helloshauna:

Silicon Valley Entry Points for Humanities Ph.D.s: Marissa Mayer (when she was at Google)

The Human Experience BiblioTech Conference

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This woman has paved some incredible headway for women in tech everywhere.

good:

‘Hacker School’ Is Creating a New Generation of Female Programmers

Male domination of the computer programming industry could soon be on its last legs. In April, Etsy announced that it was teaming up with the New York City-based Hacker School school to offer $5,000 scholarships to 20 women to attend a three-month-long summer program and learn coding through projects. Exceeding all expectations, 661 women applied to the program and 23 were admitted.

Read more at GOOD.is

Leah Culver talks Python and Django at Girl Geek Dinner SF.  Ten minutes. 

“Teaching Girls to Program,”  Genevieve L’Esperance reflects on her experience teaching a programming course for 54 middle-school age girls.   Seven minutes.

“To My Coder Girl,”  music video, Dale Chase. 

I’m Learning to Program: Getting Started 

Yay! More people learning to code.  More women learning to code, double yay! With optional Pop Tarts!  

Mmmmmm Pop Tarts.  (Sorry, Tumblr is showing me way too many pictures of delicious junk food). 

codeforamerica:

The women of Code for America. Be women of Code for America next year: codeforamerica.org/apply

^^^^HOW MUCH DO I LOVE THIS PICTURE!  HOW MUCH?!^^^^^^

Being Geek Chic: Think there’s no sexism in geek culture? Think again.  

Being Geek Chic: New rule for talking about women & startups

When I went to participate in a startup accelerator program two time zones away for three months, my husband — who has a full time job as a developer at Google — took care of our kids alone for three months.  

If you’re serious about your career, marry someone who’s serious about doing half of the childcare.  

I posted earlier on Zed Shaw’s response to being added to a Github repo that contains a specification for a fictitious markup language called DongML (“DongML: a flexible markup for stiff problems”).

Shaw says that the creator of the repo adds people he doesn’t like to the repo as contributors as a method of harassing them.  Github bills itself as “social coding,” and users have an activity feed; if you “follow” someone on github, you see when someone comments or adds to a repo, so everyone who “follows” Shaw might see a notice like:  ”zedshaw is now a contributor to DongML.”  

Lots of people have commented on Shaw’s response to this — in essence, once he was a contributor to the repository for DongML, he wrote a script to overwrite it again and again, prompting a brief outage of Github.com.   Some were on Shaw’s side and decried the “mob mentality” of some Ruby contributors; others characterized Shaw as a “drama queen.” 

Now I realize that I just engaged in what Jay Rosen calls “We have no idea who’s right” journalism, but in this case, I’m not obfuscating my opinion.  I really do have no idea.  

What’s notable to me is that no one seemed to object to how crass the satire was, or the fact that it included this: 

3.11 BOOB tag

The BOOB tag is optional. It is used for a better representation of the citation of the dong.

The fact that this kind of humor is considered normal and unobjectionable is an example of why many women don’t feel welcome in code culture.  Hey, according to the spec?  We’re only optional.  

webstartwomen:

More women in tech = better future for all

Thanks to the Twitter machine, we stumbled on this terrific post by Alex Howard. It’s a crash course in why getting more women in tech is a good idea.

The short version:

• It’s good for men—stereotypes are reduced and people’s work is evaluated more accurately.
• It’s good for women—when women are encouraged, they can devote more time/energy to the actual work because they spend less on just getting into the arena.
• It’s good for technology—mixed-gender teams are more profitable and innovative.

The post is excellent. Go read it, right now.

Being Geek Chic: Lady Geek of the Week: Sandra Kurtzig

beinggeekchic:

 

We talk about it endlessly, but it’s still true. There is a real shortage of women in tech ventures, but more problematically, there is a real shortage of said women in leadership positions. This week’s Lady Geek, Sandra Kurtzig, was one of the female pioneers in technology.

First, a…

Morgan Missen: Where are all the women in tech? On Tumblr!

mrgn:

Tracy Chou, Google and Facebook Intern turned Software Engineer at Quora

Caroline McCarthy, CNET writer turned Googler

Aubrey Sabala, Googler turned Consumer Marketing at Facebook

Melissa Miranda, Co-Founder of Journly

Lauren Leto, Co-Founder, Texts From Last Night and…