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

After years of making social networking sites for other people, I’ve finally launched one of my own! Stemming.org is a networking/community site and collaborative blog for girls and women interested in the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). I’m super excited about this — I think it has a lot of potential to support and connect women and girls who are often minorities in their fields or discouraged in their interests.

So far, I’ve done all the design and development (in Rails) for the site — it’s been cool to be my own client and get a chance to explore some technical things I might not otherwise have learned. (And being my own client gives me added appreciation for my clients’ perspective when we’re working on other projects like this!)

Stemming welcomes blog posts from anyone who has something to say that would be of interest to women and girls in STEM; I’d also love for people to share the link and send me their suggestions/improvements!

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.

It’s easier for women to feel motivated to pursue traditionally male-dominated interests if they can see other women working in those fields; but yet, women’s contributions to technical fields are often invisible. So Suw Charman-Anderson started Ada Lovelace Day to bring these women out of the shadows by encouraging as many people as possible to blog about women in technology on the same day.

March 24? Why, that’s today! Here are some of my computing heroines:

• Ada Lovelace herself, of course! She’s now thought of as the first computer programmer — she was friends with Charles Babbage and wrote a set of instructions for calculating on his Analytical Engine that’s thought of as the first program (although the engine was never built, so she would never get to test her code).
• Grace Murray Hopper was a freakin’ badass. She was a Navy admiral who pioneered the idea that computer programming languages should be similar to English (helping make possible COBOL’s leap away from assembly language to a new level of abstraction, which made programming a lot easier!). She was also one of the first people to develop and promote standards for computer languages and systems.
• Maria Webster is the author of the blog dotfiveone: Geekspace for Women, which covers everything from science fiction to hands-on electronic circuit building. By providing a space on the internet targeted toward women who are already quite geeky, thanks very much, Ms. Webster definitely helps to fill a niche that’s too often neglected.
• Valerie Aurora (formerly known as Val Henson) is a kernel hacker, filesystem geek, and Linux developer who also wrote this great HOWTO Encourage Women in Linux.
• Cathy Malmrose overcame childhood discouragement of her technical interests to found and run ZaReason, one of the few hardware vendors to sell systems with Linux preinstalled. Ms. Malmrose also makes a point of sharing information about open-source software in an open, friendly way to people in her community; as a t-shirt on her site says, “Friends help friends use Linux”!
• Everyone involved in LinuxChix, a great support/information-sharing organization whose motto is “Be polite, be helpful.” Words to live by!
• Gina Levow is an AI/computational linguistics researcher who was also one of my computer science professors in college; she gave me my first technical jobs, first as her research assistant (which is where I first learned UNIX-y command line magic) and then as a grader for an introductory CS class.
• Anne Rogers was another one of my CS professors; her Operating Systems (and Computer Architecture) classes were an intense boot camp for learning the inner workings of computers, and after taking them, I knew I was compelled to pursue even more technical knowledge.

Yikes, that list ended up way longer than I planned (I kept thinking of more awesome ladies to add)! I’d also recommend searching for more Ada Lovelace Day posts — I really enjoyed seeing other bloggers’ profiles of accomplished technical women.