sudo-discuss

sudo-discuss@sudoroom.org

8 participants
7459 discussions

Re: [sudo-discuss] someone at sudo was a creep and it's a problem

by Zach

Hey all, I hope its okay if I add to the conversation here a little, which seems to be very thoughtful and productive thus far. I'm especially impressed at the intention to hear from the experiences of women, which is really cool. Kudos to the men that expressed the importance of our limited experience, and to the women who spoke up. I am not a sudo room member and am rarely I'm rarely in that space, but Jake mentioned me at the end of the first email and CC-ed me. As a member of Noisebridge and someone in the bay hackerspace communities, this is a subject close to my heart that I think it is helpful to think about it, and maybe we can offer some cross-hackerspace solutions to eachother. Since Jake mentioned this in the first email, here is the Noisebridge Anti-Harassment Policy: https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Anti-Harassment_Policy Now for my 2 cents: Note, there is nothing in there that states you cannot ask someone out at NB. However, I am strongly in favor of definitely limiting that behavior (as I voiced to my friend the other night) because women have complained to me VERY OFTEN about being sick of being hit on at Noisebridge. Almost all of the women hackers have left the space over the years, and I have friends that are women that used to used to hack there and have told me outright they will not return because of being hit on all the time (even with something as simple as "what are you working on?" and "Do you want a tour of the space?" being asked all the time, when they had been regulars for months, if not years.) A woman I was having a meeting with recently got interrupted by some pickup artist fool (in the middle of our meeting) and asked to lunch. Was this harassment? I'm not sure, but it was damn inappropriate. Kathy makes a solid point, saying "I think one thing that always comes up at sudo/ccl is where to draw the line between bad social skills and unintentionally harmful behavior." I would like to add that pickup artists and creeps are *very* skilled at *intentionally blurring this line* it is, in fact, what they might be best at. A lot of us don't have the best social skills, but when you go out of your way to interrupt people and ask someone out I think you are behaving inappropriately (talking about NB here). Do we decide to never ask people out at a hackerspace? One of my close friends who is an awesome hacker woman is an advocate of this, and it makes a lot of sense. However, If someone is showing prolonged interest in me, over the course of multiple visits to the space, then I would consider asking them out. What does that look like? I would say if a woman came over to me to ask about my projects, my personal life, etc. on multiple occasions and made it their business (not mine) to say hello to me all the time, then maybe I would ask her if she wanted to share a burrito. The problem seems to arise when *men* are initiating the contact over and over again, especially going into a different part of the hackerspace just to engage with women. The example Jake mentioned from the other night was a woman came to ask what a group of us were working on, and then later in the night was looking for some scissors for her sewing. I said she could use mine if she needed, which she seemed to appreciate. My friend suggested that I asked her out at one point later in the night because he thought she was into me. I had a) never seen her before in the space and b) had no reason to believe she was initiating contact with me beyond needing tools. She asked nothing of my personal life and did not join us in our projects or anything. So I told him I thought it would be inappropriate to ask her out, and advocated letting women have their space to work on their projects. Hopefully some of this info is helpful to share, I'm really glad you are all addressing this issue so thoughtfully! I am by no means an expert on any of this and am very open to hearing from others if the shared views are harmful in any way. Thanks for reading, Zach -------------------------------------------- On Wed, 8/3/16, Mary Ward <maryhbw(a)gmail.com> wrote: Subject: Re: [sudo-discuss] someone at sudo was a creep and it's a problem To: "Kathy Buehmann" <kathy.buehmann(a)gmail.com> Cc: "Patrik D'haeseleer" <patrikd(a)gmail.com>, "Marc Juul" <juul(a)labitat.dk>, "Jake" <jake(a)spaz.org>, "Zach