Category: Culture

The weather is warmer and with it a lightness of spirit.

Today, in the email, I received links to two stories the senders knew I’d be interested in. The first was to the story about Frances Allen being the first woman to win the prestigious Turing Award:

Allen spent her entire career at IBM, winning several of the company’s top awards. In 1968, she won an corporate award for her research. The prize: a pair of cufflinks and a tie clip.

 

“No woman had ever won that award before,” Allen said Tuesday, chuckling, from her home in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y.

Two decades later, when she was named the first female IBM Fellow, her award certificate recognized the recipient for “his accomplishments.”

“These anecdotes are funny, but they do represent having to break through a lot of walls that still exist today,” Allen said. “I believe we’re moving into a whole new era for women in our field.”

We can hope so. Of course, this story didn’t rate a ripple on techmeme and the other online tech rags. Regardless of the field and it’s lack of women, or appreciation of women, Ms. Allen deserved this award and all the recognition she’s gotten through the years.

The second story was, of course, about the big squid caught today!

This is a really exciting story for cephalopodophiles everywhere. This baby weighed in at 990 pounds, and 33 feet long! Think of it: long as a three story building. And what a wonderfully beautiful, massive body.

This is the colossal squid, not my favorite architheuthis dux or giant squid. The colossal is a relatively new discovery (1925), lives only in the waters off the Antarctic and points south, and is heavier, possibly longer, and seemingly more aggressive than the giant.

The story about Ms. Allen is more important to me as a woman in technology, but gosh, I jumped up and down when I read about the squid.

Two stories that delighted me–and not even my family would have thought to call and let me know about them. No, that’s a mark–a good mark–of this odd little online world.

Thanks so very much to Allan, Alan, and Michael. You made my day.

According to Melinda Casino, I gather my response to Mary Hodder’s post is a case of my doing a “Cartman”. Since I don’t watch the show, I checked what Wikipedia has to say on this character:

Cartman’s personality has notably changed over the course of series. While always self-centered and bigoted, he was portrayed as more of an immature brat in the earlier seasons. As the seasons progressed, his personality became more aggressive and cunning, eventually crossing the line into outright sociopathy, while his bigotry morphed seamlessly into Nazi-like hatred. His abilities to manipulate other people into doing what he wants have become keener, along with his overall intelligence. He has expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler in several episodes. Cartman’s pet peeves throughout the show have been hippies, whom he despises for a number of reasons, and Jews (especially Kyle Broflovski).

I really do appreciate the comparison. Perhaps Melinda will follow this clever bit of journalism with something more substantial, because I’m not sure if I earned the comparison because I was critical of Mary Hodder’s post, or because I could not throw aside my book, and my only source of income, in order to lead a session at a BarCamp.

Mary Hodder writes on women speaking and has this to say:

If you aren’t in the loop you aren’t as important as others with similar skills sets and expertise in the eyes of those who fund, engage for consulting, hire for leadership positions, take in PhD candidates or whatever it is that requires discernment between people.

I’m not in the email group consisting of ‘women in technology’, but if I were, I would have emailed Mary with the following:

 

I look around at the people who are at these conferences, and after a time I wonder if that’s all they’re particularly good at: go to conferences, and speak.

It’s going to take more than a few women showing up at conferences to change this industry. The very fact that there aren’t as many women speakers is a symptom of the problem, not the problem, itself.

However, for those of us who are in the field, who don’t live in California or Boston or New York, by putting yet another burden on us as to how we are somehow failing in the industry because we’re not meeting the requirements of a privileged few, shows how absolutely out of touch the women in this mailing list are.

I was asked to give a session at the Madison, Wisconsin BarCamp, and as much as I appreciated the invite, it’s also in a couple of weeks, and about one week before the draft of my book is due. I need to finish the draft, I’m two months behind. It’s exceptionally important to me that this book do well, because I hope that there might be others that follow.

I have ridden hard on conferences for not having enough women speakers, but it has only been in the last year or so that I’ve come to realize that there’s a lot more wrong with the tech field than not having enough women at yet another mostly useless gab fest; where the ‘insiders’ that Mary seems to think so highly of, can preen themselves in front of the cameras and feel good that they’re above the rest of us.

But then, what the hell do I know? I live in St. Louis, I write books, I help friends who have problems with their weblogs, and I tinker with tech quietly on my own, putting it out for those who are interested. To Mary, or should I say, the important people, I’m not in the loop and therefore, I don’t matter.

(Via Anne, who lives in Colorado and sorta matters.)

The next president of Harvard is going to be Drew Gilpin Faust, respected Historian and currently Dean of Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies.

She’ll be participating in a growing change in today’s universities, becoming one of the 23% of college presidents who are women. Considering that women make up over 50% of college attendance, I would say this is a healthy trend. From the many sources on the story, the reason she was picked was less that she was a woman and more that she’s a consensus builder; not following in the footsteps of Summers, who was aggressively competitive and whose tenure one person said was a “…wasted five years”. According to the New York Times:

Faculty members and officials familiar with the search said Dr. Faust’s leadership style — her collaborative approach and considerable people skills — would be vital for soothing a campus ripped apart by the battles over Dr. Summers, whom many accused of having an abrasive, confrontational style.

“She combines outstanding scholarship with an uncanny ability to administer both well and with a heart,” said Judith Rodin, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation.

Most of the weblogging commentary so far is among the Righteous Right, who clamor about feminism and shake their heads at the decline of civilization as they know it, but you know something? No one really cares what they have to say.

I see this as a good step forward: for Harvard, for women, for all of us.