6 tips for next-level male allies in technology

Women at work

Someone I know asked how to be a good ally for women in tech without white knighting them. And when I looked for resources, I couldn’t find anything that said the sorts of things I wanted it to say.

There’s plenty of 101 stuff already written, such as:

• If you hear sexist or stereotypical remarks about women, say something. The lines “hey, I don’t agree with that,” “that’s a pretty stereotypical view that I don’t agree with,” or even just “hey, that’s not cool”, are all worth learning to say in a neutral tone. Similarly, correct people to use the word “woman” instead of “girl” in a work setting.
• Assume that women know what they’re talking about, especially when they’re talking about women’s experiences.
• Don’t assume that women you see are non-technical.
• Listen, rather than talk.

These are all good tips covered in a variety of articles. But most people already know them, and there’s so much more that can be done – the 200-level class, as it were.

Here are six things you can start doing now:

Become friends with women in your workplace and gossip with them. Gossip is usually a word with feminine connotations, but some polls show that men do it, especially at work, far more than women. So share the privileged and “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but a reorg is coming…”-type of information that you’d share with another close work buddy. Office gossip is often the lifeblood of an organization. It’s how people know change is in the air and what the real lines of power are.

Aggressively look at and ask about inequality in your workplace. This is something that can be really intimidating to do as a woman. For example, if I notice that a significant portion of the number of people being laid off are women, as another woman, I’m going to have an incredibly difficult time mustering up courage to ask about it. But a man in a more senior position can do it safely.

Congrats, you have an all male panel!

So ask your leadership why there aren’t more women in leadership roles, why a particular panel only has men on it, why there aren’t more female engineers, and what they’re doing to fix it. Get in the habit of looking around the room, imagining the gender ratio flipped, and then seeing if you’d find that odd as a man.

I once noticed I was 1 woman in a room with 17 other men. I suspect few of them noticed how incredibly odd and skewed that was, but I’m certain they would have noticed if there were 17 women and only one of them.

Sponsor females in the workplace. Take the time to get to know them well enough to know what their interests are (see #1). Then keep an eye out for good opportunities that you think they’d be suited for and go to your manager with:  “Hey, I think Jayla would be good at this role we need, what do you think?” Note that you’ll often need to recommend women who may seem slightly “too junior” for the role you’re looking at. That’s part of the problem with the system, and trust me when I say “too junior” men get put in similar positions all the time — it’s how they grow and get promoted. Sponsoring someone also benefits you by expanding your own influence by having people you know on interesting projects and making you look like a leader who’s helping the organization.

Help out in meetings by amplifying women’s voices. First, by helping them hold the floor when they get interrupted (which happens more often to them than men). You can do this by saying something like, “Actually, I was interested in hearing what Amy was saying before she got interrupted — Amy, can you share where that was going?” Also, do this by being careful to give credit to an idea if you amplify it — instead of saying, “Right, we should do <this> idea,” try: “Saanvi had a great idea – I think we should do that, and also this…” An obvious corollary: Don’t interrupt women.

Share the office housework. Women are disproportionately expected to take meeting notes, mentor new hires, coordinate team morale events, or run the charity efforts — work that often helps them very little in their careers but is critical for the business to run. Advocate for fair rules around these activities (note-taking rotates on a schedule, for example), offer to do it yourself, or volunteer a more junior male.

Share women’s stories. If you’re friended with coworkers on social media, share stories by women about women’s experiences in the workplace and about how things should change. Actually, do this regardless of whether you share social media with your coworkers; you’re presumably friended to other people who work, even if they’re not your coworkers. For example, start by sharing this article.

You’ll note I didn’t address the white-knight problem. Honestly, in the workplace, I don’t worry much about it. It happens all the time online; I’ve seen it happen so rarely in person that it’s a non-issue — probably because it’s largely performative online whereas grandstanding in a similar way at work is more risky with less benefit.

Transgender rights help women’s rights

Dan Savage once told a female caller that having a homophobic boyfriend meant he also was a misogynist, because the main component of homophobia is a rigid enforcement of gender norms. The same is true of transgender rights; people who wig out about Caitlyn Jenner being “a man with a boob job” also have very calcified views about how women should look and act.