T" <organic_unity(a)yahoo.com>, "sudo-discuss" <sudo-discuss(a)lists.sudoroom.org>, "cultlabsboard(a)googlegroups.com" <cultlabsboard(a)googlegroups.com>, "Tamari Kirtadze" <kirtadzet(a)gmail.com> Date: Wednesday, August 3, 2016, 7:26 PM Hi All, I have interacted with Sean on many occasions and I have not found him to be threatening in the least. I believe that we are lacking a general enculturation program for the Omni. I personally was not aware that you cannot ask people on dates at the Omni or Sudoroom specifically. I am glad to know this so I don't make a similar mistake. Kind Regards, MarySent from my iPhone On Aug 3, 2016, at 6:34 PM, Kathy Buehmann <kathy.buehmann(a)gmail.com> wrote: I agree, I think we should hear Jake's female friend's account before moving forward. When he was speaking with me, he seemed very enthusiastic and excited to share his idea with those of us at the social. I did not mind him dominating the conversation as it felt that he was doing so more to convey his excitement than to try to quiet anyone else. He promptly left once he had finished "venting" (positive connotation) and I figured he'd be busy working on his projects again. I had not thought much about yesterday's conversation with him until now. I suppose after this interaction I probably would not go out of my way to share my own projects with him, but not out of spite or malice. More, he just seemed really into his own thing. I feel there are tons of people at CCL who would be psyched to hear about stuff I'm working on, so I'd simply choose to share it with them. His loss, from my point of view. That being said, he was not hitting on me, asking me out, preventing me from speaking, or anything that aggressive. If that had been the case I probably would have found someone else to talk to or worked on my computer until he left the conversation. I imagine it would have taken quite a bit for me to directly address him about it, whether verbally or with a hypothetical yellow card. I cannot think of anything off the top of my head that would spurn me to do this, short of him flat out insulting me or becoming physical in any way. At this point however I imagine many others in the conversation would notice and also take action. I'm not really sure what to do moving forward but wanted to share my perspective as I interacted with him last night. I personally have not had or witnessed any negative interactions with him and appreciate his enthusiasm and energy. I think one thing that always comes up at sudo/ccl is where to draw the line between bad social skills and unintentionally harmful behavior. The tricky thing is it depends on the person on the receiving end of it all. I know there have been a few peeps at ccl I don't feel super comfortable around, but if no one else seems to take offense then I'll attribute it to personal bias on my part and try to minimize contact. That being said I am rarely in the space alone with said people so maybe that would change my opinion. Wish I could attend the meeting tonight. Thanks for addressing this everyone and keep us in the loop. On Wed, Aug 3, 2016 at 5:32 PM, Patrik D'haeseleer <patrikd(a)gmail.com> wrote: Sean is a regular CCL member, and has been working on the liquid handling robot in the basement for almost two months now. I've interacted with him on several occasions. He is definitely enthusiastic and talkative, but he didn't strike me as a problem before. But then again, I'm not a woman either. I would really want to hear Jake's friend's reaction to this event, and the opinion of some of the other women in CCL he's been interacting with over the past several weeks. Patrik On Wed, Aug 3, 2016 at 4:49 PM, Marc Juul <juul(a)labitat.dk> wrote: On Wed, Aug 3, 2016 at 2:17 AM, Jake <jake(a)spaz.org> wrote: Dear Sudoroom, sorry for streaming mode, i'm not sure how to talk about this. there's this guy who's been at sudo a few times during hardware hacking tuesdays. I think his name is Sean but i can't remember for sure now. he likes talking about his workout routine, and getting rich, and says he's going to invent bio-drones and says he's working on some secret project that's going to show to elon musk and it's going to make him super rich. well tonight he crossed the line from annoying to unacceptably creepy. tonight a friend of mine came to sudoroom so we could use the robot to cut holes in these christmas ornaments. It was a big project that took hours and a lot of focus. Sean (is that his name?) was on her like glue the entire time, trying to be helpful, talking to her. It made me uncomfortable, but she's a grownup and can speak for