This commercial’s taking the internet by storm, because who doesn’t love Beastie Boys, girl engineers, and Rube Goldberg devices.

Some time ago, I wrote about the kickstarter for this project, and how I could live with the pinkification it took to sell these engineering projects for girls to parents already steeped in rigid gender roles. Looking at this commercial, though I love the commercial itself, I sort of feel like it’s overselling the product.

See, the actual product introduces a specific goal and a narrative in the form of a story book, drastically limiting the engineering potential of any one set. There’s only so much you can do with the ribbon and sticks and crank, so letting your imagination run wild doesn’t seem really, truly all that possible.

As a gateway into the wider world of toys, though, if GoldieBlox leads any girl to ask her parents for LEGO or K’Nex or some other engineering toy, I feel like it’s worth it — even if it requires not only retraining girls that it’s okay to like “doing things” instead of “being pretty”, but also getting in under parents’ gender policing radars.

And everyone loves a Rube Goldberg device. Hopefully inventive girls with enough toys can invent all sorts of crazy devices, if unfettered by the prescribed play mode.

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Google has done something decidedly not-evil (despite recent major missteps), and put together a travel grants program for several computer science conferences aimed at encouraging women entering fields under the T umbrella in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math).

As part of Google’s ongoing commitment to encourage women to excel in computing and technology, we are pleased to offer Women in Tech Conference and Travel Grants for female computer scientists.

To encourage attendance at technical conferences, we are offering the winners:

• Free registration for the conference
• Up to 1000 EUR towards travel and accommodation costs (to be paid after the conference)

To be eligible for a conference grant, the candidate must:

• Be a female working in or studying Computer Science, Computer Engineering or a technical field related to the conference subject
• Have a strong academic background with demonstrated leadership ability
• Attend the core day(s) of the main conference

How To Apply

To apply, by the indicated deadline, please submit this form by the indicated deadline.
You may apply for multiple conferences.

Eligible Conferences 2013 (ongoing, more conferences will be added throughout the year)

• Product Management Festival (deadline 12 August)
• JSConf (deadline 18 August)
• EuroBSDCon (deadline 23 August)
• Flossie (deadline 4 October)
• Velocity (deadline 6 October)

Winners and claim process

All applicants will be notified of the outcome of their application by email, approximately 3-4 weeks prior to the event. If you are selected, you will receive additional information on how to register for the conference and how to receive your travel grant.

For any questions, please reach out to [email protected].

This is how you fix the gender disparity between men and women in technology: you help women who might otherwise not be able to travel or who might think these conferences are not for them because of a lack of women representation in the field, get to the conferences to begin with. This puts those women in a position to be seen, so other women know that it’s not a gender-specific job. And they get a chance to talk with people inside the industry, too — which encourages them to recognize women programmers when they see them.

Lower the barriers that have developed naturally that keep women from being seen at such conferences and drives the lack of women interested in the field — when you don’t see anyone shaped like you in a field, you come to believe it’s not for you. It’s why Surly Amy was, until the JREF president made it clear by his actions that feminists were unwelcome at TAM, offering travel grants to women to attend — to improve gender ratios and give these women a chance to discover that the movement was indeed for them. (A shame how that all turned out, by the by.)

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Well, as “abroad” as a Canadian living in the unofficial-Canada-adjunct that is Minneapolis gets, I suppose.

My first week in the Twin Cities was, as expected, a ridiculous flurry of activity. I think this is the first night I’ve had since arriving where I had no specific plans, and/or no specific plans-to-stay-home that went to hell. I’ve also spent a good deal of time helping my hosts get their upstairs bathroom set up, knowing that four people wrestling for one bathroom every morning is the kind of grating activity that might lead to ill will amongst us. So I’ve been plowing a good deal of my spare time into that project, in part to help pay my way while I’m still living on the charity of others. (In other part, because the end goal involves a gigantic clawfoot tub for awesome baths that I’m totally going to take!)

