Category: women

Useful links: Sexism, Job Hunting, Color Contrast, Blog Takedown

A Primer on Sexism in the Tech Industry at .net magazine is by Faruk Ateş. For quite some time, I’ve been impressed with the quality of content appearing at .net magazine. I’ve linked to quite a few articles here. So here’s a belated +1 to .net magazine for being such a great resource.

How do you look for a job in an industry known for biases against women? is an informative post for women looking for work.

Here’s a wonderful addition to color contrast testing tools. Lea Verou created a contrast checker that she describes in Easy Color Contrast Ratios. Here is what this innovative tool can do:

  • Accepts any CSS color the browser does, not just hex colors. To do this, it defers parsing of the color to the browser, and queries the computed style, which is always rgb() or rgba() with 0-255 ranges which be parsed much more easily than the multitude of different formats than modern browsers accept (and the even more that are coming in the future).
  • Updates as you type, when what you’ve typed can be parsed as a valid CSS color.
  • Accepts semi transparent colors. For semi-transparent backgrounds, the contrast ratio is presented with an error margin, since it can vary depending on the backdrop. In that case, the result circle will not have a solid background, but a visualization of the different possible results and their likelihood (see screenshot).
  • You can share your results by sharing the URL. The URL hashes have a reasonable structure of the form #foreground-on-background, e.g. #black-on-yellow so you can even adjust the URL as a form of input.
  • You can adjust the color by incrementing or decrementing its components with the keyboard arrow keys until you get the contrast right. This is achieved by including my Incrementable library.

You’ll find a link to the new contrast checker on Lea’s site (it’s currently on github). I think it deserves a URL of its own, don’t you?

This is one of those “I can’t believe they did that” stories. Textbook Publisher Pearson Takes Down 1.5 Million Teacher And Student Blogs With A Single DMCA Notice. That’s Pearson as in Visual Quickstart Guides and a bunch more books you probably own. Pearson that I’ve worked for several times as a writer or tech editor. I hope something in this situation changes soon.

Useful links: Hacker vs. Maker, Social Media, Prebooks

Hackers and Makers: Language Matters is from Curious for a Living. She said, “Yes, language matters. Especially when we’re inviting community. What feels more welcoming to you: A hackerspace or a Maker Faire?”

NIce summary of how the candidates are using social media in the 2012 election. Do you think it makes a difference?

CSS: The Definitive Guide, Fourth Edition by Eric Meyer is a post about much more than the latest edition of Eric’s CSS opus. It’s about how books are marketed, sold, packaged, distributed and even conceived of as entities. As far as I know, O’Reilly is the first publisher to do something like this. I don’t think O’Reilly will be the last. Even if you aren’t interested in the latest CSS book, you need to read this post.

I tweeted about Eric’s post yesterday. He doesn’t completely share my opinion. Here’s a part the conversation Eric and I had then. (By the way, have you noticed how impossible it is to embed a complete conversation from Twitter? Twitter decides for you what tweets you want to include. This is a patchwork and not complete.)

 

 

 

Useful links: Decent Men, Google Fonts, Building Responsive Layouts

A Call to Arms for Decent Men by Ernest Adams is at idga.org. It’s a great post, very long, very well-written. Here are a couple of quotes:

Guys, we have a problem. We are letting way too many boys get into adulthood without actually becoming men. We’re seeing more and more adult males around who are not men. They’re as old as men, but they have the mentality of nine-year-old boys. They’re causing a lot of trouble, both in general and for the game industry specifically. We need to deal with this.

. . .

Use your heavy man’s hand in the online spaces where you go – and especially the ones you control – to demand courtesy and punish abuse. Don’t just mute them. Report them, block them, ban them, use every weapon you have. (They may try to report us in return. That won’t work. If you always behave with integrity, it will be clear who’s in the right.)

Let’s stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the women we love, and work with, and game with, and say, “We’re with you. And we’re going to win.” 

A very nice resource indeed: Google Fonts Reference Posters.

The exceedingly awesome Zoe Gillenwater released her slides from a Building Responsive Layouts talk. You can find them on slideshare, and see them here:

Deborah Edwards-Onoro was present at Zoe’s presentation and created a Storify version of it with tweets and images as well as the presentation.

Good Guys in Tech: Two Conferences

Okay, dear reader, this is my last example to get you started on stories and examples of places where women in tech are treated as equals. Further Good Guys in Tech posts must come from you.

The Open Help conference boasts a female speaker and female led sessions.

