PyCon proposals I'd like to see

PyCon 2013 is current accepting proposals. I'm looking forward to helping review the proposals.

So, what proposals would *I* like to see?

Anything science related, especially bio and chemistry and neuroscience stuff
Anything health related
Anything homestead related - how do you use Python in your home, your garden, your office, your private hobby, knitting, weaving, ...
How Python is being/or could be used in the office and support areas (HR, Marketing, Admin Assistants, Finance)
Anything with robots
Anything about Making stuff
Anything about GAE
Hacking your fitness with Python

Accessibility how-tos
HCI

Here's where to submit your proposal


I'm planning on proposing a talk on "Hello GAE" - an overview for folks who  haven't used it before. Also a "You can be a speaker at PyCon!" session for folks who are considering being a speaker in 2014 but don't know how to start.

I know there will be plenty of my favorite speakers at PyCon - we're starting to get proposals from some of you already.  I'm especially interested in getting proposals from a wide variety of new folks. Entrepreneurs, web designers, interaction designers, chemists, rocket scientists, secretaries, WHO (you know who you are!), fitness geeks, women, people of color, neuroscientists, and anybody else I've never heard speak at PyCon before.

Why women don't talk enough

So, the call for proposals for PyCon is out and has been out for some time. It's been circulated around. I've personally sent it to a number of women's lists I'm on. So, why don't I see any proposals from women yet? (Besides mine...)

Some reasons I've heard when I've asked women friends over the years about why they haven't proposed a talk:

a. I don't have time
None of us have enough time. I know we women have a lot of "extras" that we do every day and hobbies tend to fall by the wayside. I'm a full-time student at Stanford, with a husband, a house, 2 cats, and a teenager who doesn't want to do his homework. If I can submit a proposal, so can you.

b. I don't know enough
No one knows everything. And if you're closer to the n00b level, you'll understand what a n00b needs to hear better than an expert. Which brings us to:

c. There are experts/package creators there
Even if the creator is there, they may not be speaking, or they may be so deep into the package that they have no idea what real users of the package actually have trouble with and need to know. You do. So tell the rest of us about it. It's okay to have talks about the same package at two different levels!

d. I only use Python for this limited weird niche:
There are a lot of people interested in how to use Python for niches, and the more niches that presenters explore, the more the rest of us learn about the rich breadth of our favorite language.

e. I'm scared to speak in public:
PyCon is one of the friendliest, most tolerant conferences out there. We're all just a bunch of fellow enthusiasts: you're speaking to friends. So get out there and teach us all about something Pythonic that you love. Trust me, before I speak, not only do my knees shake, my *cheeks* shake! (It's hard to speak when your cheeks are shaking - try it sometime. ;-) But people at Pycon are ON YOUR SIDE - they *WANT* you to succeed. So, it's okay if you're a little shaky at the beginning. They'll be polite and listen anyways, because they want to hear about what you're presenting on. And once you've started, you'll be okay. Trust me on this.

So women of Python - please submit your proposals. Don't let the guys have all the fun and glory. I want to see *you* on stage at PyCon!

http://us.pycon.org/2010/conference/proposals/

Status Expectations and Gender

This is a repost of something I wrote for a women-only mailing list so that I can point to it publicly. Many workplace and other community issues between genders may be related to Status Expectations on interactions. Here I try to summarize some current sociological theory on gender:


Subconscious beliefs about status affect our expectations when we interact:
*Lower status people are expected to be less competent than higher
status people, by default.
*Lower status people are viewed as having less "legitimate" claims to authority.
* Finally, the higher status person is expected to act authoritative
(decisive, proactive) and the lower status person is expected to act
"communally" (working to ease social relations, inclusive, considerate
of others, reactive, etc)

When two people interact in a situation, these expectation color our
perceptions and interactions, so, for example, the higher status
person is given "the benefit of the doubt" and their skills,
behavior, outcomes are judged less harshly than the lower status
person. The lower status person's skills are judged more harshly
(mistakes are evidence of their lower competence, while successes are
downplayed - is this sounding familiar to anyone?), and any attempt by
the lower status person to act authoritative is viewed as an
illegitimate power play. The lower status person doesn't have "the
right" to act authoritative.

Women are lower status than men (in contemporary US society, and in
many/most contemporary societies.) While education and experience can
increase our perceived status regarding competence, we are still
viewed as not having "legitimate" claim to authority. In other words,
women can be competent, but we still have to "be nice" otherwise,
we're violating what it means to be a woman (in contemporary US
society, "being a woman" includes "being nice".) Women are perceived
(rightly or wrongly) as having higher social skills than men, we are
held to higher standards on social skills than men (because we are
lower status).

Unfortunately, (white) women were socialized with the same status
expectations as men, so we hold these same expectations when we walk
into a situation. (There is some evidence that African American women
have different status expectations when interacting within a group of
African Americans - but share the hegemonic beliefs when interacting
in mixed racial groups.) We assume the man is more competent by
default (unless we have some reason to believe otherwise, such as
higher education), and we assume the man will be in charge (again,
unless we walk in with a higher "rank".)

snip of a description on the mailing list of being seen as "difficult"

This is the problem of how the lower status person is supposed to get
ahead - they're perceived as less authoritative, so they don't get
promoted to positions of authority, but if they act authoritative,
they are violating norms, and are not promoted because of their
"inappropriate behavior". (Yes - it is a double standard and a serious
catch22.) Women fall afoul of this regularly (the glass ceiling is
partly based on this effect.)