Jodi’s still in Nova Scotia. I miss her terribly. She’s finishing up her last week at her job, and working on getting the house and car sold and possibly finishing her courses — she’s taking chemistry and physics through correspondence via the local community college so she doesn’t have to deal with classes, only the proctored tests. However, she might end up having to withdraw come time to rejoin me, if she can’t get all her requirements done before leaving and if tests can’t be proctored here. Which would be a minor shame, but it would be like having had a practice run through the courses.

My first week at work started out with something like an explosion, with a hardware failure that let me prove I’m competent but didn’t really let me shine, since most of the problem was resolved by replacing said hardware outright. I’m making friends and influencing people though, which is nice. I figure at this rate, it’ll be at least another week before people start getting the impression I’m a decent steward of their digital dependencies. Have been making a checklist of things I’d love to accomplish while I’m there, and if I get through half of them in my first year, people will worship me, I figure.

I have a local bank account now, but spent a half day waiting in the social security office today only to be told it’ll be four to six weeks before I find out what my number is. Work’s trying to figure out what to do with me in the meantime. Looks like I’ll be cashing cheques manually. I’ve put a star in my phone’s Google Maps for easier navigation back to the place… figure I’ll be needing it soon enough.

Speaking of which, my damned iPhone 4 is now a brick. Well, not literally, but might as well be. I had gotten it through my last job, sort of — paid the difference in an upgrade cost from a Blackberry, and they kept paying the data package through Rogers. Rogers is unwilling to unlock the phone right now, until the next upgrade goes through and my old job has the new hardware. Anxious to get working, I tried to unlock the phone manually since it’s already jailbroken, and ended up accidentally putting it into a state where it’s deactivated and wants to be activated via a Rogers SIM card before I can get to Cydia to install SAM to “hacktivate” the carrier over to T-Mobile. Since that’s pretty much impossible at this point, I was in a situation where I could either wait several weeks then call Rogers and pay them $50 to unlock the phone, pay $140 to unlock it through some third party (YES, before you say it, that’s the cheapest you can get a Rogers phone unlocked anywhere!), or buy a new phone.

So I ordered a Google Nexus 4 and used a loaner phone until it arrived. I am in love with this thing. Gorgeous, slim, powerful, huge-ish. YOU KNOW, LIKE ME. Same form factor as a Galaxy III, but unfortunately can’t use the existing and ubiquitous cases for it because all the holes are completely wrong. So I have an Android case on order. Hope I don’t smash it to crap in the meantime. I’ll hopefully even get to blog from it sometimes, maybe, possibly. Swype isn’t exactly as good as a hard keyboard, but it does make typing significantly faster so far.

I’ve already eaten out far too often — four times — but have had excellent food each time. Mancini’s and Gasthof Zur Gemütlichkeit both stand out as amazing places worth a visit if you have the extra cash to spare for the atmosphere. Unfortunately, my gut is still getting used to the local fare and probably the water, so I haven’t had too pleasant a gastrointestinal experience lately. But that’s to be expected with my squirelly gut I guess. I’m on Omeprazole, so this is becoming second nature to me, I guess. But I’m by no means in as bad of shape as, say, Sarah Moglia, who’s in really rough shape lately (GO TELL HER SHE’S AWESOME U GUISE).

This hardly even covers half of what’s gone on here. But yeah. It’s been pretty life-changing thus far. Hope I don’t run out of spoons for it all. And I feel the need to do some catch-up blogging now, before the entirety of my list of things-to-blog goes completely yesterday’s news.

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Sometimes it takes someone saying something so gobsmackingly obvious that it makes people ashamed they didn’t realize it before, to clue people in that there might actually be a problem, and how to address it. This post, I truly hope, is one of those times.

Sometimes, men talk about the gender disparity in tech communities as if there’s some big mystery. I have to conclude that these guys haven’t talked to women who currently work in computer science academia and the tech industry, or who did and then left. As someone who was perceived as a girl or woman doing computer science for 12 years, my solution to the lack of women in tech is:

Stop telling women that they aren’t welcome and don’t belong.