herself, but at the same time the power dynamic and assertiveness imbalance was quite stark and I really wanted to say something. But i didn't know what to say. the first time he went away for a minute, which was after what seemed like a long time, i said to my friend "you know, if anyone's bothering you here you can tell them to go away" because i couldn't think of anything better to say. maybe i should have offered to tell him to go away? but that would have only parried the problem that one time. Of course he soon came back. I think we were both trying to ignore him as best we could, and we did get some good work done thanks to Zack and Fenn, who are great. But eventually they left and it was just the three of us. I don't know what other things he said to my friend when i wasn't watching, but I did see him eventually ask her on a date. She told him no, and then he made it very clear to everyone that he was fine with that and not bothered by it at all, because he's not bothered by anything. I was super bothered by it. I wanted to tell him to leave right then, but I really didn't want to talk to him, I just wanted him to go away on his own. I guess eventually he did. I want two things. I want Sudoroom to ask this person to take a break from the space so that he can study up on our anti-harrassment policy and maybe write us an essay about why it's unacceptable to mack on people in sudoroom. and I also want us to look into how we can make it clearer to people like him, and to his targets, that sudoroom is expressly a safe place from this kind of behavior. I would like for there to be a sign that I can point to in moments like that, so that I don't have to try to say it with my own words, in front of other people. it's a complex issue, because if someone is being talkative and helpful they're not necessarily doing it as a creep move, so how do you know where to draw the line? We can remind people to check their own intentions, but maybe we need more ways for people who feel uncomfortable to get relief from unwanted attention without having to then engage the person in Lesson 101 right then. maybe we need yellow cards? to hand to people that say "please go to the fridge and read the entire sign reminding you about proper behavior in sudoroom. Do not ask any more questions of the person who gave you this card, they have other things they want to do now. thank you." Noisebridge seems to have a great vibe, at least the other night when I was there, Zach explained to one of our friends why it would be inappropriate to "ask someone out" at Noisebridge. I'm not sure how their anti-harrassment policy differs from ours, or what we could learn from it, but I would like for us to be more out-in-front of this issue so it doesn't come up anymore without being addressed. thanks for reading this, let's figure this out. I also interacted with this person. Definitely some weird ego problem going on there. Pointed out several times how skilled he is and all the things he knows and kept repeating how he does mixed martial arts in places where it made no sense to the conversation. He didn't seem threatening just really intent on making me understand how amazing he is, though the repeated references to his martial arts skills were definitely creepy. I saw some of his interactions with the robot arm group but apparently not the worst of it. This is definitely a case of someone who doesn't have a clue about social interactions, which isn't new to sudo, but couple that with his pushiness and I think we have a problem. There's asking someone on a date and then there's an evening of imposing yourself and making others uncomfortable followed by asking someone on a date when they're not showing any interest. We could talk to him about his behavior. We could couple that with a short-term break from the space (e.g. 1 month). It's unlikely that he'll come back to the space after a short term ban (few people do). Meet in sudo or on the sudo room riseup pad at 7 pm for a group decision on this. -- marc/juul _______________________________________________ sudo-discuss mailing list sudo-discuss(a)lists.sudoroom.org https://sudoroom.org/lists/listinfo/sudo-discuss -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "CCult Lab's Board" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to CultLabsBoard+unsubscribe(a)googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "CCult Lab's Board" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to CultLabsBoard+unsubscribe(a)googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