Women who *do* get ahead, often are the ones who were able to smooth
ruffled feathers by "being helpful" and playing on their social skills
strengths, to get the men to accept them as peers. At that point, they
are sometimes able to act more authoritatively without it being viewed
as "illegitimate". It's hard to accept this, though, as not just
continuing the stereotypes and reinforcing them. Either way, it's an
ugly tangled knot. Do we act "nice" to get along and perpetuate the
stereotypes? or do we act "authoritative" to get ahead, and run the
risk of being stuck in a position where we're not allowed to advance
because we're viewed as "too bitchy"? Ugh.

On Python and diversity

After Kirrily's OSCON Keynote, several of us had some great hall discussions and lunch discussions on the topic of women in opensource. As a result of the discussion, Aahz, a fellow pythonista, posted a call for diversity and created a new list for Python users to discuss improving diversity in the Python community.

So far, we've had a great discussion - lots of respectful participation from people of varying viewpoints. I'm so proud to belong to a community that cares about this topic (not just women in opensource, but all forms of diversity) and is taking steps to address it. I've always loved the Python community for its welcoming, friendly, accessible nature. I am also aware that, like most Open Source projects, (and indeed, the tech field in general) there is room for improvement in the diversity of our membership, committers, and officers.

If you're interested in Python and want in on the discussion, the new list is at http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/diversity

Join us in working to make the Python community even better than it already is!

Co-ed patents

Interesting article at Forbes:


Turns out that "inventions developed by mixed-gender teams received 42 percent more citations than single-gender patents."

Widening the gates

As a geek and a female, I had to have the lack of women in IT brought to my attention by others, specifically, by male geeks. I have spent so much of my life pursuing interests where I was the only female that I stopped noticing a long time ago. I was the only girl in my electronics and small engines class. I was the only girl in the miniatures gaming group (Napoleonics). I was the only girl in most of my RPG groups (Traveller, Car Wars, ITL, etc) at the local gaming shop. I was the only girl in the computer lab at school. I was the only girl I knew who, not only owned a Commodore 64, but had done some programming on it (a program in BASIC for calculating sidereal time.)

I've spent my life being the go-to person in the office for computer-related questions (from "why doesn't my password work": check your capslock, to "someone needs to move and administer our NT network": I guess I'm someone, to "we need a website for the office fitness group":I can do that). Yet, I never thought of myself as being "in IT" until I got involved in the Python community. I jumped in with both feet, starting to present to conferences, and advocating for everyone I knew to learn Python, the typical response of a new convert. I was thrilled to have found a language that seemed simple enough to use without having to know a lot first, but that was also really powerful, that kept growing with me as my tasks and requirements and skills grew more complex. Yet, it wasn't until I'd been to several conferences, and been asked by guys why there weren't more women at the conferences, that I even noticed that the lines *were* pretty short to the bathrooms at tech conferences.

So I started researching the question. Because, I couldn't imagine why there weren't lots of other women here - after all, I'm here. At first, I blamed the women. They're too self-involved, too shallow, too interested in shopping etc. But, I knew that wasn't really the case - I've met a lot of incredibly hard-working, intelligent, deep women in SF and other areas of life. They're just not interested in computers, just like they're not interested in cars. Well, most women I know drive. Most of them use telephones, fax machines, copy machines, and major appliances every day. Most women I know use computers every day nowadays, so it's not unfamiliarity. With a lot of new web apps, women are increasingly using social software, creating websites, etc etc. I realized I had prejudices about "normal women" (meaning non-geeks) and that I had to confront those prejudices. And one of the things I came to realize in investigating this lack of other women was how similar I am to other women in IT.

It's not been easy to admit to myself that I suffer, like many women in and out of IT, from low self-efficacy (perceived self-efficacy is defined as people's beliefs about their capabilities to produce designated levels of performance), from imposter syndrome (inability to internalize successes, fear of being caught out as a fraud). I tend to view computers more as means than ends. I entered the IT field via a non-traditional pathway (I didn't go into CS in college, I kinda came into IT sideways). I value the community aspects of programming as much as the language itself (a less welcoming community might easily have turned me off to programming), and I considered programming to be incredibly difficult (most non-CS-major women undergrads rated CS as more difficult than becoming a surgeon! I wasn't quite that bad, but I did consider it more difficult than, say, a psych or biology major.) I tend to define IT as "stuff I don't do" (even though I'd created databases, administered an NT network, created a website, etc, I hadn't considered myself to be "in IT".)

Realizing these things about myself has been difficult, but enlightening. I am more willing to accept the barriers that other women face in getting into IT, now that I've acknowledged those barriers and obstacles in myself. I am more motivated to find ways to overcome those barriers, through scaffolding (starting with a simple language like Python to learn basic concepts before diving into the complex language issues of C); emphasis on pair programming and sprints and other social aspects of programming; acknowledgment of non-programming aspects of IT; etc. I have heard these described as "sexist" or "dumbing down". Having lived through the obstacles and experienced the positive effects of these methods in my own life, I don't accept that. Presenting IT as something that only the most motivated, self-confident, autonomous individualists can really be into and everything else is "dumbing down for the ladies" is precisely why we don't have more diversity in IT. It's this attitude (from both women and men) that keeps many of us out, and keeps us feeling we don't belong here. Providing pathways to entry for those who are less self-confident, for those who value usefulness or social interaction, is not "dumbing it down". It's widening the gates, and opening up IT to a more diverse group of women and men. If that's sexist, then I guess I can live with that.