Category Archives: feminism

advice, feminism , , , , , 2 Comments

Leveling up: handling conflict like a boss

I’m finding myself in conversations with friends and colleagues lately about strategy, conflict and overcoming fear. At Ada Camp DC, there were multiple sessions on Imposter Syndrome, and many friends were in career transitions. So, I decided to share parts of private conversations I’ve been having. I think of these conversations as “leveling up.” As the women I know become team leads, managers, directors and executives, we’re all facing similar sets of problems and struggling through as best we can. I hope that people find this stuff useful. I have benefited from a great deal of mentoring and support over the years, and my hope is that this helps someone else in the same way.

Someone asked for some help in handling conflicts, both at work and personally. Specifically, they mentioned that they were plagued by self-doubt. Friends have remarked to me that I “seem so confident” or that they “wish they could be as sure about things” as I am.

When someone says that to me, I get confused for a minute. Because I question myself all the time, wonder if I am doing the right things, and often think that I am really, really screwing things up. I used to never talk about those moments with other people.

I felt pretty alone.

People have told me that I’m “argumentative,” or more politely “a little intense.” I tend to engage in conflict directly, and to resolve problems with people by talking or having arguments. I can be the type of conversationalist that’s a little scary to people who aren’t used to so much directness. But here’s the secret:

I wasn’t born like this.

Confidence is learned and a gift to yourself

Confidence isn’t an innate talent. It’s a skill that you cultivate, and a set of behaviors you can learn. Confidence is what you project to the outside world, and doesn’t necessarily mirror what’s inside. (I’m thinking as I write that — “duh, everyone knows that, don’t write that, Selena!” But really, there are many people who think that to be confident, you have to *feel* confident all the time. And that’s just not true.)

Also, there are many styles of conflict resolution, some that don’t involve arguing at all.

Just because you tend to prefer one style, doesn’t mean you can’t learn others. Confidence is also a gift you give to yourself, because you deserve to not feel like crap after an argument. A lot of the questioning and self-blame people put themselves through is unnecessary. Learning from arguments doesn’t have to involve suffering.

Problem solving: my problem or your problem?

The most important mental model I’ve developed in the last decade is distinguishing between problems that are “my problem” and those that are someone else’s.

For problems that are mine, I take action without having conversation or consensus building and then let people know what I’ve done. I apply this in my marriage, my open source work and in business — and it has made me SO MUCH HAPPIER. In a corporate setting, this is probably the ask forgiveness way of operating.

When something is someone else’s problem, I think carefully about whether I want to help the other person solve it. You are under no obligation to solve other people’s problems.

If I decide to help, I think through possible solutions before talking with the person about it. When I get to the point where I actually talk with someone about a problem, I try to ask the other person what they think before offering my own solution. I find acting out these conversations with a trusted advisor ahead of time is very, very helpful. That’s too simplistic to apply to every type of business problem out there, but it’s a calming thought pattern when I first start problem solving.

When arguments feel hostile

From the research (Gottman’s, specifically), contempt is the primary indicator on whether a marriage survives. If someone is treating you with contempt, or you are using contempt in arguments, that’s a big warning sign.

My experience has been that relationships that are in this state can be repaired, but it takes a lot of work. In business, if someone treats me with contempt, I raise the issue in a business-appropriate way, and if it continues, I get the hell out of there.

Life is too short to be treated like crap. Not everyone has the privilege of being able to switch jobs, but start planning your exit strategy. You deserve a long, contempt-free life.

Recommended Reading

I’m going to share a few of the best books I know concerning relationship conflict.

In my opinion, relationship skills apply equally to personal and professional lives, and the learnings in one context necessarily translate to the other. There are a lot of very bad books out there that will give you counter-productive, and not-science-based advice (and I have read many of them).