9 years, 6 months

someone at sudo was a creep and it's a problem

by Jake

Dear Sudoroom, sorry for streaming mode, i'm not sure how to talk about this. there's this guy who's been at sudo a few times during hardware hacking tuesdays. I think his name is Sean but i can't remember for sure now. he likes talking about his workout routine, and getting rich, and says he's going to invent bio-drones and says he's working on some secret project that's going to show to elon musk and it's going to make him super rich. well tonight he crossed the line from annoying to unacceptably creepy. tonight a friend of mine came to sudoroom so we could use the robot to cut holes in these christmas ornaments. It was a big project that took hours and a lot of focus. Sean (is that his name?) was on her like glue the entire time, trying to be helpful, talking to her. It made me uncomfortable, but she's a grownup and can speak for herself, but at the same time the power dynamic and assertiveness imbalance was quite stark and I really wanted to say something. But i didn't know what to say. the first time he went away for a minute, which was after what seemed like a long time, i said to my friend "you know, if anyone's bothering you here you can tell them to go away" because i couldn't think of anything better to say. maybe i should have offered to tell him to go away? but that would have only parried the problem that one time. Of course he soon came back. I think we were both trying to ignore him as best we could, and we did get some good work done thanks to Zack and Fenn, who are great. But eventually they left and it was just the three of us. I don't know what other things he said to my friend when i wasn't watching, but I did see him eventually ask her on a date. She told him no, and then he made it very clear to everyone that he was fine with that and not bothered by it at all, because he's not bothered by anything. I was super bothered by it. I wanted to tell him to leave right then, but I really didn't want to talk to him, I just wanted him to go away on his own. I guess eventually he did. I want two things. I want Sudoroom to ask this person to take a break from the space so that he can study up on our anti-harrassment policy and maybe write us an essay about why it's unacceptable to mack on people in sudoroom. and I also want us to look into how we can make it clearer to people like him, and to his targets, that sudoroom is expressly a safe place from this kind of behavior. I would like for there to be a sign that I can point to in moments like that, so that I don't have to try to say it with my own words, in front of other people. it's a complex issue, because if someone is being talkative and helpful they're not necessarily doing it as a creep move, so how do you know where to draw the line? We can remind people to check their own intentions, but maybe we need more ways for people who feel uncomfortable to get relief from unwanted attention without having to then engage the person in Lesson 101 right then. maybe we need yellow cards? to hand to people that say "please go to the fridge and read the entire sign reminding you about proper behavior in sudoroom. Do not ask any more questions of the person who gave you this card, they have other things they want to do now. thank you." Noisebridge seems to have a great vibe, at least the other night when I was there, Zach explained to one of our friends why it would be inappropriate to "ask someone out" at Noisebridge. I'm not sure how their anti-harrassment policy differs from ours, or what we could learn from it, but I would like for us to be more out-in-front of this issue so it doesn't come up anymore without being addressed. thanks for reading this, let's figure this out. -jake

9 years, 6 months

eBay link for good LCR tweezers?

by Jake

I want to buy a set of inductance / capacitance / resistance measuring tweezers, for identifying surfacemount components. can anyone recommend a specific model or ebay link or whatever for one that actually works? I figure the quality varies widely. thank you -jake

9 years, 6 months

etching circuitboards the easy way, at sudoroom

by Jake

Last tuesday at sudoroom I used the Phaser 8560 printer to print circuit patterns onto pyralux material (kapton coated with copper) and then etched them in ferric chloride. http://imgur.com/gallery/TbzsP the result was that I was able to make circuits very quickly and easily, even though it was the first time i did it this way. if other people want to etch circuits at sudoroom, I can help. email me if you want to coordinate. The circuit i made was single-sided but you can do multiple layer circuitboards pretty easily, obviously, by putting these back-to-back. if you wanted to be even more advanced, you could use the laser cutter to burn holes in the pyralux (assuming that works) and solder through those holes from layer to layer. also did i mention this material is flexible like paper? we can make wearables, cylindrical circuits, watches... -jake

9 years, 6 months

“Uber Against Hunger” Delivers Unused Food To Needy, Hits 1000-Meal Mark - Good News Network

by Romy Ilano

http://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/uber-hunger-delivers-unwanted-food-need/ “Uber Against Hunger” Delivers Unused Food To Needy, Hits 1000-Meal Mark Terry Turner Jul 29, 2016 What could be more perfect than using the “sharing economy” to deliver food that people don’t want to those who desperately need it? That’s what the Unsung app sets out to do. Being tested in Austin, Texas, the app has delivered 1,000 meals that would have otherwise gone into the trash. The Unsung app works kind of like Uber’s ride-sharing service to “hack hunger,” as it’s creators say. RELATED: Tesco to Give All Unsold Food to Charity in its 800 UK Supermarkets Restaurants, grocery stores, or even individuals click on the app to announce they have food to give to the hungry. The app sends the information to nearby volunteer drivers who pick it up and deliver it to people in need. The app will even calculate the value of your food donation so you can declare it as a tax deductible contribution on your income taxes. Every meal that’s donated appears on the app’s live feed. This video shows how the app works. RELATED: Canadian Restaurant Offers Free Meals To Anyone Who Can’t Afford To Pay The app is expected to be available later this year as Unsung works to set up networks of users around the United States. (WATCH the video below from Unsung) – Photos: Unsung.org SEND The Sharing Economy To Your Friends, By Sharing This Story… Sent from my iPhone

