WomensProgrammingGroup
Women's programming group
https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/a-room-of-ones-own-by-virginia-woolf
Women need a room of their own.
Women's groups tend to focus a lot on women's roles as mothers, or serving mothers. If there is going to be a woman-focused group it is best that the group is focused on women being people, not just parents that exist to serve others. Mothers are people too you know!
For some reason women are generally encouraged to do web design and javascript and in women's programming courses people hesitate to introduce meatier topics like go etc. I don't know why this is. Stuff is presented as being very "hard" even when the women present are math majors. javascript is cool but it is one of many different programming languages that exist on this earth.
Building yourself and your mind is the best thing you can do for society because then you are all that you can be
Positive patterns
- Women often are made to feel guilty for doing stuff for the sheer intellectual pleasure of doing it.
- It is ok to not work in children's education
- It is ok not to do stuff for the benefit of charity
- It is ok to like stuff that is traditionally what men do
That being said, women's programming groups should be creative and actually result in fun coding and exist as a human being, not a servant to society!
Our Code
We have a GitHub at SudoRoom here:
Most of the projects at all the hackerspaces started by men, and I've seen many promising women diverted over the years to projects like charity and children's education. I see a general trend of women doing stuff that is mostly not fun and focused mostly on educating kids, while men get to work in education at a university level. It is also quite rare to see women doing creative art or music on their own at hackerspaces, they tend to take the "den mother" role, run meetups and throw benefits for non profits. It's also generally more common to see women tagging along as girlfriends of hackers rather than women coming of their own volition to hackerspaces - it must be a cultural thing, not sure why that is!
Any women focused groups do not really try to get women creating at only a very basic level (3 or 4 intro to javascript classes and then of course "learn how to do job interviews so you can get a jobs") and then they are funneled off into doing stuff for charity or non profits and running endless pointless meetups instead of a actually doing great work. Any deep intellectual work is viewed as selfish for women and instead they should go on pointless diversity committees and run charity events and run social media accounts.
It's pretty disappointing and a huge waste of potential.
Inspiring Women
Many women in tech are nowadays presented only as teachers or mothers or as marketing gurus.
here's a nice list of inspiring women in tech who smart, tackling meaty topics and working on projects that aren't about educating children or becoming a tech influencer or doing some kind of non profit work (those are ok too but it gets hard for me to tell all of those people apart or ).
It's a nice change of pace and I hope we can add people from SudoRoom to this list! There was Kelly who started the AR startup Kura who was hacking here for a bunch of years and she had nothing whatsoever to do with any diversity or women's groups. Instead she just focused on learning hardware and didn't tag along as someone's girlfriend.
Maybe we can start getting a pattern of women just coming alone to hackerspaces, working only on projects, not running diversity related meetups and doing complex technical work.
- https://blog.jessfraz.com
- Julia's programming zines https://wizardzines.com
I don't know how to solve these problems but putting smart people on diversity committees and doing weekend fundraisers for children's education is definitely not going to be it and maybe those are what keep smart women from accomplishing anything meaningful to society!