Weekly Feminist Work in Tech by Mozillians roundup – Week of March 3, 2014

We have a ton of individual work done by MoFo and MoCo employees related to feminism, feminist activism and the larger technology community. So much is happening, I can barely keep track!

I’ve reached out to a few people I work with to get some highlights and spread the word about interesting projects we’re all working on. If you are a Mozillian and occasionally or regularly work on feminist issues in the tech community, please let me know! My plan is to ping people every Friday morning and post a blog post about what’s happened in the last week.

Without further ado:

Dispatch from me, Selena Deckelmann:

  • I’m presenting at SF Github HQ on Thurs March 13, 7pm as part of the Passion Projects series (Julie Horvath’s project). I’ll be talking about teaching beginners how to code and contribute to open source, specifically through my work with PyLadies. I’m giving a similar talk this afternoon at Portland State University to their chapter of the ACM.
  • Just wrapped up a Git workshop for PyLadiesPDX and am gearing up for a test-run of a “make a Flask blog in 80-lines of code” workshop! Course materials are available here for “intro to git” workshops.
  • Lukas, Liz, me and others (I’m not sure who all else!!) are coordinating a Geekfeminism and feminist hackerspace meetup at PyCon 2014. The details aren’t published yet, so stay tuned!
  • PyLadies PyCon 2014 lunch is happening again!
  • PyLadies will also be holding a Mani-Pedi party just like in 2013. Stay tuned for details!
  • Brownbags for the most recent GNOME Outreach Program for Women contributors are scheduled for next Friday March 14, 10am and 2pm. (thanks Larissa!!) Tune in at http://air.mozilla.com. One of the GNOME Outreach Program for Women contributors is Jennie Rose Halperin, and another is Sabina Brown.

Dispatch from Liz Henry:

  • I’m doing a lot of work to support Double Union feminist hackerspace, a nonprofit in San Francisco. We are hosting tech and arts workshops, and establishing connections with other hackerspaces in the US and around the world. Lukas is also involved with this effort! We have over 100 members now using the space.
  • For PyCon I would like to host fairly informal sessions in our Feminist Hacker Lounge, on QA, bug triaging, and running/writing WebQA automated tests with pytest and selenium.
  • I’m hoping to have funding for an OPW intern for this upcoming round to work on the back end of a QA community facilitating tool, using Python and various APIs for Mozilla tools like Bugzilla, Moztrap, and the Mozillians profiles.

Dispatch from Lukas Blakk:

  • Just held the Lesbians Who Tech hackathon at the Mozilla SF space and it was an amazing weekend of networking, recruiting for Mozilla, doing a stump speech on the radical/political possibilities of open source, and also just a lot of social fun.
  • I’m nearing the point of Project Kick Off for The Ascend Project which will be a 6 week training course for underrepresented in current tech mainstream (and underemployed/unpaid) persons who will learn how to write automatable tests for MozMill. This first one will take place at the Portland office in Sept/Oct 2014 (Starts on Sept 8th). There’s so much more here, but this is just a sound bite.
  • I’m trying to determine what budget I can get agreement on to put towards women in tech outreach this year.
  • PyCon – yes! Such Feminist, So Hackerspace, Much gathering of geek feminists!

Dispatch from Larissa Shapiro:

  • OPW wrapup and next session – we’re wrapping up the current round, scheduling brownbags for two of the current interns, etc. Funding is nearly secured for the next round and we have like 6 willing mentors. w00t.
  • I’m also providing space for/speaking at an upcoming event in the Mountain View office: last year’s African Techwomen emerging leaders were part of a documentary and the Diaspora African Women’s Network is holding a screening and a planning session for how to support next year’s ELs and other African and African-American bay area women in tech both through this and other projects, March 29. Open to Mozilla folks, let me know if you’re interested.

Anything else that’s come up in the last week, or that you’d like Mozillians to know about? Let me know in the comments!

An experiment in attention

I’ve had reoccurring thoughts about attention and who I give mine to. In the last week, I’ve been mentioned in a couple “women in tech” twitter lists. This seems to happen about quarterly and someone will create a list of 50 or so, or maybe 100+ women on a list.

I spent a couple days looking through my 5k followers and assembled a list of the women and women’s groups who are following me. I probably missed a few, and I know I followed a few people who don’t consider themselves women. Sorry! Just let me know and I’ll add/drop as needed.

So, why bother with a list like this?