9 years, 6 months

Fwd: SSF: Bay Area Robotics Warehouse Blow-out Sale Sat RIGHT NOW

by Patrik D'haeseleer

Happening RIGHT NOW - Bay Area Robotics near SFO is having a clearance sale: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Elise Engelhardt <techelise(a)gmail.com> Date: Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 11:47 AM Subject: SSF: Bay Area Robotics Warehouse Blow-out Sale Sat (plus help needed) Al (who i know from Homebrew Robotics) is having to shut down his warehouse by Monday so he is having a clearance event on Saturday. There will probably be really good deals. Plus he needs labor help conducting the sale which he will pay for with inventory. From: Albert Margolis <almargolis(a)gmail.com> I have to shrink my operations by 75% over the next 72 hours so I am going to have a blow-out sale tomorrow Saturday 7/30/16 from 10am to 2pm Where: 282 Harbor Way, South San Francisco, 94080 Facebook Link w/pictures: https://www.facebook.com/BayAreaRobotics/ Website Page: https://www.bayarearobotics.com/pages/warehouse-sale-saturday-7-30-16 There will be great prices on great products plus lots of weird stuff that just has to go. The pictures don't really show the scale of the product line. ***************************************** Please share on facebook, mailing lists, etc. I also need help conducting the sale and packing up the leftovers. See below. Please spread the word about that too. ***************************************** I don't really have the resources to pull this off in the available time. If you can make time to help me put stuff out, lookup prices and/or provide customer service tomorrow. I can really use the help. I have 3 days to clear out of a 5000 sq-ft warehouse and desperately need help to make it happen. - Friday 7/29/16: Help put stuff out for a warehouse sale. Lookup prices and mark products. - Saturday 7/30/16: Help at a warehouse sale. - Saturday and Sunday: Load stuff onto pallets and move into storage space. - I am not in a position to pay cash for help but definitely can trade some stuff for your time. https://www.bayarearobotics.com/pages/critical-help-needed Here is my personal Facebook page with the help needed post: https://www.facebook.com/big.al.margolis ***************************************** I will still be in business next week, but as a much smaller, better focused operation. Thanks for your support. Al Margolis owner, www.BayAreaRobotics.com email: al(a)bayarearobotics.com

9 years, 6 months

Kinect2

by Cere Davis

Hey does anyone have a Kinect2 I can borrow for an art project? Thanks, Cere -- Cere Davis CereDavis.com @ceremona <http://Twitter.com/Ceremona> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ GPG Key: http://taffy.findpage.com/~cere/pubkey.asc GPG fingerprint (ID# 73FCA9E6) : F5C7 627B ECBE C735 117B 2278 9A95 4C88 73FC A9E6

