misbehaving.net

Misbehaving Kinja digest

I've added the entire Misbehaving blogroll (under 'Misbehaving elsewhere') and the Misbehaving authors' sites to a Kinja digest to help keep up with posts by women in technology. If you'd like to suggest a site to add to the digest, email me - gina at misbehaving dot net.

(Full Disclosure: I work at Kinja.)

BW on Women in Tech

Business Week has a special report on Women in Tech in their May 12 Issue. They have changed their angle on this annual report: rather than profile executives who've already reached the top, they are "spotlighting a wide variety of influential women who may be the next generation of top women in technology." I like it when the up-and-comers are highlighted rather than those who've already arrived.

Genevieve Bell on the importance of culture in technology

Today, in the NYTimes Circuit section, there is a profile of Genevieve Bell (see under "misbehaving elsewhere"). As a anthropologist at Intel, Genevieve has been traveling the world to understand how different cultures consume technology. In turn, she has been challenging Western assumptions, most notably in areas concerning ubiquitous computing.

"We thought, there's a group of people just like us all over the world who will buy the technology and have it fill the same values in their lives," Dr. Bell said. "I was fairly certain that wasn't going to be the case. I'm an anthropologist. Culture matters."

Rock On, Julia Lerman!

Gracing the front page of ZiffDavis' DevSource this week is the smiling face of Julia Lerman, an early reader and commenter here on misbehaving.net, and only the the third person to be profiled as a ".NET Rock Star."

Of particular interest to me--and probably to many of our readers--is what she has to say about the underrepresentation of women in technology, especially in the Microsoft programming community:

I think that the lack of women in visible roles in our community is one of the biggest problems. A general consensus is that there are about 10% women in IT, and that this same percentage applies to programmers. But if you look at authors and conference speakers, it's miniscule in comparison. Take a look at the speaker list for TechEd 2004. There are as many speakers named Brian (including one Bryan) as there are women speakers.

Certainly, a lot of social and cultural factors make IT a more heavily male populated field, but I think that if we saw more visible role models that were women, two things would happen. One is that more women would make themselves known in the community and the other is that more young women would be encouraged to come into technology.

Clearly this interview is a step in the right direction. Congratulations, Julia!

microsoft research profiles women in cs research

Just found this. To acknowledge women's history month, Microsoft Research has published an article by Suzanne Ross entitled Women in Research, which profiles "women researchers who are working today to advance the state-of-the-art in computer science." Included are Kristin Lauter, Lili Qiu, Mary Czerwinski, Cynthia Dwork, Lili Cheng, Nuria Oliver, Qian Zhang, and Min Chu. Some I already know of, many I don't. Am looking forward to reading more about all of them.

Even a woman…

Oh, my. I don’t know what to say about this except how terribly demoralizing I find it.

This, I hope, is a good antidote.

Margaret Heffernan

And since we mentioned Margaret Heffernan below, why not link to an article about her career? Here is a profile and interview on WITI -- Women in Technology International: Margaret Heffernan.

And check out the other WITI profiles.

Dr. Olga Ladyzhenskaya

In the Misbehaving.net tradition of noting the lives and deaths of women in the sciences, I post this notice of the death of Olga Ladyzhenskaya, from whose work we benefit every night when we watch the weather reports:

Dr. Olga Ladyzhenskaya, a mathematician whose work with differential equations contributed to advances in the study of fluid dynamics in areas like weather forecasting, oceanography, aerodynamics and cardiovascular science, died on Jan. 12 in St. Petersburg, Russia. She was 81.

Henriette Avram, Maker of MARC

My “hey, I really am in the right field” moment of the week: Chugging through my Organization of Information readings for next class, I learned that MAchine Readable Cataloguing, otherwise known as MARC, the backbone of library catalogs everywhere, was engineered by Henriette Avram (1919–).

I can't begin to imagine the kind of guts it took to be a woman building major, profession-changing technology in the late 1960s. Somewhere there’s got to be a tell-all book about the development of MARC. Now I want to read it.

Ms. Avram received a lifetime membership in the American Library Association (scroll down for a photo) in 1997. A quick Google reveals that she was active as a speaker as recently as 2001. The American Society for Information Science includes her in its Pioneers pages.

Each To His (Her) Own

I love Gina's post below. It's wise and thoughtful and raises a lot of important points. Her post and all the great comments have been making me think a lot about my original post. Sometimes I wonder if all the goof-ups and missteps don't teach us more in life than all the efforts to "do the right thing."

Virtual Intimacy

When Jeneane and I were chatting last night about meeting other bloggers, we started talking about whether it's fair to judge an online relationship as somehow less valid than an in-person relationship. We've known one another online and by phone for nearly two years and only met in person yesterday. Is our relationship real now and was not real when it was virtual, supported by technology? Would we be better friends if we ONLY knew one another in person and lived next door to one another? Going forward from this time, should we assume all our relationships will rely on a lot of electronic connection and a little in-person connection?

