What’s the emoticon for ambivalence?
I saw this in large poster format in an apartment window while on the train in from O’Hare airport to downtown Chicago earlier this week: My first thought that was this was a marketing campaign created by men, but it turns out the company behind it is a small group of women. I find it [...]
Playing in your walled wurstgarten
Earlier this week, after my post about mesh‘s lack of visible reasons for a having a bunch of white guys as their keynote speakers, I had a conversation with Mark Evans, one of the mesh organizers. Based on this chat, my assessment is that the mesh organizers exhibit little or no commitment to diversity, and [...]
Out come the long knives
Yesterday, in frustration at a post that I read by one of the mesh conference organizers explaining why they were yet another tech conference with no women keynote speakers, I wrote a post that parodied their unnamed reasons for this. I didn’t give a lot of background to this in the post, but it’s key [...]
mesh: a conference by, for and featuring white men
Last year, there was a certain amount of noise about the fact that the mesh organizers managed to find only a tiny number of women speakers — 6 out of 50, or some such ridiculous ratio — and this year is not shaping up to be any better, with exactly zero women keynote speakers. It [...]
A bit of social unnetworking
In spite of my modified Skype description that has stopped most of the unsolicited requests for contact, there’s still a few morons who don’t get the message. I’ve decided to create a rogues’ gallery of Skype Scumbags on Flickr showing their requests; you can find the entire set (as it grows) here, and I encourage [...]
Rebuffing the Skype stalkers
As part of the whole transparent lifestyle, I publish my real name, my age and my gender on my Skype profile. Unfortunately, some morons take the “female” indicator as an invitation to start a chat with me that they think is going to lead to some sort of hot IM conversation. I allow chat messages [...]
Getting women into technology jobs
My post earlier this week about Alec Saunders’ sexist demo scenario at DemoCamp 12 (criticism that he took quite gracefully) led to both a blog post on his part, then an email and Skype discussion between us. The topic of our private discussion quickly turned to that of hiring women in technical jobs, with Alec admitting [...]
Remembering
17 years ago today, 14 women (12 of them engineering students) were killed at Montreal’s École Polytechnique by a misogynist whack-job who blamed women for his failure to gain attendance to the engineering school. Although this event catalyzed the Canadian movement to eradicate violence against women, and led to December 6th being marked as the [...]
Getting friendly with women
I used to work for a software company in southern California, and eventually left because of the toxic corporate culture and politics, especially the old boys network that prohibited women from having any real impact in the company. Recently, they were acquired by a very large technology company that has their own particular unwanted level [...]
Breast of Canada calendar
If you read this blog directly (rather than via the RSS feed), you may have noticed the beautiful Breast of Canada photo in the sidebar. I added this to my site after meeting the creator of this calendar, Sue Richards, at BlogHer in California earlier this year. Needless to say, I have my copy of [...]