Some people are confused about why transgender issues are important, given that people who identify as transgender are probably 0.2% or 0.3% of the population. That’s still over half a million people, just in the US. But transgender visibility is important not only for its own sake, but for all women’s rights as well. Because in many cases, it makes explicit the biases and internalized rules about gender roles in a way that non-transgender people (cisgendered) people can’t.

It is hard to talk about bias in the workplace because when you’re in the system, it’s nearly impossible to tell if you’re being treated differently. Negotiations about hiring and salaries and discussions about career and promotions occur in secret. Like most people, I’ve never experienced the system as the other gender, so I always the worry that problems aren’t gender-related but instead my individual weaknesses.

Except… some men started their careers as women and have experienced the world both ways and written about it. And everything they say validates what ciswomen say about the workforce. These transgender men find that they’re funnier and more competent. They’re no longer asked to do things like grab coffee for people or decorate for work parties. Essentially all of the ways women are treated differently no longer happen to them.

In one case, scientists thought that a man’s sister had done inferior work to his — when “his sister’s” work was merely his prior work under his female name. We’ve heard this before; scientists have been putting male and female names on identical resumes and work for years and noting differences — but a personal story brings it home in a way that data can’t.

With Caitlyn Jenner’s recent coming out, you can see the difference in how she’s treated. Almost all of the coverage focused on her looks and age. John Stewart got it exactly right:

“It’s really heartening to see that everyone is willing to not only accept Caitlyn Jenner as a woman, but to waste no time in treating her like a woman. You see, Caitlyn, when you were a man we could talk about your athleticism, your business acumen. Now you’re a woman, and your looks are the only thing we care about. You came out at 65, and you’ve got another two years before you become invisible to society. Better make the most of it. I mean, you take away the corset and the makeup, and I don’t know if anyone wants to bang her. Caitlyn Jenner, congratulations. Welcome to being a woman in America.”

So when I read things like this conservative article having an apoplectic fit about Jenner, calling her “an insult to women”, I think — no, this is exactly what we need. We need to get over that what’s between your legs matters, or if you look “sufficiently” male or female to pass muster on the street… and instead decide that we really don’t care how people dress or present themselves. Transgender womens’ visibility and acceptance can only help this.

Rachel Dolez, Caitlyn Jenner, and identity politics

I regularly read the National Review Online, despite disagreeing with almost everything there.  And they’ve been having a meltdown over Caitlyn Jenner’s coming out. The amount of faux concern for Jenner’s mental health and the health of her family (who as reality stars, are perfectly capable of speaking for themselves) is ridiculous. But the NRO really had a field day when the story of Rachel Dolzez broke.

If you haven’t heard, Rachel Dolez is the NAACP spokesperson in Spokane, Washington, and was recently outed by her parents as not being black and having no black ancestry. Instead, she’s a white woman who has tanned and permed her hair in an effort to look black while becoming a black activist. There were multiple NRO articles I read that talked about Rachel coming out as “trans-race” and asking what the difference is between Rachel and Caitlyn.

Caitlyn and Rachel are not the same.

And yet, there is a valid point about something broken here that the question raises.

First, Caitlyn and Rachel are not alike because Caitlyn isn’t claiming to be a cisgender woman (that is, a woman who was born as a woman). She isn’t getting paid so she can talk about what it’s like growing up as a woman, and she hasn’t spun fake stories of discrimination about growing up as a young girl. She can’t do this without being dishonest because she didn’t grow up presenting as a woman — she grew up perceived and treated as a man. That’s not to minimize her struggles; in today’s world, I’d rather be an attractive ciswoman for my whole life than be a transgender woman, when transgender women disproportionately experience more harassment, violence, and discrimination. But they’re different struggles.

Most transgender women don’t try to claim they know the experience of growing up female. In fact, some I know actively shy away from women’s organizations because they worry it’s inappropriate to speak for women who have spent their entire public life as women. But Rachel has done exactly that — she has claimed the experience of growing up as black in America and made up stories of discrimination she hasn’t experienced. That’s dishonest and wrong. (It’s also possible, given this peice, that some of this is a result of illness or abuse. I can’t know.)

But it is possible to see a more charitable explanation — her adopted siblings are black, so it’s not as if she’s unfamiliar with the culture and challenges. And with black siblings, she has perfectly understandable reasons to care about the cause. Her parents say she has been “altering herself” since 2006, which means she’s now had 9 years of living in public as a black woman. Made up stories aside, I’d be willing to say she has some authority on what it’s like to experience life as a black woman, perhaps with even a unique perspective due to seeing it as a white woman first. This isn’t, as some activists are suggesting, a case of a white privileged woman putting on and taking off black face as she pleases — it seems she put on blackface in 2006 and hasn’t taken it off since. This is something fundamentally different.

