Category: Diversity

The importance of supporting diversity

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Diversity

Girly girls and auto shops

I received a coupon special from a neighborhood auto shop that’s just joined a national car care organization. As part of the special, the shop would do a complete car preventative maintenance check. I called and asked if performing an analysis of a Check Engine Light would be part of this effort, and they said “Sure!” This is in contrast to my previous auto care shop, who wanted to charge me $90.00.

Last Friday I took the car in and they had it all day long–checking all of the fluids for level and state; the transmission, the brakes, the exhaust, the tires, the drive axles, the signals, the hoses, and so on. They also changed the oil, oil filter, and libricated the chassis where needed. When I picked up the car, they found that the brakes are in amazingly good shape, my two tires are shot (knew that), the other two are evidencing uneven wear, and my brake fluid and power steering fluid were both extremely dirty and needed to be ‘flushed’.

They also diagnosed the Check Engine Light as a failure in the DPFE (Delta Pressure Feedback of EGR) sensor in the EGR (Exhaust Gas Recirculation) system. I knew immediately what they were talking about because before I took my car in, I researched causes of Check Engine Light failure on Ford Focus and found that it could be because of failure in two sensors: the O2 and the DPFE (or EGR sensor). I also researched how the exhaust system works, and even found a site that has an excellent article on the DPFE sensor, how it helps determine if enough exhaust is being recirculated back into the engine in order to help control emissions.

In fact, I found out that many Ford Focus owners have disabled the DPFE sensors because of known issues with the sensor in this model of car, and had easy to follow instructions if I wanted to do such myself. However, a quick check and I found out that doing so in Missouri is illegal. Not only that, but driving with a Check Engine Light on in Missouri (as well as many states) is illegal. At a minimum, you won’t be able to renew your car license, and the reason why is most Check Engine Light failures occur in the exhaust system and signal that your car is most likely polluting more than it should.

During the check, my local auto shop found out there is a special extended warranty on DPFE sensors for Ford Focus, just because of problems encountered. I logged into the computer at home and found that the extended warranty lasts until 60,000 miles and I have 58, 900 miles on my car. Today I took it into Ford and they verified my mechanics diagnosis and replaced it free of charge.

(If I wanted to, I could have bought my own diagnostic tool and found out myself what the problem was. These are easily used, and with help at the MyFordFocus forum, fairly easy to deciper. However, since I got this service for free at the auto shop, I’ll hold on a purchase for now.)

Even if it wasn’t under warranty, I could actually replace this myself — it’s not inaccessible, and it’s more a matter of unbolting it and putting in a new one and making sure the connections are right. But now it’s replaced and the Check Engine Light is off, and it didn’t cost me a penny.

As for the flushing the brake fluid and the power steering fluid, I checked again on the internet and found that the brake fluid should be checked when brakes are checked, but many auto shops don’t do so, primarily because many mechanics aren’t aware they should do so. From the state of my brake fluid (which I saw in a comparison with ‘good’ fluid color), mine should have been flushed a long time ago.

As for the power steering, it’s not unusual for it to get dirty but whether you flush it or not somewhat depends on how long you’ve had the car. For instance, I found that if the car has reached 60,000 miles, then the recommendation tends to be to flush the system; others recommend flushing the system if it’s dirty, period. Since my car is reaching the 60,000 mark and the fluid was very dirty, this is a good procedure.

The auto shop also told me that my “Air Intake & Induction System” was ‘dirty’ and needed to be replaced. Hmm, that was a new one on me. When I got home, a little checking led me to discover how the air instake system works, what would be replaced (a filter) and that if I want to race my Focus, I can replace the air instake system with a racing intake system or a Cold Air Intake (CAI) system, which could boost performance and milage. So, I may hold on replacing the filter and look at actually replacing the system.

(Heck, maybe someday I’ll replace the body with a new Focus racing body, with lightning streaks on the side. Vro-o-om, vro-o-o-m. I found a site that gives complete, step by step instructions on how to do this.)

But before I take the car in, I’ll call around and get price checks to see how much other shops are charging. If there’s a discrepancy in prices, I’ll then decide if my confidence in my mechanic is high enough to let the difference slide, or negotiate a price change at the shop, or take it to another shop. Right now, my confidence in this shop is high, so unless the price difference is significant, paying more is acceptable.

So now when I take my car in to get the rest of the maintenance completed, I’ll have had a complete systems check, Check Engine Light diagnosed, sensor replaced, fluids flushed, and other than replacing the two tires (and research is pointing me to Bridgestone high-performance all-weather tires), my car will be in optimum condition — and I’ll have a high degree of confidence that I got the repairs I needed, the maintenance I needed, and just what was needed and at a good cost (or none, for warranty repair). More importantly, I’ll have established at the auto shop that I do my homework, and am capable of discussing problems from a basis of understanding, not ignorance.

I was able to do all of this because I decided long ago that unless you’re using your penis as a dipstick replacement to check oil levels, you don’t need one when it comes to understanding how your car works.