Before I created this list, I was following about 920 people. Which, in itself is a sort of ridiculous number. How could I possibly pay attention to that many people?

I really don’t, right? I just check into twitter, sample the firehose, and then step away for minutes, hours or days.

When I do sample the tweet stream, whose voices do I listen to? There are certainly a few close friends whose feeds I look at directly, and a few other people I’m interested in who I will catch up on a backlog. Otherwise, it’s whoever is the most vocal.

What I noticed is: most of the voices I hear from when I sample the feed are men. It wasn’t anywhere near balanced. That’s on social activity, technical rants, technical praise and blogging.

I’d like to be skewed toward women’s voices for a while. Particularly on tech issues. So, I just added about 450 women to my feed who were already following me.

My next step may be replacing my primary feed with this list I’ve made. I wrote a tool a while back to extract URLs and RSS feeds from my friend’s twitter profiles and feeds. The code isn’t awesome, just rough and practical. But you could do something similar using it. You need a set of read/write API keys (create an app, then make it read/write), but I did the “hard” work for you:

./opml.py --consumer_key [key here] --consumer_secret [secret here] --access_token [token here] --access_token_secret [token secret here]  --to_follow [file of twitter handles]

I left some crud in there that links the script directly to my account for the list. Sorry! If anyone actually wants to use this, I’ll clean it up. (just ping me on github)

Anyway, doing this kind of attention hacking for yourself isn’t hard. It is drudgery to go through all your followers and guess who is what gender. But it is interesting to spend a few hours contemplating what the people you’re giving your attention to have in common, and how you might hack it a bit to hear from different perspectives from time to time.

I’m turning comments off because I don’t care to hear from anyone who thinks I’m somehow being sexist by changing who I pay attention to. Cheer up, haters! I’m sure plenty of people are already paying attention to you.

Why I gave $1024 to the Ada Initiative

AdaCamp participants

I’m one of the founding board members and advisors to the Ada Initiative, a 501(c)3 charitable non-profit that supports women in open technology and culture. This year, I am supporting the organization through a donation of $1024.

My reasons for supporting the Ada Initiative, advocating for their work, and now donating are many. I started out working with open source software in 1996, as a sysadmin setting up backups for a small research lab at the University of Oregon. I’d installed Linux from floppies in 1994, and surrounded myself with other open source advocates, sysadmins, hackers and finally, computer science students. Open source software has defined my career, and most of what I’ve chosen to do with my life.

In those few years in college, I met only two women who were interested in open source software – one that I brought with me from Chemistry into the Computer Science program and a woman who worked in Academic Services. I met no other professors, fellow students or friends online to collaborate or talk with.

All my mentors and friends were men. And, to be honest, I never thought much about that. Growing up, I tended to hang out with boys or spend a lot of time alone. As I started to think about computers and programming as fundamentally changing society, as tools that enabled and could dramatically change lives, I felt discomfort that only men seemed to know the things I knew.

A critically important aspect of being involved in the work that the Ada Initiative does is simply introducing women to each other in our communities. I’ve attended all three AdaCamps – in Melbourne, AU, Washington DC and San Francisco. Each gathering was larger than the last, and I’ve had important conversations at each that have changed my thinking and my activism in significant ways.

My most striking realization is how little work is done to educate adult women about computer science, about open source and open culture. Most outreach efforts focus on children, with the implication that adults are some how “not worth the effort”, “beyond help”, or that adults will simply find the things that interest them on their own.

My experience with the Ada Initiative, and with PyLadies contradicts everything that I had assumed, and everything that some advocates for early CS education for girls have implied — that the only way to change diversity is to start with a new generation of kids.

Adult women want the same skills that anyone interested in computers want. But there are important social and economic barriers to pursuing those goals.

The grassroots movement to educate adult women in writing software is inspiring. It reinforces my belief that it is never too late to learn these skills, and the women who seek out these classes inspire me with their dedication and fearlessness. Because of what I’ve learned and experienced, I’m now taking a break from the Ada Initiative advisors board to focus on my work with PyLadies.

Many people share my discomfort with a world whose code is only written by men. We’re making important changes in the way women view open technology and culture. We’re showing women that they definitely can learn and master these skills, that there are huge benefits to doing so and that women fundamentally belong in our communities. That work, I believe, also leads to the kind of intersectional awakening about diversity that all community builders should have.