There’s still the legitimate question of why someone would do such a thing — maybe, as some have suggested, she feels authentically black. But I also speculate if she cares about the cause against racism, she realized that in some circles, she’d have less authority (not to mention the position she had in the NAACP) while white. And that’s broken too — a triumph of identity politics over ability and passion.

There’s a dangerous meme I’ve seen running through liberal thought — that the only people qualified to talk about a minority’s problems are members of that minority. Much of the confusion over Rachel’s choices seems to ignore this fact. I admit to feeling it myself; my hackles went up about the men’s panel last year at the Grace Hopper Women in Technology convention. Why put men up on stage at a women’s conference? Aren’t all-male panels already all too common?

Organizations that serve a minority need to make sure they don’t stuff their ranks with people who have ample opportunity elsewhere in the world. And they need to support, train, and assist people in their minority. But advocacy organizations like NAACP also benefit if they allow people from the majority to join them and speak for them too — because people who have grown up with a particular privilege move through the world differently and are able to exercise their power for the common cause.  Strict adherence to the belief that “only oppressed minorities can speak about themselves” leaves very little room for others to help. If there’s one thing we can learn from the unusual story of Rachel Dolez, perhaps it’s that we should be more willing to allow allies to be allies, regardless of exactly what form they come in.

Links I love

Every so often, I collect links into my “to write about” ideas file and later look at them and think, “This is so well-written, I can’t add anything to it.” Here are a few like that that I’ve been keeping for a while.

The women I pretend to be
Naomi Alderman talks about the various personas or masks she wears as a woman working in the tech industry. I pretty much have played all of these at one time or another, with some variances for being in tech but not in the gaming industry. But, oh, how this resonates.

The ping pong theory of sexism
Ariel Schrag does an amazing job in this comic of illustrating so many of the challenges I talk about in my post Creeping Doubt, except she adds the twist of talking about a woman’s experience in tech from a queer, butch-looking woman’s view. One of the things that’s so important is hearing different voices who all share their particular slant on the same phenomenon — it helps validate the reality that’s there while giving a more nuanced picture.

Street Harassment
Another comic strip! Robot Hugs tackles why it is that men don’t see street harassment, despite women talking about it a great deal. I’ve been lucky in that I experience very little harassment on the street, largely because of where I’ve lived. The comic is long, but a great explanation of the phenomenon. (It looks like Robot Hugs main site is down, so linking to the HuffPost version of it.)

Mad Max’s Hey Girl meme
If you’ve made it this far, just for fun, a set of feminist memes about Mad Max: Fury Road. It’s like a little popcorn ending for the post.

Practicing pretty versus teaching tall

“You’re great at your job! And it probably doesn’t hurt that you’re also attractive.” This is a sentiment I hear a couple of times a year. Almost always from a man, though a few women too. Next time I hear this, I’m tempted to nod thoughtfully, and respond in kind — “Thanks. You’re great at your job and all, too. And it probably doesn’t hurt that you’re taller than average,” or “It probably doesn’t hurt that you’ve got a resonant baritone.”

I remember the point in my life when I realized I was attractive. I was 33. It’s an awkward thing to say, as a woman, that you know you’re attractive. It feels vain. We’re taught to pretend that everyone is equally beautiful, or to pretend we’re unaware of our own prettiness. Even writing it here — where I’m anonymous — feels incredibly awkward.

But my life has benefited from being attractive. In high school, I was too proud to wear my glasses, so often simply went blind. While travelling for a science fair (my first time travelling alone), I got stuck in a large airport hub trying to peer at monitors for my connection. They were too far away for me to see without my glasses, which were packed in my checked luggage. Before I could seriously panic, though, someone noticed and helped me. If I stand around in public looking lost, I usually spontaneously get assistance. Because people never talk about this phenomenon, it wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized this didn’t just happen to everyone.