Open Help Conference & Sprints

I must mention Environments for Humans as one of the good guys. E4H sponsors many conferences – all done online. For example,  if you look quickly through the speaker’s faces for the current CSS Summit, you’ll see that women are welcomed and given equal status there.

Good Guys in Tech: Twitter supporters

I’m attempting to prime the pump with a few Good Guys in Tech posts of my own. I hope this encourages you to let me know about examples of men in tech who treat women as equals that you find.

One way men in tech can support women in tech is to treat what they do with the respect and support that comes from a promotional tweet. Here are a few examples, starting with good guy Jeffrey Zeldman.

Mike Lane lets us know how the W3C is doing on equality for women in this tweet. Perhaps he wasn’t interested in the 2:2 gender ratio of the new editors, but I am.

Pratik Patel – love his enthusiasm for the ladies’ work on a panel.

Here’s one from Howard Rheingold celebrating a woman’s work.

Finally, advice for a woman from Dave McClure about how Yahoo! can Pass Go, collect the big money, and hold up half the sky.

Good Guys in Tech: Peter Seewald, Continued

The people who work with and for Pete Seewald at Location3 Media are so enthusiastic about what a great job he does treating women as equals in the workplace, I heard from even more of them after the mention he got yesterday.

The first comes from JV, who said,

Pete Seewald and I worked together for about a year and a half on a large software project.  The team was comprised primarily of men.   I was in a product owner role and Pete was a developer.  Pete was willing to talk to me about technical issues and not deliver it in a way that was condescending.  He actually listened to my opinion and point of view which was evident in his final work product.  Pete made me feel that my perspective was just as important as the other members of the team.  The idea of gender and treatment of individuals based on their gender does not seem to enter into Pete’s mind.  It is a refreshing approach.

Next I heard from BB, who said,

As a woman in the IT field, a lot of the times people treat you like you are not as good as men unless you prove to them it is not the case. I have been in the situation where a new manager came on board (a guy) and I am the only woman in the team so I was assigned to do all the administrative tasks such as booking meeting rooms, arrange lunches, photocopying and etc, I was eventually pulled away from those duties after the boss realized I am actually one of the strongest programmers in the team. There is also the opposite situation that I have heard: the team hired a woman programmer but she couldn’t really deliver anything, but because she is a woman so the team was very lenient with her incompetency and it turned out the value of her being in the team was to help out some administrative tasks. I’d like to be in a team where people just treat me as a professional, and that is how I felt working with Peter Seewald. I felt that I was given the same opportunity and respect while working with Pete, he is very direct and candid, and also very attentive to my professional opinions.

And finally, from his boss, Brandi.

Pete works with me in an environment where he tries to find solutions to problems and facilitate opportunities for  everyone in the business including me, as his female boss.  He constantly looks to give me information, or ensure that I’m filled in when I may be seen outside of the “good ol’ boys club”.   Pete has always promoted my work and realizes that in some cases as a woman, I may need to manage businesses differently and accepts and embraces those challenges.  He has always respected me and my decisions, and reflected on me in a positive and friendly manner as we have worked together in a wide range of types of businesses.

Thanks to Philip Reed for getting all this organized among the folks at Location3 Media.

As for myself, I want to see Pete speaking at tech conferences and telling all the brogrammers who attend how to act around women in the workplace. He has some advice to give, methinks.

If you can share a story about a conference where you see women treated as equals – delivering keynotes, leading panels, giving talks – please contact me and I’ll share the good words in a Good Guys post. See Women in Tech: Can You Help Find a Few Good Men? for more details.

The Good Guys in Tech: Peter Seewald

I received this as a comment from Jackie Brockhill in the post Women in Tech: Can You Help Find a Few Good Men, Part II.

I wanted to promote Jackie’s comment into a post, because it is the inaugural post in the new category on this blog: GoodGuysInTech.

As an Agile project manager, the majority of the developers that I work with are male. All with varying levels & flavours of their experience with Agile as it relates to a company or project. The team I was managing for this particular company were considered to be some of the most senior developers responsible for the foundation of the platform. Each with their own beliefs, attitudes and goals . My challenge was about demonstrating how Agile could benefit a skeptical group of developers. To do that I needed support. Luckily, Peter Seewald was able to help translate between myself & the developers. He helped explain to the group the reason behind using points to track work, the need to enter time spent on a particular task & he also showed enthusiasm for our daily scrums. I believe that the support of a male developer made my job & in the end the whole team a success.

See also: Women in Tech: Can You Help Find a Few Good Men?