History!

Thanks to metafilter, I found this set of pictures of a data center room from back in the day (late 1960's). It looks like many, if not most, of the computer operators (but not the programmers) were women. Some of that comes from the cultural categorization of that sort of computer operations work as 'clerical'.

I'd like to think that some of it goes back to a number of computer pioneers being women back when "computer" was a job title for a person, not the name of a machine. It looks like the eniacprogammers.org folks are trying to get a documentary made about the women who did the initial programming on the ENIAC, and they're taking donations.

Women keep being part of tech and hacking and history and repeatedly forgotten. Every once in a while there's a spate of stories in media about "OH MY GOD! LOOK! WOMEN NERDS AND WOMEN HACKERS!" And every time, it seems like they're newly discovering it. We're here. We've always been here, and we're *still* here, not just newly arriving. But somehow, we're never quite remembered as having been there.

Never introduced, they never became a part of history. Forty years later, Kathy Kleiman was told that the women in pictures with ENIAC (1946) were "Refrigerator Ladies," models posed in front of the machine.

Back to the present and into the future... The CCC (that's chaos computer club not concourse computer center) is having their conference right now, which led to a wired article I just read about the Haecksen group of women hackers. Yay more women hackers! We're here -- still here, not just newly arrived.

gender and drupal

Interesting post over at Wild Unicorn Herd

Open Source people, and Drupal people in particular, pride themselves on having a “doacracy”—a community that values getting stuff done above traditional authority. This could create a beginner-friendly, non-hierarchical environment of subversion and experimentation. In practice we just have white straight cis men getting SUPER DEFENSIVE at the suggestion that maybe they got where they are not only by the sweat of their brow, and shouting down any mention of patriarchy, racism, or any other systemic oppression when people run the numbers and get to wondering why there’s so little minority representation in Open Source.

On the other hand, I'm pleased to see things like the discussion over the expanded 'gender' field at Drupal.org (link here).

hat tip to geekfeminism.org

Dress for success....

Apparently, when dealing with at least some VC's, "dress for success" means "wear a white penis":
'white male tech startups get funding for being white and male'. 

Also, the Wall Street Journal has an article looking at reasons that women-owned companies are generally smaller than men-owned companies (in spite of there being more new women owned businesses than men owned businesses for decades).  (And Discover magazine points out that women become more risk-averse when faced with stereotypes of women as risk averse)