Can one have a metrics of intimacy? And if there is such a scale, are online relationships always less "real" than so-called real world relationships? I still have something Adam Curry said swirling around in my head. At BloggerCon in October 2002 at Harvard Law School, he said that perhaps blogging is a way of connecting like minds and creating a network of thought that does not require corporeal proximity (my words, his idea, I'm not sure how he put it exactly. Adam, write about it again, it was very interesting.)

I asked Jeneane that last night. Are we all practicing a new way to be intimate? Is falling in love online not real? Is it not love? Are friendships on IRC not legitimate, but an aberration supported by technology? Is it time to stop judging one way as less real and one as more real? Perhaps it's a pointless distinction.

women internet researchers

Nicola Döring's list of women researching Internet-related topics has links to a lot of interesting women doing interesting work. Great place for a random browse every now and then.

Douglas Bowman asks "Who/Where Are the Women?"

Douglas Bowman, a writer and developer active in the web standards/web design field, asks in his blog "Who/Where are the women?"

A chorus of answers has appeared in the comments, with names and links--some great additions for our sidebar, as well. (Will try to do that later this weekend.)

girlgeeks.com

I was looking for a profile of Red Burns, the chair of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, when I stumbled across the girlgeeks.org web site. Their profile of Burns is part of a series of profiles called "Women Who Inspire Us" that's well worth looking at.

Sexual Globalization

When I was away for Thanksgiving, doing family things and taking care of my son, I wasn't thinking about Fleshbot* very much. I was thinking how unsexy I felt and how little I was thinking about sex and how inappropriate it felt when I was preoccupied with the big family holiday of Thanksgiving to even consider sex.

When I got home, the holiday was over, my kid was asleep in his bed, our suitcase unpacked and dirty clothes in the laundry, I did go check in to see what they'd been up to while I was away. I went to look for all the reasons everyone else goes to look -- I felt a little sexy and it's a sexy blog.

And I was thinking about how we integrate our work selves, our parent selves, our public selves, our sexual selves, now that all this sexual content is available on the web which surely blurs the line between public and private.

Even when I was a kid and my older brother had Playboy magazines hidden under the bed, they could easily be revealed by my mom vacuuming and he could be "found out" and perhaps feel ashamed or somehow dirty. There was a lot of sneaking around in the old days to real world locations OUTSIDE your home to get sexual materials or experiences -- with sexy magazines, sexy clubs, sexy videos, or just plain sex from paid escorts, masseuses, prostitutes. And I think it's fair to say, mostly men pursued these sexual outlets and it was deemed inappropriate for women to be involved in such pursuits. Now this sexual content is available to anyone with a computer, men and equally women.

But the enormous availability of sexual content (notice I'm trying not to say porn, because I'm still not sure what that word even means) online which allows one to privately pursue sexuality in great range and depth is changing the world we know. Changing it fundamentally. We are not only experiencing sexual content from many countries, but we are experiencing sexual culture from many other countries. What they do in Amsterdam, Osaka, Abu Dhabi and Alabama and HOW they do it, are not the same. This is another reason I'm writing about "alpha males" as I believe all the assumptions about how men and women relate in one culture are being challenged by how men and women relate in many cultures. I'm trying to understand who we are, or perhaps who we were and who we are becoming.

I think fundamentalists of many religions (in many countries) are being buffeted by gale force winds of sexual globalization. Women are right in the sweet spot, or not-so-sweet spot of these seismic sexual rumblings. I really don't know where it will lead us, but I think it's changing our lives very quickly and we may not even notice how much and how fast it is happening.

[I'm turning comments OFF on this post, since we've been getting so many trolls and others writing off-point comments. Feel free to blog about my post and link to it, letting me know whether you agree or disagree.]

[*Fleshbot is a new sex blog, or I might call it an online review and digest of sexy digital content. ]

New York Times Profile of danah boyd

There's a great profile of danah in today's New York Times! It's a great piece, that highlights her skills and accomplishments. A nice Thanksgiving treat...

Lili Cheng and Microsoft's Wallop Project

There's an article this month in Microsoft Watch on Microsoft's new "Wallop" social networking software. In reading the article, I noticed that the project manager is a woman, Lili Cheng, who heads up Microsoft's Social Computing Group.

According to Cheng, Wallop evolved from an earlier Microsoft "virtual worlds" project called HutchWorld, which I first heard about a couple of years ago at Pop!Tech from Linda Stone--another woman who heads up a group at Microsoft Research.

Say what you will about the "evil empire" in Redmond, they seem to be doing a good job of hiring strong, talented women to do interesting work. (I wrote about another interesting woman at Microsoft, Bonnie Robertson, in my weblog back in May.)