Pity this isn’t work-appropriate

And my career undeniably has also been helped by this. My moves up the career ladder coincided with my “practicing pretty” — namely beginning to wear makeup, to dress in conventionally attractive clothing, and to tone down on the supremely quirky outfits that I used to wear. (Some outfits that I wore right out of college were practically costumes. These days, I like to believe I’ve toned it down to “items with a theatrical flair”.) Yes, I’m competent and good at my job. But in a male-dominated world, sometimes people talk to me because I’m an attractive female first, and my networking started to soar when I started looking good. Unfortunately, unlike most men, I’m not really allowed the delusion that these things are unrelated, unlike people with other success factors (being male, being tall, or having a deep voice).

I wish this weren’t true, though.  But I don’t know how to change it — I could intentionally look less attractive, but it’s hard to see how that helps the problem rather than simply making it more difficult for myself. There’s enough other barriers in the industry as a female that I selfishly don’t want to cede an area where I do have advantage.

This gets worse with time, too. Men benefit from attractiveness, too, but “men grow distinguished while women grow old”, making the problem feel more urgent as women age. This typically manifests in a private terror of looking older in this industry.  Pretty much every woman I know in tech eventually admits to some amount of cosmetic alteration — in some cases, surgery, in others, fillers, Botox, copious peels at the spa, and the like. Penelope Trunk goes so far as to call cosmetic surgery the “next career tool”. Other than her article, though, it’s not spoken about much, and when it is, it’s often in hushed tones between individual women. All because we’re supposed to pretend that we don’t know we’re pretty, that there’s no advantage to being pretty, and that it’s something that just magically and spontaneously happens, rather than something that’s part genes and part learning to conform to the physical fads of the moment. Women can learn or be altered to be more pretty, and thus try to, whereas no one can teach being tall. This is unhealthy, dangerous, and something we need to change.

I don’t have grand ideas for how to fix it, though many of the suggestions (such as blind interviews) aimed at helping women and minorities in the industry at all will also help reduce the attractiveness bias. But first we have to acknowledge there’s a problem here – both for men and women – and start talking about it.

Four easy steps to fix the leaky pipeline

Leaky pipeline, photo by Seth Sawyers (Flickr)

The “leaky pipeline problem” is a commonly-used metaphor for the way women disappear from tech careers. The metaphor is that if you pour water (young girls) into a pipe, and it leaks along its length (girls and women exit the area at various times), very little water (professional women leaders) will emerge at the end of the pipeline.

A lot of the focus on “the pipeline problem” has been on the front — getting girls interested in tech, educating them, and making sure that by the time they get to college, they aren’t already behind the boys. And in fact, until recently, the pipeline wasn’t understood to be leaky at all — many people focused entirely on the entry point and assumed that once in, women would progress forward in the same way as men. This focus on young girls is worthwhile, but there are several things we can start doing immediately that would make enormous strides towards plugging leaks later in the pipeline.

1. Make it easy for women to choose computer science degrees. 

In 2010-2011, fewer than 12% of college degrees were issued to women in computer science, down from 37.1% in 1984. However, when engineering coursework is described as learning skills that help solve society’s problems, the classes skew remarkably female — in some instances, 70% of the enrolled students were women.  There’s a sidebar here about how women are over-socialized to be helpers, but we can tackle that later. For now, universities need to make it clear that there is socially valuable work available in tech today. Tactically, colleges should rewrite their computer science class descriptions to relate them to having a purpose other than just pure technology.

2. Kill the rockstar programmer myth.

There’s a myth of two classes of people in tech: “the 10% rock star programmer” and “people who suck” — it’s not accurate, it’s actively toxic, and it discourages women from even starting in the field at all. Jacob Kaplan-Moss has an absolutely amazing PythonCon keynote video about this and is worth every minute of the 35 minutes.

That cool new project at Apple, Facebook, or the latest start-up doesn’t need “rockstars” on it. It needs people with certain skills who know how to work with others and lean in as a team to finish the job. The more we can recognize this and drop the rhetoric about “rockstars” or “tech geniuses”, the more women are going to be interested in joining. Our cultural image of “rockstars” or “geniuses” is overwhelmingly male, and it matters when we use that language.

3. Stop blocking women at the hiring line. 

It’s well known that we prefer to hire people who are attractive, who are white, and who are male. The way to fix this is to redo our interviewing process to be blind to that.

