Clara Raubertas // Freelance Web Design, Web Development, and Web Consulting // Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts clara raubertas design. development. consulting.

Some website projects I’ve been working on in the past couple months:

• Launching the design for MetaArts, an educational publishing development house in Chicago
• Launching MyWomanToday, which I worked on through Webstudio Boston — I did all the backend Ruby coding for this social network
• HTML coding for Really Useful Information
• Some updates and changes to Lamp Glass’s online store
• Wordpress customization for Tall Tales from the Antiques Trail — it’s still under development, but this will be a blog where a local antique dealer collects colorful stories (from his own experience as well as from colleagues) about the business

I’ve also been enhancing my Wordpress skills and learning sIFR for some other projects that are still in the behind-the-scenes stages. One of the great things about being a freelancer is getting to learn new technological skills with almost every project!

I upgraded to the new Ubuntu, Jaunty Jackalope, on the day it came out. “At last!” I thought. “Time to solve the problems I created for myself by upgrading to a non-Long-Term-Support release last fall!” Dreaming of a world in which pulseaudio didn’t randomly need to be restarted every few hours, I started the upgrade running… only to load Firefox and discover an even worse fate — no sound in anything Flash-based! No Pandora!! PANIC TIME!!!

Anyway, it turned out to be super easy to fix. Just go to Adobe’s website and download the .deb of the latest Flash, then install, restart Firefox, good to go. Now I can get my Sarah Haskins¹ fix complete with sound!

I got into a discussion on Trogger this morning about the question of men far outnumbering women in computer science (in my experience, this is very true — in my college CS classes of 20-25 people I would usually be one of 2 women, and of the 20 or so people my year who actually graduated with CS degrees, I was the only woman); why is this, and what can be done about it?

I think a lot of this has to do with unconscious bias and role models. As Cassie pointed out in her original post, a big factor is probably stereotype threat — the finding that members of particular groups stereotyped at being bad at certain subjects actually do worse in tests of those subjects if they are told the tests show a gender/race disparity, or even just asked to list their race or gender, than if they take the tests without race or gender brought up. Research like the Implicit Association Test suggests that most people, even female scientists and mathematicians themselves, unconsciously find it easier to associate math and science with men than with women.

Implicit biases in a person aren’t evidence that the person is actively discriminatory — they’re subconscious ideas that we get from the racist, patriarchal society all of us are raised in. No matter how consciously convinced you are that women make great scientists and technologists, you probably also have the subconscious implicit biases that suggest otherwise. So it’s not so much a question of women thinking, “Hey, I probably won’t be good at programming because I’m a woman!”, as thinking, “Oh, I just don’t see myself as a programmer”, without realizing that this idea might come from subconsciously ingrained biases about what a programmer is like (male).

But these biases can be fought! Research associated with the IAT has shown that people show less evidence of implicit biases when holding counter-stereotypes in their minds; for example, you’re more likely to associate women with science if you read about Rosalind Franklin or Marie Curie right before taking the test. This is what Ada Lovelace Day is all about — promoting the women who are already successful in scientific and technical fields is a win for everybody. The more visible women in science and technology are, the less prevalent these implicit biases will be in the future, and the more girls and young women will be motivated to enter these fields.

Some of you may be aware that some friends and I started a band this year, and so far, it is awesome!

Well, actually, several of the same people had a previous incarnation of the band last year, but it never really went anywhere. The version we (re-)started in January has accomplished much more, for a handful of reasons:

• I have a real electronic drumset, rather than just a bucket to bang on!
• Meeting on Sunday afternoons rather than on weekday evenings gives us more time to practice
• Meeting on the same day every week rather than “when people are free” makes sure we’re rehearsing together regularly and frequently
• Not breaking out the beer at the beginning of practice keeps us focused :)
• Keeping our playing-together practice and writing-music sessions separate also improves our focus (in our previous incarnation, we often spent the whole practice thinking about a song idea someone had had instead of playing together; this time, we’re restricting our Sunday practices to songs that are ready to play, and scheduling optional weekday meetings to work on turning song ideas into playable songs)
• We’ve also tried recording some of our songs as we practice — most of the recordings aren’t fit for public consumption, but they’re helpful to practice to and to listen and critique to see what we need to improve

This has been a really fun project so far! We’re so put-together that we even have a name (The Moral Hazards), a website (themoralhazards.com), and a myspace, where you can hear a jam session we had last weekend based on one of the original songs we’re working on.