The work of the Ada Initiative is difficult, wonderful and making a huge difference in my life. Please join me in supporting the Ada Initiative in 2013.

What I mean when I talk about collaboration with teachers: part I

I’ve given a few talks about my experience learning to teach. This is an edited version of my speaking notes for the keynote I gave at the Computer Science Teachers Association conference. This is the best distillation of my thoughts about the value of open source in my life, and what motivates me to contribute and teach. The first half is over 2000 words, so I’m breaking this into two posts. The next part I publish will be the second half of the talk – about the classes I’ve taught, and my lessons learned about what people need to know to get started in free and open source software.

I am a beginner teacher. I’ve only just started writing lessons and teaching classes to adult women who are learning or practicing their programming. All of what I share today is based on my personal experiences working with first time, adult programmers. My plan today is to tell you a little bit about me and what motivates me to teach and contribute to open source, share with you the successes of some of our beginner adult programming efforts and finally what I think open source communities offer teachers.

And I want to start by giving away my punchline. When it comes to working with open source community – of which I’m a member and a leader, and there are many, many leaders without any kind of central authority – I can say for sure today that we’ll come to you.

I’ve been working for the past couple years to find like-minded open source community members, and for those of you in the audience today, I am making a commitment to you – if you want it – to find an open source person to come and talk about what it is that they do to your classroom.

Just contact me (you can leave a comment below – just indicate if you’d prefer I not make your comment public), and I will make this happen, either through Mozilla or through my open source collaborators. I’ve spent the last 16 years going to conferences, and I would like to introduce that network of people to you.

I want to start with something Julie Horvath said recently. She wrote a blog post about women in tech and it struck such a chord with me. The first sentence really stopped me dead in my tracks.

I didn’t grow up thinking I could do anything I wanted to.

When I look at this again, I feel overwhelmed by how much it matches what the women I’ve taught said that they think about programming.

Screen Shot 2013-07-25 at 5.31.27 AM

I see this every time I walk into a classroom to teach beginning programmers. This is a photo from a class on algorithms, people doing a pen and pencil exercise in groups. Several women said afterward they finally felt confident that they could explain what algorithms were. That before coming and working on this in these groups, they literally had never really thought about how algorithms related to programming or what it might mean to implement or create their own algorithms.

I’ve come to think of this as a possibilities problem. People truly have no idea what is possible for them in computer science. And in my teaching experience in particular, many women coming to these classes have a very limited view of what they can accomplish. They don’t know what the job opportunities are, they don’t realize how programming can be used in their lives outside of work, and they know very little about how a computer works or what the main components of a computer are.

When I think about what I really need to do — what my focus is in teaching that I do — I think about changing the scope of what people think is possible. Broadening the scope, and enhancing whatever details I can that make studying programming and ultimately computer science relevant to the lives of the people coming to these classes.

So if we were to just to attach a little overdeveloped importance to this idea of expanding the scope of possibility, we could call this “possibility engineering.”

In my experience, there’s two basic things I have to do – I need to raise awareness, and then I need to offer encouragement. It’s in addition, of course, to teaching real skills that people need. And as classroom teachers, you’re all aware of the need for these two things. I’ve found that these issues are often left out of how outreach and teaching in open source communities is structured.

Screen Shot 2013-07-25 at 5.09.46 AM

This is a picture of a sticky note I drew of how I felt while learning to use a new programming language or trying learn a new module in Python. The top of the graph is “euphoria” or “happiness”, and the bottom of the graph is “despair” or unhappiness. You can see I have a lot of ups and downs!

The peaks are when I’m reading documentation for the first time, succeeding with experiments and implementing code. The valleys are when I actually try the tutorials and they don’t completely work, when I write code that fails and when I’m trying to refactor my test suite. In the end, my emotions level out and if I’m lucky, I end up satisfied with the tool I chose to work with.

Screen Shot 2013-07-25 at 5.11.08 AM

Here’s what I think happens sometimes with the women who come to PyLadies and then never come back. They initially are very happy, but then something happens that causes them to give up.

Screen Shot 2013-07-25 at 5.11.51 AM

In one case, I know exactly what happened — a woman attended the workshops, tried things on their own that didn’t work, and then finally had something break with Python on her Windows laptop and she never came back.

What happens when PyLadies succeeds? What does the emotional graph look like?

Screen Shot 2013-07-25 at 5.12.49 AM

What I’ve seen in the 60+ women that keep coming to meetings is that they continue to have difficult experiences – things break, they don’t know how to fix them.