Discover Dialogues

Discover Magazine does a series of interviews and profiles of scientists, many of them women. Here are some I found:

• Sherry Turkle, Social Scientist
• Susan Greenfield, Pharmacologist (see below)
• Ann Druyan, Cosmologist
• Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Evolutionary Anthropologist
• Vera Rubin, Astronomer

And a list of The 50 Most Important Women in Science.

Greenfield Profile

In the September issue of Discover Magazine I found an interview with Pharmacologist Susan Greenfield. She's quite accomplished:

Baroness Susan Greenfield, Fullerian Professor of Physiology and Comparative Anatomy at Oxford University, heads a team of scientists who are focused on the genetics of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases. She is the first female director of the 204-year-old Royal Institution of Great Britain and a cofounder of two biotech start-ups that specialize in brain diseases. She holds a seat in the House of Lords, has hosted a BBC series on the brain, and wrote The Human Brain: A Guided Tour. Her next book will be titled Tomorrow's People.

And has this to say about women in biotech:

Why are there so few women in prominent biotech positions?

Greenfield: This is a particularly savage world. I think it's a particularly alpha-male type of environment. In biotech, people's body language is different, the way they talk, the way they walk. They are very aggressive. Women especially do have a problem working with the men. I'm happy doing that, because I'm a naturally aggressive type of person. But men have a problem too. Men at my company say I'm a difficult person to get along with, and I say, wait, if I were a man you wouldn't be saying this. I think that because biotech is such a roller coaster—because it's not a secure and stable environment—there's a lot of adrenaline, a lot of puffing up, a lot of showing off, and I think women are uncomfortable in that kind of environment.

And more. It's an interesting interview. "Happy people know what they want, but they are not ambitious. They are not the people who build civilizations," she says.

Who Are You?

I was writing this morning about who I am, who I might be, how we integrate all the people we are. I see other people writing about it too. Geek girls and geek guys are about more than meets the eye, I suspect.

I don't know anything about the guy who painted this painting, I just like it a lot. Looks like it comes from Matisse's Thong Period. I dug a little deeper and found out that this guy does a lot of things. He used to be a graphic artist at Lycos here in Boston and obviously knows web design down cold. He is a painter. He seems to make silkscreened tee shirts very fast for rockstars and other mucky mucks.

Been thinking about Buckaroo Bonzai as an employment model. Why should we be one thing? This lousy economy makes us all innovate, try new things. Why can't we be brain surgeons, particle physicists and bass players all at the same time?

Julia CodeWoman Rocks

I love reading Julia Lerman's blog as she hangs out at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in LA this week. She's one of those still much-too-rare birds -- a woman developer. Surely the ratio of men to women at the conference must be something like 100 to 1 ... although I hope it's better than that.

Wait, there was a "Women In Technology Luncheon" and they mentioned that PDC has 9000 attendees and 750 are women.

Even more fun was to read this post about how she solves problems for her clients. She's sensitive to the fact that her woman client really hates computers and she needs to fix the thing fast so the woman can get some work done.

Ada Byron Lovelace

Before the first computer, there was Lady Ada Byron Lovelace, one of the first computer scientists.

Born in 1815 to British poet Lord Byron, Ada’s parents separated just after she was born. In an attempt to “counter dangerous poetic tendencies,” her mother Annabella Milbanke made sure Ada received tutoring in mathematics and music.

Eventually, more than a century ahead of her time, Ada would produce the premier text explaining the process now known as computer programming.

At 17 years old, Ada met Charles Babbage, a professor of mathematics at Cambridge. Moved by his ideas about an “Analytical Engine,” the first concept of a modern computer, Byron and Babbage frenetically corresponded about the machine, logic and math. Soon Babbage enlisted Byron to translate a French article on his development. Byron’s own notes taken with the translation turned out to be three times the length of the original article. Babbage had her notes included with the translation.

Published in 1843, Lady Lovelace's prescient comments included her predictions that such a machine might be used to compose complex music, to produce graphics, and would be used for both practical and scientific use.
- Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace

Ada called herself "an Analyst (& Metaphysician)," and the combination was put to use in the Notes. She understood the plans for the device as well as Babbage but was better at articulating its promise. She rightly saw it as what we would call a general-purpose computer. It was suited for "developing [sic] and tabulating any function whatever. . . the engine [is] the material expression of any indefinite function of any degree of generality and complexity." Her Notes anticipate future developments, including computer-generated music.
- Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace

What's Carly Up To?

Look at this link and tell me what Carly Fiorina is up to. I have my theories, but would really like to know what you think.

Some of the questions that come to my mind are:

1. Is she still running a "technology" company?

2. Will women leaders in technology take tech places men would never go?

3. Does gender really matter when it comes to being a CEO?

4. Does a woman see technology as a way to solve problems in the world that men don't even necessarily see as problems?

5. Do some engineers design technology to impress other engineers with how smart they are, but are essentially solving non-problems?

6. Are these "leading" questions which demonstrate my bias?