I found that good books paired with advice from a counsellor who strictly adhered to proven-with-science strategies measurably helped me. Here’s the books and training I recommend:

  • The Passionate Marriage, and Intimacy and Desire: http://amzn.com/e/B001IOFH8M Both books are fantastic for thinking carefully about what marriage really is for you. Defining what intimacy is helped me A LOT in all my relationships. Marriage is a special and weird relationship, and not one that I was prepared for at all.
  • Pretty much anything by John and Julie Gottman, like The Relationship Cure: http://amzn.com/0609809539 They’ve also been featured on This American Life, and those podcasts are worth a listen, and slightly more fun that slogging through their “10 steps” type books.
  • Harvard University Negotiation training: http://www.pon.harvard.edu/category/courses-and-training/ I arranged for a version of this training to be given just before OSCON for women in open source community management last year, and it was amazing. Every woman who attended said it changed their professional and personal relationships. It’s the type of thing people often can get work to pay for, as it’s obviously work-related training.
  • Liespotting: http://amzn.com/0312601875 There’s a bit of pseudoscience in it IMO, but lots of very entertaining stories. There’s a chapter in it about your trusted circle of advisors, and how to test out and develop that circle over time for personal and professional advice. I started working on this for myself last year, and the people who I now turn to are an invaluable part of decision making, and really, my entire life.
  • If you’re struggling with illogical behavior and influence patterns (like: “Why the hell did person X do THAT for person Y?”), you may find _Influence_ useful as a primer in how skilled people get others to do things: http://amzn.com/006124189X

Books that didn’t really help me

There’s a series of books I’ve tried to read about “verbal self defense”, but to be honest, none of them helped me. Reading them made me feel better temporarily as I started to recognize different types of “attacks,” but I found their suggestions to be too difficult to remember, for me to be able to implement them in an emotionally charged situation. I’d love to hear from anyone on strategies that work for you, and books that have helped you out.

postgresql, womenintech 1 Comment

Thoughts from Think Out Loud’s Women in Tech radio broadcast

I was on the radio program Think Out Loud here in Portland this morning. Before getting on the radio, I prepared a few things to say and wanted to share a longer form of what I was thinking.

I’ve been blogging more about women’s issues in relation to open source community and technology more generally. The experience is finally something that’s pretty fun — because there is finally research, success stories and a real sense of optimism among my friends and colleagues.

This is in no small part because of the wonderful experiences I’ve had working in open source and on PostgreSQL.

Continue reading →

womenintech 8 Comments

What I mean when I say I would like more women in the software industry

Sometimes I’m asked about women’s equal representation in the software industry. And someone might also ask me — what other than ethics justifies spending precious resources on making a company or a community include more women?

When I think about getting more women involved in the production of software, I think about:

  • What’s the ethical thing to do
  • What’s the fallout when we don’t do the ethical thing

Continue reading →

community, open source, personal, womenintech , , , 5 Comments

I am a feminist hacker: Reflections on the first AdaCamp

I had a wonderful time at the first AdaCamp, held in Melbourne, Australia on January 14, 2012.

I didn’t take notes during most of the sessions, and spent a lot of time listening and thinking.

The two important things I took away from the first AdaCamp were about context – my context, and the camp itself.
Continue reading →

conference, womenintech , , , 1 Comment

She’s geeky: day 1 report

Image courtesy of Sarah Novotny

I got in about 1pm to She’s Geeky, an unconference about women who self-identify as geeks.

I’m here on a mission: to find developers who want to move to Portland! Emma, Urban Airship, Puppet Labs, About Us and BankSimple are all hiring (and BankSimple is even interested in remote hires).

My favorite conference session yesterday was about leadership and management, the difference between the two, and how to work with managers. We had an amazing discussion, with @noisegirl, Allison Randal, and Ursula Kallio leading a lot of the discussion. Topics ranged from how to carve out time for individual contribution when you take on a management role, to dealing with insane micromanagement to exploring the limits of change in an organization.