4. Fix the mid-career drop out rate by removing the “pregnancy tax”.

There are many factors for women dropping out mid-career, but one common reason for the mid-career leak is motherhood — approximately 50% of the women in the US will have a child in their lifetime. However, if I look around at senior women, a very large proportion of them are childless. This isn’t by accident — the times I’ve most thought about leaving were times where I was simply thinking of becoming a mother. In academia:

Women with advanced degrees in math-intensive academic fields drop out of fast-track research careers primarily because they want children […] Even just the plan to have children in the future is associated with women exiting the research fast-track at a rate twice that of men. (Source)

This is tricky to think about, because we often suggest longer maternity leaves for mothers to solve this problem. But rational men and women quickly realize that having a baby puts women at a disadvantage with the men who have children — if I have a child and take six months of maternity leave, and the man takes merely a week or two, my coldly economic brain would rather hire him than me. After all, things move quickly in the tech world, and he’ll have six months of additional skills and experience while I’ll have learned a skill (child rearing) that isn’t obviously valuable to my company. Multiply that by more than one child, and the gap grows. And this issue may affect more than mid-career drop out; it may be one of the reasons women have a harder time being hired.

Fortunately, the solution is still simple: Grant equal amounts of paternity and maternity leave, and create a culture where the men are expected (or even required) to take their leave. That is, do not allow your company to be like sports radio and Daniel Murphy. Murphy took his full three day paternity leave allowed by MLB, only to have the men of sports radio skewer him for his choice.

Sweden offers equal maternity and paternity leave, and has one of the highest percentages of women participating in the labor force today. Japan is significantly lower, has far fewer women working, and a proposal to lengthen their maternity leave policies to 3 years seems likely to make it even worse.

And that’s it. None of these fixes are particularly difficult, although some of them require bureaucratic or cultural change within companies and academia. But they’re things we can start doing today to plug up an otherwise very leaky pipeline.

Use your brain, not your eyes

Braaaaaains, photo by Neil Conway (Flickr)

Recently, the story of Elizabeth Bentivegna sprawled across my feed.  And with it, commentary about whether people would or wouldn’t hire her based on her outfit, whether the “real” reason she wasn’t hired was because she was late, and a lot of whining about those annoying entitled Millennials and her “inappropriate” response on Facebook. If you aren’t familiar, Elizabeth Bentivegna is a programmer who applied for an intern position at On Shift, and despite what seemed like a good interview experience at the time, was later told by her recruiter:

“She said they’d love to hire me based on my technical ability and my personality, but were not going to because A: I looked like I was about to go clubbing and not be on an interview, B: I had a huge run in my tights and C: I was late. And I told them I was going to be late,” Bentivegna said. They also said she just wasn’t “put together.” (Source)

And, this being the age it is, she took to social media to tell her story. Let’s be clear. Assuming the reporting of their response to her was correct, she was obviously passed on because of what she was wearing. It’s simply that the recruiter was forthright instead of using the “not a cultural fit” phrasing that typically hides discriminatory decisions.

If you too want to pass judgement on whether she was wearing something appropriate, click the link above to see her outfit. But notice that three of the four items of feedback are specifically about the way she looks. To say, as I’ve seen others suggest, that it was something else that counted as “not professional” is to ignore three fourths of the story.

Casual guy, photo by Chris Hunkeler (Flickr)
This guy looks like 90% of the men I’ve interviewed for tech roles. Except they’re not usually running during the interview.

I work in technology. Guys in tech regularly get hired wearing shorts and t-shirts. In fact, in tech, it’s more likely that men will be passed on because they look too nice than because they look “not put together”. Surprised by this? Do some searches about whether it’s appropriate to wear a suit to a tech interview. Yes, Cleveland is more conservative than Silicon Valley. But even there, “business casual” is typically considered appropriate for a tech interview.

I suspect her being a larger woman affected the response, because larger woman are expected to be covered to a larger degree than smaller women. (Disagree? Think about a large woman and a small woman, both on a beach, both wearing a bikini, and which one is more likely to be judged for her choice.) It’s also a ridiculous notion that what people wear in jobs where they don’t face customers reflects on their competency. And don’t get me started on the perils of finding an appropriate “business casual” outfit as a woman. One woman got fed up enough with the problem to literally just wear the same thing every day.