But they all come back to the group. They ask questions, they commiserate over things that don’t work and they get the help they need to see that they are improving at the same time as they feel as though they are getting better, making friends and being supported. The in-person experiences are key.

Screen Shot 2013-07-25 at 5.13.48 AM

Before we go on, it’s important to acknowledge a key truth about what it is that teachers are teaching. Computer Science is a way of thinking and solving problems. It’s not a company or a product.

This is of course obvious to all of you in this room – but it’s such an important idea to come back to to in all of our work. It’s about getting kids or adults to understand the basics of what a computer is and what it does, and how it stores data about what, where, how and when we do things. We need people to understand these concepts in the same way that we need people to be able to read. When our society is increasingly assisted, augmented and controlled with the help of computers, democracy is at stake when most people have no idea how a computer and software works.

The role of open source groups like PyLadies, of non-profits like Mozilla, is ultimately to empower people: to spread knowledge, dispel myths and invite exploration.

But these groups are mostly helping out people who are already out of high school.

There’s a fair amount of research at this point about what many people think about computers when they’re in high school. I’ve mostly read about what girls think, and try to keep that in mind when I’m advertising my courses. Which brings me to what I thought computer science was all about when I was in high school.

What I knew was:

  • Computers were for playing games
  • Computers were for anti-social boys
  • You’ll find lots of inappropriate, animated ASCII art on computers

And I think that highlights a problem with how we’re collectively handling explaining computer science to the world. We can’t rely on ad-hoc self-education, or discovery learning to help people understand how the whole world is changing.

Screen Shot 2013-07-25 at 5.16.37 AM

Here’s a list of job titles from my colleagues in the industry. Many of these are jobs that didn’t exist 20 years ago, some are jobs that didn’t exist five years ago. So much is changing so fast.

Despite that, we have some real principles – computer science principles – underpinning it all. That’s where we need to focus, while at the same time exposing people to this wealth of possibility.

So, how did I, a person who thought the computers were for gaming, for boys and probably a little bit seedy, get from there to thinking it might be possible to join an open source community and move on to actually changing something I cared about?

In 2000, I made my first contribution to an open source project. I was working at Intel, managing network equipment monitoring and I’d found a problem with how I’d set everything up and needed to modify something like 7000 files to fix it. So I wrote a simple script.

Not too long after that, someone else had a similar problem and posted about it to a mailing list. So I decided, I might as well help that guy out and post the script. Then, I did.

And what happened next totally changed my life. The maintainer of the project not only thanked me, and asked a bunch of questions, he accepted my patch committed it to the main repo, and added me as a contributor to the project’s site.

Mind Blown

I changed the source code of a tool I used every day.

I felt deliciously powerful, so important! And incredulous that something that I’d written that was so obviously terrible, was good enough to be part of a piece of software that I not only used every day, but thought was incredibly great.

And other people used it! I know because I got bug reports later.

Today, I’m a major contributor to the PostgreSQL community, and I founded a chapter of PyLadies in Portland. I’m also deeply involved in many aspects of open source community organizing, like running conferences and helping out with the Ada Initiative. It’s hard to understate how much that patch affected the rest of my life.

I’m super passionate about open source software and I really think collaborating with teachers is awesome. And what I think in particular is great about collaboration between us is getting the open source community to understand teaching at scale. By that, I mean learning how to teach everyone — the way that we teach in our public education system.

Public education is a grand experiment, and a very successful one. Despite the many issues we have with the administration of it, we have a literacy rate that enables us to sustain a democracy and a system for getting an incredible amount of information to most of our republic’s citizens.

We should be using this system to teach everyone about computer science.

Beyond that, I want open source communities to figure out how to teach at that kind of scale. Not only do we need computer science in the classrooms — we need free and open source principles and tools to be taught as well.

We can get there with community members reaching out to teachers as a first step.

And an important part of that is learning what the process of developing lessons and teaching students in classrooms is all about. This is the huge thing we (free and open source developers and community members) can learn from you (teachers).

Teachers and open source community have a lot in common. Some of the more important things are:

  • Minimal resources
  • Teach anyone who shows up
  • Change the world by sharing ideas

My dream in this is that we’ll find a way to provide effective computer science education for everyone.