Another discussion I participated in was “Startup. Now what?” We talked about the issues each woman faced in starting her own business, and I asked a lot of questions. 🙂

I also attended a talk about the commerce department’s Privacy Green Paper. I hadn’t heard of it before, but the response being formulated is here: http://wiki.idcommons.net/Privacy_Green_Paper_Response

The main gist of the discussion was about encouraging congress to think carefully about the legislation and the business environment created (or stifled) by new data regulations. The contention is that activity data stored in “personal data stores” (PDS) is inherently of value — we already know this because our data is bought and sold without our consent or knowledge currently. So, why not create a system where businesses can do this, but with the consent and knowledge of consumers? I’d probably say “citizens” there instead of consumers, but you know. Whatever. 🙂

I’m not sure I fully understand the issues yet. I tried at one point to draw a link between PDS and “owning your own logs.“, but that didn’t seem to resonate. Kaliya said something about respecting definitions, so I think that I still don’t quite understand what defines a PDS.

Or, put another way, I am having a hard time understanding the distinction, because the freedom issues seem to be very much the same.

I tweeted a bit about my thoughts on APIs related to PDS, and here’s one conversation that tumbled out of it:

Welcome, Selena! | LinkedIn
Uploaded with Skitch!

Anyway, much to think about from the first day, and I’m excited to see what discussions unfold today!

codensplode, community, user groups , , , , 5 Comments

Unlocking the clubhouse: cultural resistance and learning communities

I finished reading “Unlocking the clubhouse” on Saturday, finally. The book is only about 150 pages long, but it’s full of useful information about increasing participation of women in computer science.

The chapter that most stuck with me was chapter 6, “Persistence and Resistance: Staying in Computer Science.” I have said more than once, in a tongue-in-cheek way, that Code-n-Splode‘s mantra for men who think that we should not have the “dude token” policy should be: “It’s just not about you.”

My feeling is that establishing a culture where female voices dominate, rather than are assimilated in, creates a social environment that’s fundamentally different. And that that difference is *good*. I wouldn’t say that the book totally supports that notion, but it points out situations where women found peer groups that did not conform to a male hacker stereotype, and that foundation of social support helped them stay in their course of study.

The students referred to in the paragraph are undergraduates at Carnegie Mellon University:

Women who accept the prevailing culture as the norm and who continuously compare themselves to this norm and find themselves coming up short are the ones who suffer the most.

The majority of women struggle to find a place where they can feel comfortable in the prevailing culture…

Ironically, it is in this area of relationship to culture that international women may have an edge. The international women do not as readily use the U.S. male hacker as their reference group. Since they are not fully part of this culture, their reference group is elsewhere. Many international students have alternative success norms and social bonds that protect them. Other priorities are dominant, and with these come other scales for self-evaluation.

So, rather than bringing their cultural norms to the hacker culture and modifying it, the international women have their own social structures which exist outside of the dominant culture. “Cultural resistance” was the title for this section, and it’s a great way of characterizing the lack of assimilation.

I have more than a few times heard women-specific groups discouraged because of they emphasize differences that the dominant culture feels should be unimportant. I’m interested in further research that discusses the effects of splinter groups, particularly when they are created for women.

The second interesting topic in this chapter concerned learning communities.

Former University of California calculus professor Uri Treisman (1992) believes that a supportive learning community is critically important for the success of minority students in math and science.

The story went on to describe Professor Treisman’s observation that Asian students tended to socialize *and* study in supportive groups, which tended to help students stick with the courses and get better grades. He established similar groups for Hispanic and African American students, and found across several universities and colleges that these groups helped retention. Our observations and the resulting user group for women mirrors that Professor’s experience.

There’s a special connection created when you live and engage with material in a supportive learning community. They take time to create, and are a bit harder to maintain outside of an academic context (where life, work and diverging interests can be a bit more challenging to coordinate).

Code-n-splode has been fairly quiet about its successes, but I think now is the time for us to start talking a bit more about how well the group has succeeded.

Photo courtesy of DrPantzo under a Creative Commons License.

community, gender, leadership, open source, portland, user groups, women, womenintech , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

What’s changed? Portland as an example of increasing women’s participation.

Code from @christiekoehler's presentation. #cns

At Code-n-Splode last night, we first heard Christie Koehler give a great talk on CodeIgniter, the one PHP web framework endorsed by Rasmus Lerdorf, original author of PHP. She went over the pros/cons, details of how you go about installing and then using CodeIgniter, and then showed a very detailed example from her recent work. I hope she posts the slides soon – they were great. (If you want to see our tweets – per Gabrielle’s suggestion, we’re tagging with #cns now.)

