women in technology

One of my greatest high school regrets is that I never took an auto shop class. I would have had a chance to learn some practical skills like changing oil and changing a tire. At the time, I doubt it fit into my schedule, but entering a class of mostly boys scared me as well. It's not that I was afraid of boys—I considered myself a feminist despite not fully understanding what that meant—but it would still have been intimidating to walk into a classroom full of dudes. 

 

Last week, I spoke with Valerie Aurora of the Ada Initiative about women in open source and how to get more women involved. In Part 2 of women in the open source world, I speak with Sumana Harihareswara (volunteer development coordinator at the Wikimedia Foundation) who I also met at the Open Sourcebridge conference, where she was named on of three Open Source Citizens at the conference (read her recap of the conference here!) In the following interview, Sumana doesn't just discuss the challenges that open source software and communities face when it comes to women, but open source's potential for changing the world through diverse voices. It's not just about getting more women involved--breaking down language, access, and ability barriers from the get-go is also necessary. In the following interview, Sumana talks about initiatives at Wikimedia to reach out since its lack of women contributors made headlines, the potential for open source social justice, and tips for your first go at editing Wikipedia. Also she quotes Mr. Rogers AND the Bible, and explains kyriarchy with a Hyperbole and a Half cartoon, which is awesome.

Stream our interview above, download it from archive.org, or subscribe to Bitch radio via iTunes or RSS! Transcript available here (.doc). Thanks, Ann!

I recently attended Open Sourcebridge, a tech conference in Portland Oregon, and got to speak with some really incredible women in the open source world. (Hopefully I'll be filling the little void left in the hearts of feminerds since Jarrah Hodge's series ended!) Open Source is a method of development that's publicly available, collaborative, and peer reviewed. If you read the Bitch website on the reg (which uses Drupal), or browsed the Internet using Mozilla Firefox, or blogged with WordPress, you have used Open Source software! Wikipedia is an example of open source content, where users peer edit the work of others publicly. Like a lot of cool things that should be open to everyone, the open source community can be a bit of a boys' club. I spoke with Valerie Aurora, programmer, Geek Feminism contributor, and, with Mary Gardiner, co-founder of the Ada Initiative, a "non-profit organization dedicated to increasing the participation of women in open technology and culture." We spoke about how the Ada Initiative came about, the anti-harassment conference policy she helped put together, and how the tech world can be hostile to women.

Stream our interview above, download it from archive.org, or subscribe to Bitch radio via iTunes or RSS! Transcript available here (.doc). Stay tuned next week for Part 2 of women in open source, which will feature Sumana Harihareswara of the Wikimedia Foundation!

Sarah Sparks loves technology. A freelance tech geek, she fixes everything from new computers to old radios and calls her home pregnancy test a "nifty gadget." When its digital face displays the word "pregnant," she comments to boyfriend, Leon, "It’s actually a pretty good quality font for a disposable," before recognizing that her life is about to be altered by a much less predictable technology. In first time feature directors Annie J. Howell and Lisa Robinson’s Small, Beautifully Moving Parts, Sarah (Anna Margaret Hollyman) is ambivalent about her pregnancy.

Following a great expose ("The Dark side of Open Source Conferences") by Valerie Aurora on harassment and sexism in Open Source (technology that is horizontally integrated, anyone can collaborate on it, and its nuts and bolts are all transparent) conferences and communities, which has been making its rounds on feminist as well as tech sites, the blog Geek Feminism has posted a great conference anti-harassment policy template on their wiki.

OK, so we can all agree that there is a lack of women in positions of power in the tech industry, right? Right. Well, according to Douche du Jour Michael Arrington, it's our own damn fault. In his piece for TechCrunch (charmingly titled "Too Few Women in Tech? Stop Blaming the Men.") earlier this week, he had this to say:

I'm going to tell it like it is. And what it is is this: statistically speaking women have a huge advantage as entrepeneurs, because the press is dying to write about them, and venture capitalists are dying to fund them. Just so no one will point the accusing finger of discrimination at them.

Um, thanks for clearing that up. Douche.

Episode number two of Read My Bitch is ready to be consumed for your listening pleasure. Read My Bitch is the podcast that features Bitch magazine readers reading out loud an article from the Bitch archives and then talking about why it's meaningful to them. For this episode, Bitch reader and contributor Brittany Shoot reads Anna Clark's "The Ambition Condition: Women, writing, and the issue of success," from Issue 41 (Loud) from the Fall of 2008. Stream the article, and our conversation afterwards, below. (Read the article here, interview transcript here.). You can subscribe to all Bitch Media podcasts through our blog RSS or via iTunes, or download the file from archive.org.

You can read Brittany's work in Bitch as well as her own site. Her guest blog, The Biotic Woman ran on the Bitch blogs earlier this year and covered eco-feminism. If you'd like to be featured on Read My Bitch, send me an email at online {at} b-word.org, telling me which article you'd like to read and discuss and why. This podcast may require experience or access to digital recording, but all queries are welcome!