9 years, 6 months

FYI: East Bay Mini Maker Faire - Oct 23

by Glenn Meader

East Bay Mini Maker Faire Sunday, October 23, 2016 10 am—5 pm Park Day School campus + Studio One Arts Center in the Temescal district of Oakland, CA http://eastbay.makerfaire.com Makers! Performers! Presenters! Apply now for the 2016 East Bay Mini Maker Faire The 7th Annual East Bay Mini Maker Faire is coming up on Sunday, October 23rd. The annual Call for Makers is open now... Apply to participate at this year’s faire! Science, art, food, craft, engineering, play—there is no limit to the subject matter. Whatever your passion, this is the place to share it. Show off your projects—finished or unfinished! Teach a workshop, sell your work, make a presentation or perform on the stage. REMEMBER, space is FREE for non-commercial exhibitors. Individuals, young makers, "first-timers," maker spaces and collaboratives, clubs or classes, businesses and startups are all welcome to apply. As many of you know, the East Bay Mini Maker Faire is not so terribly "mini"—we're only "small" if you compare us to the MAXI flagship Maker Faire in San Mateo. Over 7,000 people enjoyed the one-day East Bay event last year. There's an incredible array of amazing makers and interesting attendees to meet. We offer makers great exchange, big fun, a community vibe, and a wonderful showcase for their efforts. Apply early to secure your space. The priority round Call for Makers closes September 2nd. More details on content, process and logistics are at our Call for Makers page. If you have questions or ideas, please get in touch via makers(a)ebmakerfaire.com. See you in October! —the East Bay Mini Maker Faire team

9 years, 6 months

We built voice modulation to mask gender in technical interviews. Here’s what happened. – interviewing.io blog