After the talk (nearly 9pm!) we all went over to the Green Dragon for our #afterhours chat. Audrey led off by explaining the recent controversy she’d written about, and the Ruby/Rails community response to her posts.

Some of the things she shared I was shocked by – specifically some very personal attacks in comments that she’d decided to save (in Skitch), but remove from her posts. Her standard was: “is this something that would cause my mom to stop reading.” And, if the comment met that standard, she archived and removed it.

I learned about threads in the local ruby community about the topic of women’s participation, and some very positive comments on Hacker News and Digg, and _why’s posts that seem to be expanding perceptions and opening people’s minds to ways that may ultimately be more inclusive of women and minorities.

All told, we had 15 people at the meeting, 13 of which were women. Our first Code-n-Splode meetings started with about five people. Our largest meeting (thanks to the clever, rocket-building Sarah Sharp) had somewhere around 30 people.

Among the many things that the Code-n-Splode crew discussed last night was “what made portland different”. And I thought I’d let you in on our secret.

We ask women to participate.

When we have code sprints for Calagator, Open Source Bridge or we have the Agile development meetups dedicated to coding – there are always women there. From what I understand, having women show up regularly to code sprints is unusual in other cities.

When I am responsible for these meetups, I contact the people that I want to attend directly – and I ask them to come. This is a mix of women and men (I no longer have to explicitly think about inviting women, because so many are already in the community). But when I was first asking people, I *did* have to contact women who were just dipping a toe into the community — to convince them that yes, joining us would be fun, educational and sometimes good for their careers.

When I first started attending user groups regularly about nine years ago, I often was the only woman. Now, it is extremely rare for me to be the only one. Particularly in groups that span multiple technologies (Web Innovators, Open Source Bridge, Extreme/Agile developers, Functional programming, and BarCampPortland come to mind) or are largely social opportunities for geeks to mix (Lunch 2.0, Beer and Blog). More geeky women (and women that I don’t already know) seem to attend these types of events.

I don’t think there is a single magic formula for transforming your city’s geek scene. But I think it is worth asking questions of the Portland tech community leaders, finding out how our groups work and trying out our techniques in your home town.

community, conference, women, womenintech , , , , , , 11 Comments

What works? Getting more women involved in open source.

Taking a break while digging a ditch

Taking a break while digging a ditch

When you have a community, and you notice that there’s an imperfect distribution in participation, what do you do?

How do you increase participation of a particular minority group? What should your goal be?

For example, if you have an open source project, and you need more programmers to contribute — what do you do? What I’ve observed is that the project advertises explicitly – they say, “Hey, we’d like more developers – interested?”

The leaders of the project call up their good friends, and ask those people to help out. Then they present at conferences, saying “Hey, look at our cool project. Want to join us?” They talk to individuals, they talk to groups. They say the same thing, “We’d really like you to join us. So, why don’t you download our code, ask me some questions, and contribute!”

Bottom line: they network, and they find the people that they are looking for.

So, I think this model works equally well for getting more women involved in open source projects. You say to your group of friends, “Hey, I’d like more women contributing to my open source project. Do you know any?” You go to conferences, and you say explicitly, “Hey you – would you like to participate in my project? What are you interested in? Can I help you find a project that is of interest to you?” You go to user groups, and you talk to the women who show up and find ways to keep them engaged in the group, and in the code.

All the hand-wringing over this problem that starts with “I don’t know what to do” can be solved by simply asking people to be involved. Politely, insistently and like you’re bringing them the best party you’ve thrown all year.

Invite them explicitly, rather than falling back on a “if we build it, they will come” mind-set. Sure, a laid-back approach works when you have a popular project, or the choice to contribute is easy. But otherwise, we need to ask for greater participation.

Take a moment, ask yourself — how many women do you know that write code? How many women do you know that contribute to open source in other ways? What can you do to expand your open source circle so that you invite at least one woman into our community? More than one? Maybe half a dozen?