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Diversity

Beauty is only geek deep

Misbehaving pointed to a new Geek Calendar featuring 12 young, attractive female tech workers in typical calendar poses.

According to the “About the Producer” page (the producer being one of the models):

Lilac Mohr, who herself is a Senior Java Developer, is the producer of the Geek Gorgeous Calendar. Sick of hearing complaints from male co-workers about the lack of attractive women in the computer industry, Lilac set out to show the world that there are plenty of beautiful, intelligent, and interesting women in the fields of computers and engineering.

Gina at Misbehaving writes:

This seems like a good idea, but it’s too bad the photos are so cheesy and tasteless (in my opinion). I don’t know about you, but I don’t use pink ethernet cable as a bikini top. In addition to the photo, each month includes a summary of each model’s technical skills and quotes on working in the male-dominated tech industry.

I would have much rather seen classy, artsy photos of people looking both beautiful and geeky.

Personally, I would rather have seen a small, stylish photo of each woman, and then fill the page with code or other results of their work. To me that would be both geeky and beautiful. But then, according to the creative tech writer, I’m not the target audience:

My version would probably be a study of “What Not to Wear” befores and afters — in my experience, it’s a rare geek who can pull off the prOn pout with studied disheveledness with any style. Give me the slightly overweight and overworked senior network engineer who wears too-tight yoga pants, oversized sweaters, and ponytails. Or the newly-back-from-maternity-leave security manager who’s gotten no sleep in 12 weeks and still has to manage the outcomes of 3 crises her first week back. Talk about people in need of some cheesecake overhauling. And after they’ve been pampered and styled for the camera, what do you think their eyes would say as you stared at their calendar pic? I don’t think it would be anything like what the GeekGorgeous.com girls are saying. Sure, they’d look as good, but they’d be telling a whole other story.

I’m sure that were I to interview at any number of companies, and I walked in looking like who I am — an almost 51 year old woman who would really prefer not to pose in Victoria Secret underwear in public, thank you–there would be no disappointment among the young males who I’m most likely to be interviewing with. I believe in challenging stereotypes, but I agree with I Speak of Dreams: There are better approaches.

Maybe my reluctance about the calendar is that I don’t know any of the women. I wonder how Joi Ito would look as a Victoria Secret Angel?

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Diversity Writing

The Testosterone Meme

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

After checking out the tech.memeorandum.com web site for a few weeks now I’ve made several observations:

First, most of the stories covered are about business, rather than technology. The companies in focus may be technical, but the stories are about commerce.

Second, if you’re a woman writing about technology, don’t expect to show up in the site; when you do, expect to see your weblog disappear from view quickly. This site is for the big boys only.

Third, quiet uses of technology, such as discussions of .NET, digital identity, and others do not show in the list. If you want to appear, link an A-lister who is talking about Web 2.o or search (i.e. Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft). Actual discussions about technology fly under this ‘technology’ aggregator.

Fourth, rank matters more than content. Recently Danny Ayers started a conversation about what other options do we see for a semantic web. He got several responses — not an avalance, but respectable. However, Danny’s post and the cross-blog discussion didn’t show on tech.memeorandum.com. What did show was a post by David Weinberger saying how he hadn’t posted in four days.

Conclusion: if this site represents the new Web 2.0 technologies that filter content to eliminate noise, then thee and me are nothing but static, baby.

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Diversity

PopTech: Better

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

A year ago I and others wrote on Pop!Tech and the lack of women and diversity in its speaker list. At the time, the conference had one woman speaking out of 30. I don’t know if what we wrote had an impact or not, but I was heartened to see a more diverse speaker list this year.

More, I noticed that the speakers who didn’t fall into the typical white, Euro-Pacific-Americas white male pattern are touching on some unusual and unique topics: from underwater exploration, to Saturn fly-bys, to patenting living things, and so on.

The representation still isn’t perfect, but it is better. If the organizers continue the trend into the future, I’ll have to start saving my pennies to attend Pop!Tech in 2008-9.

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Connecting Diversity

Looking outside of self

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Dori Smith writes about putting together conference panels made up exclusively of women.

Coming up with panelists for SxSW was easy. As Shelley gave away a few days ago, she, Kathy Sierra, Virginia DeBolt and I are going to be on a panel together, and I think it’s going to be a blast. I asked three women, they all said yes, and life’s been easy.

But I also agreed to come up with one for Macworld Expo in SF in January, and that’s been a different thing entirely. I have asked probably a couple dozen women so far, and I’ve gotten one to say yes (after I twisted her arm). I’ve asked about 40 guys to send me their recommendations for women, or to pass along my search for same, and I’ve gotten nobody that’s willing to do it.

First of all, clarification: I ‘gave away’ the panel discussion at SxSW because I had an email from the organizer who said he was featuring our recent discussion about getting women into conferences on the front page of the conference weblog. (It was in the sidebar, which is not archived, so the entry has scrolled past.)