by Romy Ilano

Maybe this is another reason why coed groups may benefit Women more than all women groups? http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mask-gender-in-tec… We built voice modulation to mask gender in technical interviews. Here’s what happened. June 29th, 2016 Posted by Aline Lerner on . interviewing.io is a platform where people can practice technical interviewing anonymously and, in the process, find jobs based on their interview performance rather than their resumes. Since we started, we’ve amassed data from thousands of technical interviews, and in this blog, we routinely share some of the surprising stuff we’ve learned. In this post, I’ll talk about what happened when we built real-time voice masking to investigate the magnitude of bias against women in technical interviews. In short, we made men sound like women and women sound like men and looked at how that affected their interview performance. We also looked at what happened when women did poorly in interviews, how drastically that differed from men’s behavior, and why that difference matters for the thorny issue of the gender gap in tech. The setup When an interviewer and an interviewee match on our platform, they meet in a collaborative coding environment with voice, text chat, and a whiteboard and jump right into a technical question. Interview questions on the platform tend to fall into the category of what you’d encounter at a phone screen for a back-end software engineering role, and interviewers typically come from a mix of large companies like Google, Facebook, Twitch, and Yelp, as well as engineering-focused startups like Asana, Mattermark, and others. After every interview, interviewers rate interviewees on a few different dimensions. Feedback form for interviewers As you can see, we ask the interviewer if they would advance their interviewee to the next round. We also ask about a few different aspects of interview performance using a 1-4 scale. On our platform, a score of 3 or above is generally considered good. Women historically haven’t performed as well as men… One of the big motivators to think about voice masking was the increasingly uncomfortable disparity in interview performance on the platform between men and women. At that time, we had amassed over a thousand interviews with enough data to do some comparisons and were surprised to discover that women really were doing worse. Specifically, men were getting advanced to the next round 1.4 times more often than women. Interviewee technical score wasn’t faring that well either — men on the platform had an average technical score of 3 out of 4, as compared to a 2.5 out of 4 for women. Despite these numbers, it was really difficult for me to believe that women were just somehow worse at computers, so when some of our customers asked us to build voice masking to see if that would make a difference in the conversion rates of female candidates, we didn’t need much convincing. … so we built voice masking Since we started working on interviewing.io, in order to achieve true interviewee anonymity, we knew that hiding gender would be something we’d have to deal with eventually but put it off for a while because it wasn’t technically trivial to build a real-time voice modulator. Some early ideas included sending female users a Bane mask. Early voice masking prototype (drawing by Marcin Kanclerz) When the Bane mask thing didn’t work out, we decided we ought to build something within the app, and if you play the videos below, you can get an idea of what voice masking on interviewing.io sounds like. In the first one, I’m talking in my normal voice. And in the second one, I’m modulated to sound like a man. Armed with the ability to hide gender during technical interviews, we were eager to see what the hell was going on and get some insight into why women were consistently underperforming. The experiment The setup for our experiment was simple. Every Tuesday evening at 7 PM Pacific, interviewing.io hosts what we call practice rounds. In these practice rounds, anyone with an account can show up, get matched with an interviewer, and go to town. And during a few of these rounds, we decided to see what would happen to interviewees’ performance when we started messing with their perceived genders. In the spirit of not giving away what we were doing and potentially compromising the experiment, we told both interviewees and interviewers that we were slowly rolling out our new voice masking feature and that they could opt in or out of helping us test it out. Most people opted in, and we informed interviewees that their voice might be masked during a given round and asked them to refrain from sharing their gender with their interviewers. For interviewers, we simply told them that interviewee voices might sound a bit processed. We ended up with 234 total interviews (roughly 2/3 male and 1/3 female interviewees), which fell into one of three categories: Completely unmodulated (useful as a baseline) Modulated without pitch change Modulated with pitch change You might ask why we included the second condition, i.e. modulated interviews that didn’t change the interviewee’s pitch. As you probably noticed, if you played the videos above, the modulated one sounds fairly processed. The last thing we wanted was for interviewers to assume that any processed-sounding interviewee must summarily have been the opposite gender of what they sounded like. So we threw that condition in as a further control. The results After running the experiment, we ended up with some rather surprising results. Contrary to what we expected (and probably contrary to what you expected as well!), masking gender had no effect on interview performance with respect to any of the scoring criteria (would advance to next round, technical ability, problem solving ability). If anything, we started to notice some trends in the opposite direction of what we expected: for technical ability, it appeared that men who were modulated to sound like women did a bit better than unmodulated men and that women who were modulated to sound like men did a bit worse than unmodulated women. Though these trends weren’t statistically significant, I am mentioning them because they were unexpected and definitely something to watch for as we collect more data. On the subject of sample size, we have no delusions that this is the be-all and end-all of pronouncements on the subject of gender and interview performance. We’ll continue to monitor the data as we collect more of it, and it’s very possible that as we do, everything we’ve found will be overturned. I will say, though, that had there been any staggering gender bias on the platform, with a few hundred data points, we would have gotten some kind of result. So that, at least, was encouraging. So if there’s no systemic bias, why are women performing worse? After the experiment was over, I was left scratching my head. If the issue wasn’t interviewer bias, what could it be? I went back and looked at the seniority levels of men vs. women on the platform as well as the kind of work they were doing in their current jobs, and neither of those factors seemed to differ significantly between groups. But there was one nagging thing in the back of my mind. I spend a lot of my time poring over interview data, and I had noticed something peculiar when observing the behavior of female interviewees. Anecdotally, it seemed