We’re trying to find that minimal set of concepts that will make people feel empowered at a keyboard, a kiosk or any computer they interact with in their lives. That they understand what’s being said in the newspaper about computers, that they can ask questions without feeling shamed or stupid, and that they can learn more if they choose.

And I don’t mean at all to say that you’re all signing up for teaching everyone. But I am signing up to at least try to do this for the adults in my life that need and want it.

Second half of this talk coming shortly…

Tech literacy and learning to code for girls in middle and high school in Portland, OR

A friend asked about programs suitable for a 10 year old and a 14 year old girl in the Portland area.

Here’s what I came up with:

As far as things that are already underway: http://www.chicktech.org/ has the most stuff for the 14-year-old

Looks like it happened in January: http://www.chicktech.org/participants/workshops/

Next there’s FreeGeek: http://www.freegeek.org/

http://www.freegeek.org/volunteer/

Their “adoption” program is interesting because you learn how to put together your own computer. Highly recommended.

There’s online programming courses offered through ORVED: http://www.orved.org/

What did I miss?

From twitter:

About high school computer science teachers

I’m giving a talk at PyCon next Saturday about teachers. The title is “What teachers really need from us“.

The first thing I should admit is that when I started thinking about this talk, I was sure that the list of what teachers needed from us was really long.

Then, I started actually talking with teachers.

So, here’s what some of them have said:

  • Reading comprehension is the biggest barrier to completion of AP Computer Science (Page 8 of this AP CS course description)
  • Fighting for continued existence is the biggest battle for a computer science teacher every year. “The number of secondary schools offering introductory computer science courses dropped 17 percent from 2005 to 2009 and the number offering Advanced Placement (AP) computer science courses dropped 35 percent in that time period.” December 2010 report
  • Writing personal letters from a teacher to students and parents increased the number of girls in one teacher’s class (in Virginia) from nearly zero to 50%. Research into increasing the number of women and minorities in CS classrooms is available in Stuck in the Shallow End.
  • Students at a high school learned three languages in three years. (C++, Java and Python) This busted so many notions I had about how long learning to program takes or what languages are most appropriate for beginners.
  • Kids don’t need algebra to learn to program. Algebra is a weeder course, often a prerequisite to CS and one that strongly indicates whether or not a student will graduate high school. What if kids could take an “algebra on computers” course instead of failing out of school? Please note, learning to program is not the same thing as being a professional programmer.
  • School counselors who help kids choose classes still send students to CS class believing that they’re going there to learn to type. Find out more about the wildly varying understanding state-by-state of what a computer science class really is in the Running on Empty report.
  • What teachers wanted from me was for me to come to their classes and give a short talk to their kids about myself and my work.
  • Teachers were super excited to hear about PyLadies. They struggle to get girls into their classes and are all looking for ways to increase the diversity of their classes.
  • The CS teachers I’ve met want to share their lessons – with me and with other teachers.
  • The CS teachers I’ve met don’t know other CS teachers.
  • Teachers were only mentioned once in the 84 initial statements of support for code.org

I think we’re all really missing out when we don’t talk to teachers.

I’ve talked directly with nine computer science teachers. Most of them are in Oregon, but I also was introduced to a couple teachers who came to Python-related conferences, or were married to Python programmers. I’m hoping to meet more. If you know someone, please put them in touch with me. I’m happy to chat over the phone or email, and love to meet folks in person.

Why PyLadies?

pyladies_blue

Hey Hacker News! If you’re coming here for the first time, you may also be interested in What I mean when I say I would like more women in the software industry

PyLadies is a group of women working on welcoming, encouraging and directly inviting women to join the Python community and to learn from each other.

I started a PyLadies chapter in Portland, OR last September (2012). We started out with weekly meetings to do homework from a Coursera class to make games with Python. That turned into weekly meetings — plus homework meetups on Saturdays at a local coffee shop, and IRC hangout time to test homework. And that turned into me giving mini-lessons at each Coursera meetup about the material from the class.

People seemed really excited.

Stats - PyLadies PDX (Portland, OR) - Meetup

Before we knew it, it was December, we had over 60 women subscribed to the Meetup, 30 of which had attended a meeting. Today, we’ve got 96 subscribers, 50 people have attended a meeting, and more have signed up to attend events in the future than ever before. And, it’s done by women. Using open source. Teaching classes. Learning developer tools. And writing software.