Sounds pretty obvious, right? Well, you’d think. But read on to see what counts as telling them they don’t belong. A tip — it’s not just making the blatantly sexist comment, like Prof. Doaitse Swierstra’s saying that more women in Haskell’s programming school would make the program “more attractive”.

When I watched the video, what I heard after Prof. Swierstra’s comment about attractiveness was laughter. No one called him out; the discussion moved on. I might be wrong here, but the laughter didn’t sound like the nervous laughter of people who have recognized that they’ve just heard something terrible, but don’t know quite what to do about it, either (though I’m sure that was the reaction of some attendees). It sounded like the laughter of people who were amused by something funny.

It would have taken just one person to stand up at that moment and say, “That was sexist and it’s not acceptable here.” (That person would probably have to be a senior faculty member or researcher, someone of equal rank to Prof. Swierstra; challenging a male, senior researcher is not something a female grad student (or even maybe a male grad student) should be expected to do.) But nobody did. And that’s what really disappoints me. Structural sexism persists not because of the few people who do and say blatantly bad things, but because of the majority who tolerate them. People say things like the things Prof. Swierstra said because they are socially rewarded for it: they can get a few laughs. Also, they can display their membership in a high-status group (heterosexual men). Take the reward away, and the comments and actions that exclude go away too.

The whole story sounds like the old anecdote about wanting to attract more women to a product “so let’s make it pink” — looking for a silver bullet solution that doesn’t acknowledge the true nature of the problem. “Let’s get more women because it’ll become more ‘attractive’, wink wink nudge nudge” makes it sound like all you need is more women to make it more likely for women to join up, rather than addressing any sexism already rampant in the community. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding that the framing of the problem is actually prejudicial to women to begin with. It’s one of those things where a bunch of men say “we need more women because X-thing-that-hurts-women”, and women go “no fucking wonder you’ve got a problem”, and no self-awareness is ever achieved.

It’s terrible when that entrenched sexism comes from the top, and woe betide any lowly trench soldier that dares speak truth to power because they’ll get drummed out as trying to “tar” the leader’s reputation.

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Air Canada, I have to say, has some snazzy planes. I have a live map of where I am in the flight, how long it will be til I get there, and to feed my OCD and need for more information than is actually necessary for any normal traveller, exactly how fast I’m travelling and at what altitude. All on an LCD panel that’s built into the seat in front of me. 1h 46 mins, touchdown at 10:02 am local Toronto time. This is definitely information overkill.

And my seat isn’t special, either. Every single seat in this plane has one of these. Only some people are playing movies, cartoons, or browsing through a selection of XM Radio channels. From here I can see The Smurfs, some cartoon I don’t recognize (maybe Iron Giant? I haven’t seen it yet), and something starring The Rock. I could put Planet of the Apes (the original) on if I so chose, but the map of our flight path is infinitely more interesting to me. What took an hour and a half to drive, I’ve already covered in the first five minutes of being in the air. I’ve traveled double that by now.

What’s more, my netbook is drawing power from a 110v power outlet, and I have the option to plug my phone in via a USB charger. That’s distinct from the power outlet, by the way — I could (and probably should) plug my phone in too.

All of this is forgetting the fact that I’m hurtling through the air in a big metal projectile.

I am more keenly aware of my first-world privilege right now than I have been in quite some time. While some struggle to eat, someone’s pushing a cart full of snacks down the aisle and I can (and will) refuse.

I’m over St. John, New Brunswick, now. Unreal. Uncanny.

Read for the rest of the flight, posting now that I’ve touched down in Toronto. It won’t be long til I’m back in MN.

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Apropos of the video I posted yesterday about biotech, here’s Dara Ó Briain on the IT industry.

He’s mostly right. Those of us who do real work frown on the goons he’s talking about, though. There’s a showboat in every crowd.

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