I gave a brown bag tech talk at work today, which was a report back on my experience attending AdaCamp DC last month. Below are the contents of the handout I created for the talk, which is an attempt at compiling what I learned there. No doubt there are things missing, and I encourage you to visit the resource sites listed below to explore more!
AdaCamp DC
July 10-11, 2012. Washington, DC: http://dc.adacamp.org/
The Ada Initiative: http://adainitiative.org/
Key Issues
- The gender gap in open technology and culture
- Trend of women leaving technology, engineering careers
- Impostor Syndrome: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Impostor_syndrome
- Getting more women to speak at conferences
- Creating comfortable environments for women, minorities to participate in general
- Raising girls to be geeky
- The challenges of being a geek mom
- Work-life balance
- Career advancement/development
- Supporting newbies
- Lack of visible role models, mentors
- Need to include non-techies in FOSS (Free/Open Source Software)
- Fandom as a female safe space
- Accessibility
- Using tech for social change
- Importance of UX design for getting newbies on-board
- Supporting LGBT techies
Anecdotes and Data Points
- Women come to computers late. Middle school tends to be where the gender gap widens.
- Parents give computers to girls later than to boys; computers often in boy’s room
- Power of invitation – women need to be invited to run for office, to edit Wikipedia
- If you make a (tech) program specifically for women, they will apply in greater numbers than if it’s just a general program.
- Lack of women editors of Wikipedia (~9-13% of Wikipedia editors are women internationally.)
- MIT OpenCourseWare users annual survey – 20% of respondents identified as women
- Many developers at AdaCamp felt “immersed in male culture”, had a hard time relating to other women
Practical Ideas and Examples
- Mentorships (see for example the GNOME Outreach Program for Women): http://projects.gnome.org/outreach/women/)
- First patch workshops: see for example http://openhatch.org/ – OpenHatch approach can help with women as contributors – forces projects to think about how to be welcoming to new contributors; explicit documentation for newbies; keyword in the bugtracker for beginners for bite-sized bugs.
- RailsBridge: http://railsbridge.org/en
- Boston Python Workshop: http://bostonpythonworkshop.com/
Women Hackers’ Groups and Other Happenings
- PyLadies: http://www.pyladies.com/
- Girl Geek Dinners: http://girlgeekdinners.com/
- Ada Lovelace Day (this year Tue 16 Oct 2012): http://findingada.com/
- Systers (forum for all women involved in the technical aspects of computing): http://anitaborg.org/initiatives/systers/
- Mothership hackerspace for moms, Oakland: http://mothership.hackermoms.org/
- Grace Hopper Celebration: http://gracehopper.org
Key Organizations
The Ada Initiative: http://adainitiative.org/
Anita Borg Institute: http://anitaborg.org/
Geek Feminism: http://geekfeminism.org/
FOSS Projects that train and/or support women, newbies
PyStar: http://pystar.org/
RailsBridge: http://railsbridge.org/en
Dreamwidth: http://www.dreamwidth.org/
OpenHatch: http://openhatch.org
The Hacktory: http://www.thehacktory.org/
An Archive of Our Own: http://archiveofourown.org/
Open Education
- Citizen School - http://www.citizenschools.org/volunteer/how-it-works/
- Communicate OER, a Hewlett funded effort to engage OER people in improving wikipedia content about open education(al resources): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:EDU/OER
- Peer-to-peer university: https://p2pu.org/en/
Other Resources
- Geek Feminism Wiki: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Geek_Feminism_Wiki
- Resources for Men: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Resources_for_men
- Geek Feminism’s list of generic mailing lists for women in computer science: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_academic_organizations_interested_in_women_in_CS
- The Hacktory’s “Hacking the Gender Gap” resource list: http://www.thehacktory.org/p=2500
- Free/Libre/Open Source Software: Policy Support (FLOSSpols): http://flosspols.org/
- Adacamp DC session notes: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/AdaCamp_DC_2012_notes
- Open Source Mentoring flyer: http://code.google.com/p/google-summer-of-code/wiki/SpreadTheWordAboutMentoring#Flyers
- She’s Geeky: http://www.shesgeeky.org