Since September, I’ve met even more women involved in running PyLadies chapters across the country. Much like the way the PostgreSQL community is organized, we’ve got a loosely connected group of people working independently. We offer support to each other, but don’t have hard and fast rules about what each chapter does. We encourage teaching and workshops, but don’t require them. We share our resources and are quick to put git repos out there of our materials. We send lots of pull requests. And we’re constantly looking for ways for women to get more involved in open source and Python.

All Group Reviews - PyLadies PDX (Portland, OR) - Meetup

I’m completely energized by the positive feedback we’ve gotten for every meeting. More recently, I’ve heard from people that they feel confident and sure of their knowledge because they’ve spent time in our meetups talking and learning from other women.

My goal is to make every get together like that – by having great lessons, a shared understanding of coaching and peer-based education and presentations from our members. Building these groups takes time, and I’m impatient to get to the part where I feel like every interaction with the group is rewarding for every member.

And I can’t do it alone. We’ve got four meetup organizers (although one is about to relocate to the Bay Area!). I work closely with Flora Worley, a kickass developer who chose programming as a career path after working on a PhD, on topic details and planning for the meetings. I’m so looking forward to meeting in person with the many members of the PyLadies community at PyCon next month.

Save the Ada Initiative

If you believe that women are a crucial part of the future of free and open source software, you should give to the Ada Initiative.

If you think we should have more women contributing, talking about and using free and open source software, you should donate to the Ada Initiative today.

I spent this past summer working with Mary, Valerie and the many supporters and contributors to the Ada Initiative. I talked to past donors, and spent a lot of time writing and thinking about how the Ada Initiative has evolved.

I met hundreds of people in person and online who believe not only that the Ada Initiative is a crucial advocate for change in the world of open source, but that establishing gender balance in open source through their work is a worthwhile, achievable goal. That work includes research, writing, training and creating culture and community specifically designed for women to flourish.

They’ve created strong relationships across project, business and ideological boundaries, through their board, advisors and AdaCamps.

I’m a member of the Advisors board, a major contributor to PostgreSQL and a data architect at Mozilla. These relationships have formed into a strong, diverse and visible alliance of women in open technology.

Because of the Ada Initiative’s work, I have seen an important shift from identifying problems to seeking solutions among my colleagues in open source. This work is made possible because TAI provides full-time employment to focus, write about and act on these solutions. Their work cannot continue without your support.

Between now and October 31, you can be the crucial donors who made this organization succeed in 2012. If you work for Microsoft, Google or Red Hat your donation with be doubled thanks to charitable giving matching programs. And individuals like Sumana Harihareswara and Leonard Richardson are sponsoring matching grants.

Social change is never easy, and the organizations like the Ada Initiative, who chose to step into the void, need our support.

Take a few minutes and give to the Ada Initiative, to Mary and Val, and help their work continue in 2013.

Feminist reading: Creating a wiki page, reading

This will be a series of blog posts about the reading I’m doing about feminism.

Over the years, I’ve been given a list of books like the The Feminine Mystique, The Second Sex (Vintage), and most recently Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How to Use It.

I’ve read parts or all of those, and many other books. But I am still sitting here with a profound sense of dislocation about feminism. I don’t have a list of feminist philosophers or writers that I strongly identify with. I find a lot of the writing either polemical or overly academic. I would like to find the books and articles that I can identify with, learn from and share.

My first action is to create a wiki page with links to books and articles that I’m finding in a number of syllabi for introductory womens studies classes.

If you have a syllabus from a course you’ve taken that you can share with me, I’d love to see it.

The things I’ve read today include:

I am reflecting on all the readings, and if you’d like to join me in discussion, I’d love to have some discussion partners as I work through these texts.

Giving back: “Career advice in less than 5 minutes”

Garann Means came up with this brilliant idea: give career advice about the big topics women in tech are facing IN LESS THAN 5 MINUTES.

So she started a gist to collect advice!

Have a look at the list of topics, and if you’ve got something to add do this:

  1. Make a short video
  2. Upload it to Vimeo
  3. Comment on the gist
  4. Tweet it out!
  5. Feel like the awesome mentor and contributor to the advancement of women in tech that you are!

Also, anyone have a good idea for a tag we should use?

I’m also collecting links to other resources.

Finally, I was talking with some people here in Portland about starting an advice column from respected recruiters and hiring managers. Would you submit a question? I’m thinking like Captain Awkward, but focused on issues women in tech face in looking for jobs, navigating a male-dominated working world, managing and hiring.