like women were leaving the platform a lot more often than men. So I ran the numbers. What I learned was pretty shocking. As it happens, women leave interviewing.io roughly 7 times as often as men after they do badly in an interview. And the numbers for two bad interviews aren’t much better. You can see the breakdown of attrition by gender below (the differences between men and women are indeed statistically significant with P < 0.00001). Also note that as much as possible, I corrected for people leaving the platform because they found a job (practicing interviewing isn’t that fun after all, so you’re probably only going to do it if you’re still looking), were just trying out the platform out of curiosity, or they didn’t like something else about their interviewing.io experience. A totally speculative thought experiment So, if these are the kinds of behaviors that happen in the interviewing.io microcosm, how much is applicable to the broader world of software engineering? Please bear with me as I wax hypothetical and try to extrapolate what we’ve seen here to our industry at large. And also, please know that what follows is very speculative, based on not that much data, and could be totally wrong… but you gotta start somewhere. If you consider the attrition data points above, you might want to do what any reasonable person would do in the face of an existential or moral quandary, i.e. fit the data to a curve. An exponential decay curve seemed reasonable for attrition behavior, and you can see what I came up with below. The x-axis is the number of what I like to call “attrition events”, namely things that might happen to you over the course of your computer science studies and subsequent career that might make you want to quit. The y-axis is what portion of people are left after each attrition event. The red curve denotes women, and the blue curve denotes men. See interactive graph with Desmos Now, as I said, this is pretty speculative, but it really got me thinking about what these curves might mean in the broader context of women in computer science. How many “attrition events” does one encounter between primary and secondary education and entering a collegiate program in CS and then starting to embark on a career? So, I don’t know, let’s say there are 8 of these events between getting into programming and looking around for a job. If that’s true, then we need 3 times as many women studying computer science than men to get to the same number in our pipelines. Note that that’s 3 times more than men, not 3 times more than there are now. If we think about how many there are now, which, depending on your source, is between 1/3 and a 1/4 of the number of men, to get to pipeline parity, we actually have to increase the number of women studying computer science by an entire order of magnitude. Prior art, or why maybe this isn’t so nuts after all Since gathering these findings and starting to talk about them a bit in the community, I began to realize that there was some supremely interesting academic work being done on gender differences around self-perception, confidence, and performance. Some of the work below found slightly different trends than we did, but it’s clear that anyone attempting to answer the question of the gender gap in tech would be remiss in not considering the effects of confidence and self-perception in addition to the more salient matter of bias. In a study investigating the effects of perceived performance to likelihood of subsequent engagement, Dunning (of Dunning-Kruger fame) and Ehrlinger administered a scientific reasoning test to male and female undergrads and then asked them how they did. Not surprisingly, though there was no difference in performance between genders, women underrated their own performance more often than men. Afterwards, participants were asked whether they’d like to enter a Science Jeopardy contest on campus in which they could win cash prizes. Again, women were significantly less likely to participate, with participation likelihood being directly correlated with self-perception rather than actual performance. In a different study, sociologists followed a number of male and female STEM students over the course of their college careers via diary entries authored by the students. One prevailing trend that emerged immediately was the difference between how men and women handled the “discovery of their [place in the] pecking order of talent, an initiation that is typical of socialization across the professions.” For women, realizing that they may no longer be at the top of the class and that there were others who were performing better, “the experience [triggered] a more fundamental doubt about their abilities to master the technical constructs of engineering expertise [than men].” And of course, what survey of gender difference research would be complete without an allusion to the wretched annals of dating? When I told the interviewing.io team about the disparity in attrition between genders, the resounding response was along the lines of, “Well, yeah. Just think about dating from a man’s perspective.” Indeed, a study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior confirms that men treat rejection in dating very differently than women, even going so far as to say that men “reported they would experience a more positive than negative affective response after… being sexually rejected.” Maybe tying coding to sex is a bit tenuous, but, as they say, programming is like sex — one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life. Why I’m not depressed by our results and why you shouldn’t be either Prior art aside, I would like to leave off on a high note. I mentioned earlier that men are doing a lot better on the platform than women, but here’s the startling thing. Once you factor out interview data from both men and women who quit after one or two bad interviews, the disparity goes away entirely. So while the attrition numbers aren’t great, I’m massively encouraged by the fact that at least in these findings, it’s not about systemic bias against women or women being bad at computers or whatever. Rather, it’s about women being bad at dusting themselves off after failing, which, despite everything, is probably a lot easier to fix. 1Roughly 15% of our users are female. We want way more, but it’s a start.↩ 2If you want to hear more examples of voice modulation or are just generously down to indulge me in some shameless bragging, we got to demo it on NPR and in Fast Company.↩ 3In addition to asking interviewers how interviewees did, we also ask interviewees to rate themselves. After reading the Dunning and Ehrlinger study, we went back and checked to see what role self-perception played in attrition. In our case, the answer is, I’m afraid, TBD, as we’re going to need more self-ratings to say anything conclusive.↩ Sent from my iPhone

9 years, 6 months

omni haunted house

by robb

hello omninoms, halloween is quickly approaching omni has been in the red for almost a whole year now we are borrowing about $5000 from different members each month to pay our bills if each collective could contibute some time & effort, i think, we could put on a multiday haunted house fundraising benefit to buy the building & renovate the kitchen that could bring in a significant amount of revenue. so what do you think?

9 years, 6 months

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