist. That would not be tolerated in any company in America. And yet we have these pockets in cultures of companies that really are very hostile towards women. People don’t seem to find that nearly as offensive.

I believe I've written about this topic before, where it's strangely acceptable to be sexist and ableist, but not racist. We really need to work on that if we have any hope of making progress.

In any case, kudos to Margo. Go read the article and check out her blog!

That's what she (really) said

Great post from Jessamyn Smith on the Geek Feminism blog. You should read the whole post for how she brilliantly countered a bunch of male colleagues telling her to "lighten up" about a joke she didn't find very funny. Here's an excerpt:

I work at a startup, and most of the time, I enjoy it. Compared to most tech companies, and certainly most startups, we have quite a few people who are relatively clueful. There are relatively few moments of “brogrammer” culture. There is, however, one thing that has been bugging me for months, ever since it was introduced. 

I took it for granted that everyone was familiar with the “That’s what she said,” joke, but a recent conversation with a consultant friend made me realize some industries don’t feature it on a daily basis. For those who haven’t heard it a million times, the idea is that when somebody says something that could remotely be turned into a sexual joke, e.g. “I’m trying to solve this problem but it’s really hard!” you say “That’s what SHE said,” in a lascivious tone. 

Now, I admit to having made this joke myself, at times. Once in a while, I even find it funny. What I don’t find funny is a bot we have in our general IRC channel at work, that has some basic AI devoted to determining when to interject TWSS into the conversation. 

I asked a number of times to have that bot function turned off, but got the usual combination of being ignored, being told it’s funny, and being told I should lighten up. I tried explaining once why it was objectionable, and managed to get the guys saying variations, e.g. “That’s what your DAD said,” for an evening, but that was about it. 

Last Friday, the bot went a bit crazy and started throwing TWSS into the conversation with no apparent rhyme or reason. Finally, I had had enough. And then it came to me: I would write my OWN bot, that responded to TWSS with a quotation from a notable woman. If they are so keen on what she said, why don’t we get educated about what she really had to say. And so the “whatshereallysaid” bot was born. It might annoy the guys into shutting off the TWSS bot, or we might all learn about notable women. It’s a win either way, in my books!

Kudos, Jessamyn! Well played. I only wish I could be half that clever when encountering such situations.

Kudos, Zach Weiner!

Today's Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal totally made my day.

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Thank you, thank you

One of the best things you can do as a student or employee is write someone a thank you note after they've done something helpful for you.

I was pleasantly surprised to find a hand written note from a student thanking me for a reference letter I wrote for them. This was immediately followed by a thoughtful note from an editor thanking me for a review.

These two things made my day.

Kudos, student and editor!

Don't Stop B-cell-ievin'

On the topic of "teaching as performance", this video making the rounds is by Richard Bungiro, Immunology lecturer at Brown. He calls this "immunolo-glee", "Don't Stop B-cell-ievin'".

Kudos to Richard -- it takes guts to sing in front of students, and I think anything to make science lectures exciting is a great idea. (You know, give them some pep -tides*)

Here's the clip:

(*) Sorry, couldn't resist.

Kudos, ACM!

Kudos to ACM for featuring two prominent Female Computer Scientists on in this month's Communications of the ACM (CACM) -- Jeannette Wing and Barbara Liskov (via Valerie Barr). I especially enjoyed reading Valerie's article about Barbara's keynote at Grace Hopper. Barbara is the second woman to win the Turing Award, which is basically the Nobel Prize for Computer Science. I liked this:

"Liskov talked about her technical work that ultimately led to the Turing Award. Much of her work was motivated by an interest in program methodology and the questions of how programs should be designed and how programs should be structured. So, after receiving the Turing Award, she went back and reread the old literature, discovering anew that there is great material in old papers and that her students were unaware of it. So, she is now pointing people to these papers and encouraging people to read them. 

For example, three key papers she cited are:

• Edsger Dijkstra, "Go To Considered Harmful," Communications of the ACM, Vol. 11, No. 3, March 1968, pp. 147–148.
• Niklaus Wirth, "Program Development by Stepwise Refinement," Communications of the ACM, Vol. 14, No. 4, April 1971, pp. 221–227.
• David Parnas, "Information Distribution Aspects of Design Methodology," IFIP Congress, 1971."

I recently had a similar "everything new is old again" epiphany. I was looking up a paper that everyone cited and realized it was far too recent. So I went down the citation rabbit hole and found the original paper, written over 30 years ago. And, wow, great ideas - but they completely got lost in the whisper-citation-down-the-lane effect.

Anyway, good stuff, check it out if you have the chance.

Female Computer Scientists FTW

In other security news this week, Google is claiming China orchestrated some major attacks against gmail users. No shock, but what I found interesting is that they were discovered by blogger and fellow female computer scientist Mila Parkour.

Kudos, Mila!

And this just in - apparently Sony! Soni! Soné! has been hacked again. With script kiddie SQL injection attacks. The PC World article says, "Sony seems to ignore compliance requirements and basic security best practices".

For shame, Soné, for shame. You should totally hire Mila to fix you up. After China I suspect a gaming network will be child's play.

Kudos, Randall!

Another winner in XKCD yesterday. Sending kudos and <3 to Randall.

Image Description: Captioning is available here. 

Dear Randall

You are, truly, the reason why Computer Scientists* make fantastic comic writers. Thanks for making me laugh today.

♥,
FCS

(*) I guess technically you're a physicist, but really, what's a few bits and atoms between friends?

http://xkcd.com/859/

Kudos to the American Mathematical Association

Hats off to the American Mathematical Association for creating a poster entitled, "Women Doing Mathematics". It highlights the accomplishments of nine women and has a personal quote from each about their interest in Math.

Print it out and put it up in your department, the library, the mall, your kid's school, etc. This is a great poster to have in circulation. If I was a young woman considering a career in STEM a poster like this would have far more reach than Computer Engineer Barbie.

Bravo, Cornell and XKCD!

While writing my post the other day I visited a number of CS department websites. Cornell's has a rotating image highlight on its front page. Two of them really caught my eye:

Big kudos to Cornell - a picture is worth a thousand words.

Also kudos today to Randall Munroe (XKCD), for today's comic. In addition to beautifully articulating my frequent frustration with tech support, I love that the uber-smart CS superstar is drawn as a woman. Thanks for helping represent!