Change yourself, and the whole community will change with you.

Fact is, open source software contribution is still kind of difficult. There are so many barriers to entry that community managers from huge corporations and extremely large open source projects are willing to meet with a group of five people at a 2000-person conference to explain the culture, the potential pitfalls, and the tremendous benefits of getting involved. And those same people are so convinced of the importance of this one-at-a-time contact, that they tell potential contributors, “If you have any questions, email me directly, and I will help you.”

We love our communities and the ideas that drive free and open source software so much that we want to talk to anyone who is interested. We think that it is worth it to convince people, one at a time, to contribute.

The same logic applies to getting women involved. The change won’t happen in a day. We convince people, one at a time, that what we work on – what we believe so much in – is worth contributing to.

And then, one person at a time, we will make it so that women are 50% of open source community.

(image courtesy of diamondmountain via Creative Commons license)

community, conference, gender, open source, postgres, postgresql, womenintech , , , , , , , , 7 Comments

Mentor Summit Report for PostgreSQL

mentor summit

Update: Fixed the etherboot wiki link.

I attended the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit this past weekend on behalf of PostgreSQL. We met at the Google campus in Mountain View.

This event was an unconference and so, none of the sessions were determined in advance.

Some of the highlights were:

  • Leslie Hawthorn and Chris DiBona went into some detail with the whole group about the selection process for GSOC. This session made me feel as though PostgreSQL had relatively good chances for being accepted again next year. Google, however, does not pre-announce projects/products, so there is no sure thing about our (or any other project’s) involvement.
  • I met MusicBrainz guys and was pleased to receive many bars of chocolate they requested to be distributed to SFPUG and PDXPUG members as thanks for making an great database.
  • Attended three sessions concerning recruitment and retention of students. This is a topic that many people were interested in, but that few people feel they have a proper strategy for.

I also led a session on recruitment and retention of students to open source projects. Some of the ideas that came out of that and the related sessions were:

  • Determine what makes you personally need to be part of Postgres (joy of learning, scratching a technical itch, making a tool for your job, fame). Find out which of those things your student also needs or wants and try to give that or help your student achieve that thing.
  • Have a clearly defined method for students to keep journals. Several projects simply used MediaWiki and templates.
  • Use git (or other distributed revision control), and have students commit early and often to a branch that mentors have access to.
  • The Etherboot project has a great system: http://etherboot.org/wiki/soc/2008/start
  • Hold weekly meetings over IRC. These can be brief, but help get students accustomed to your project’s culture and way of doing things.
  • Ask the student: “are you on track?”, ask the mentor: “do you think the student is on track?” on a weekly basis
  • If you want students to stick around, find incremental responsibilities to assign that are driven by their enthusiasm.
  • Interview on the phone all your students ahead of time, not just the ones you think might be a problem.
  • Require a phone number on the application for the student.
  • Require a secondary contact so that if the student “disappears” there’s a backup person to contact. (and contact that person BEFORE SoC starts)

I made good connections with members of Git, Parrot, WorldForge, Ruby and many other community leaders. I was particularly impressed by the ideas and stories from the current Debian project leader, Steve McIntyre and Gentoo council member Donnie Berkholz. Donnie recommended some books about recruitment that I plan to read and review in the next few weeks.

The issue of mailing list moderation and the number of people required to keep mailing lists functioning properly came up frequently. If you know a moderator for a Postgres mailing list, please consider thanking them for doing a very tedious, extremely important and often thankless job.

I also spent some time discussing with Leslie Hawthorn and Cat Allman how to increase the total number of women mentors and students next year. Leslie and I shared some ideas and I offered to help implement them next year. One thing the crowd asked for was explicit training on how to recruit and manage female students. Realistically, this information will apply to all students, and I hope this training helps us recruit more students overall.

I thought the conference went quite well. I hope PostgreSQL is accepted next year, and that one of our mentors is able to attend this conference. And, if you go, be sure to register for the hotel early, and stay at the Wild Palms.