And to be honest, I had hesitated to speak on the panel at SxSW and there were a couple of reasons for the hesitation.

The first is that if I speak at a conference, my preference would be to speak on the topics covered in the conference, and my hope is that I’m asked because of my expertise on a subject (or interest in same). Because of this, I hesitate about speaking about women at a tech conference, the same as I hesitate on speaking about tech at a conference about women. However, this panel promises to be more than the usual, because those of us on it do disagree, even strongly, on many of the issues related to women in technology. This is not going to be what passes for a panel at too many tech conferences–where people use it as an opportunity for free marketing and nary a dissenting word is heard.

As to the second reason I hesitated: I don’t want it to ever seem that I’m fighting the battle for more representation of women in the tech community, as a way of advancing myself or my career. I have actually seen a person who has also fought this battle being accused directly of this. If we’re perceived as using this platform as a way of advancing our own careers, then we’ve lost credibility. For the little difference we’ve made at times, we have made a difference: small, but present. If we lose credibility, we’ll have lost even this difference.

As for the difficulty Dori is having getting women for her panel at the Mac Expo, I don’t know of many women or men heavily into either Mac development or administration to recommend anyone from either sex. I do know, though, that one instance of having difficulty getting women for a specific panel in a specific city (that is expensive to visit, and no costs are covered) should not be used to extrapolate to the whole. I myself an working with the folks at XML 2005 about expenses for giving the tutorial at Atlanta in November, and this is a very real issue for me.

In addition, not everyone is comfortable on a panel. A panel requires a certain mindset. Frankly, it also requires that a person be proficient at debate, and very comfortable being put into a position of having to defend a viewpoint in front of what could be a large audience. Panels are not for everyone: men or women.

As for women saying that they don’t feel qualified to participate, then it’s our job to help give women confidence in order to speak. This isn’t catering to some view that we have to provide a ‘nurturing’ environment just for women (though why having a nurturing environment is seen somehow as weak or deficient is a worthy topic for much debate); this is working to help women realize that for all the bluster and pontification that men do, they most likely don’t have any more of a clue then we do, ourselves. The men are just better at tossing around BS; oh, and believing it, too.

We have to make a decision not to adopt the persona of that which is acceptable in the tech community: the arrogance, the intolerance, the embrace of competition, and the disdain of being supportive. These personality traits are embedded and imbued throughout technology and engineering, like flecks of mica in granite, precisely because the field is so heavily dominated by men without the necessary balancing influence from the female side of the human race. In my opinion, it is this that led to the first dot-com, with such promises of fame and glory the technology couldn’t possibly support; it is this that is leading to this new dot-com explosion, with no doubt the attending failures and disappointments once the current round of buying has stopped, and the bill is presented.

I wrote a cryptic post this week and immediately pulled it (not realizing it was still in my syndication feed, which is statically generated). I wrote “I give up”. The reason for this is what I read in another post of a weblog of a woman who is a leader in the community of women in technology. She’s a person I had admired for years, even before I started weblogging.

This person (who I am not identifying for reasons I don’t want to get into) had been at an invite-only event lately that had very few women present but immediately, without any hesitation, absolved the organizers of their part in the lack of representation: hard to understand at a invite-only conference, especially one where women had asked to be part and been rejected. Instead, she focused on how we have to get more women in the field, which means more outreach for young girls.

What particularly disappointed me about the comment was the fact that she had completely ignored all that we’ve been trying to do to bring about change in the industry, in favor of an answer that absolved not only the organizers but the industry itself from complicity in the problem. From any woman in tech, it would be a disappointment; from a leader of women in tech, it was massively discouraging.

Let’s focus this discussion on matters of self interest for both women and men: providing opportunities for women in tech also provides opportunities for men. If women reject the 16 hour days, obsessively hunched over a computer, while competing constantly with your co-workers for the opportunity to be skate board down a hall for that free Red Bull, I can’t imagine that we are so different that most men wouldn’t want to reject this, too. Men have families as much as women; men have lives as much as women; and men have insecurities, doubts, and need to have support just as much as women.

(Not to mention that not all of us skateboard, like Red Bull, and walk around with cellphone stuck in one ear, iPod ear bud in the other.)

Ours is a particularly unhealthy industry; it would rather hire young men from other countries, or offshore work than adjust and adapt to a climate that is beginning to finally look at the greed of the few and the manufactured ‘need’ for gadgets and goods and perhaps decide that quality of life is really more important than fame and fortune. To make this environment healthy for women, I like to think I’m working to make this environment healthy, period.

There is a third reason I hesitated on the SxSW panel and that is because I’m fighting my own self-doubts about my value in this field. Does writing this make me seem to you to be weak and deficient? If so, then question why you feel this way, and the answer you’ll find is what I’m fighting.

I hope that Dori finds her members of the panel, but if she has problems, I’m not going to absolve the industry because of it and be willing to dump the problem on the women.