But really, this was an issue because the way we hire people is wrong, is known to be wrong, and needs to be fixed. In fact, the way we hire is almost designed to play into unconscious biases about people like minorities and women. It’s pretty well documented that we prefer to hire people who are attractive, who are white, who are male, and who are like the interviewer. And in a world today where pictures are on every LinkedIn resume (a practice that women and minorities were previously advised not to do, to delay the onset of bias until knowing one’s qualifications better), it’s become easier and easier to weed out different people before they even reach your doorstep. With the shortage of qualified tech workers, we need to fix this.

Orchestra playing, photo by Sean MacEntee (Flickr)

It’s not a solution for every role, but we need to follow the lead of orchestras and run blind auditions. As late as the 1970s, the top 5 orchestras in the US had fewer than 5% women. Today, they’re now over 25% women, with percentages still rising. The difference is now it is standard for people to audition behind a screen. That is, the interviewers can hear the music and judge it, but not see the player. From the article, “Even when the screen is only used for the preliminary round, it has a powerful impact; researchers have determined that this step alone makes it 50% more likely that a woman will advance to the finals.” Amusingly, they now even ask that applicants wear no shoes — to avoid interviewers picking up on the sound of heels versus flats.

We need to start doing the exact same thing in tech — for non-sales jobs, run early interviews over a chat session with a randomly assigned name given to the interviewee. Or better still, give candidates a project, let them work on it under conditions similar the job in real life (that is, with access to resources and time to think without someone actively waiting on them), and later use the chat window to discuss their choices and answers with the interviewer.

While there’s little evidence that face-to-face interviews do much better than random chance, people persist in wanting them. And it’s probably because they want to hire someone they feel like they like and can work with. But at least delay the face-to-face interview until your interviewing team has assessed a candidate’s primary skill. Then that all-important first impression is made on something that actually matters to the success of your team, rather than whether your candidate does or does not have a run in her tights.

It matters where the story starts

Mathematician Ada Lovelace, image from Wikipedia

If you want to tell an interesting story about the history of computers, there are a lot of places you can start.

You could start with Charles Babbage, a mathematician in the 1800s who created prototypes for a mechanical computer. Or you could start with Ada Lovelace, also a mathematician of the same time, who created the first algorithms that could run on Babbage’s hypothetical computer. She’s widely considered to be the first programmer. Ideally, you’d tell a story about the team, since neither a computer or a programmer without the other is much use.

You could start with the codebreaking era of World War II and talk about Alan Turing and his codebreaking work at Bletchley Park. Or you could tell a story about Grace Hopper, working around the same time, who programmed the Mark I and created the first compiler. A compiler turns what programmers write into something a computer can understand. It’s fair to say software wouldn’t be so ubiquitous if compilers didn’t exist. Or you could talk about the nearly 10,000 women of Bletchley Park who were the bulk of the codebreakers and the human computers of the era.

Grace Hopper and the UNIVAC, image from Wikimedia commons

For the modern era, you could start with Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft and the slogan or “a computer on every desk and in every home”. Or you could start with Radia Perlman who invented the the protocol that allowed the internet to begin. None of the things we know computers for today would be possible without both of them.

The point is, you can pick a lot of places to start a story — every arc of history has many threads that lead up to the present. It’s only after the story has been told that it seems obvious where the beginning is. So it matters where you choose to start, and who you make the hero.

Computer Scientist Radia Perlman, image from Wikimedia commons

The stories we tell ourselves define our culture. They shape how people behave, what they believe they are allowed to do, and what they aspire to. There are whole areas of psychology devoted to shaping people’s behaviors by getting them to re-mythologize their own past. And in stories recently, particularly mainstream ones, we’ve had a habit of picking and idolizing the white males far more often than others.* This isn’t limited to computer science, or even to the telling of history. It’s an issue in fiction too. Out of habit, people pick up and tell stories about men first.

“But,” some people might say, “I’m telling a story about a time or place where there weren’t women or people of color, so I can’t put them in the story.” Really? For starters, if it’s a medieval fantasy story, for the love of god, use some of that “fantasy” and fix it. If you can add an entire magic system, you can add women. Second, are you sure they weren’t there? Or have you just not seen them in popular representations of the time so you assume they weren’t? Third, if you’re bound and determined to tell a story that’s entirely about white men, fine, but realize you’re being rather unoriginal. The number of stories that fail to pass the Bechdel test is already huge. And the Bechdel test is a low bar.

This isn’t limited to story creators, though. As readers, we need to do better and create a market where diverse stories are consumed. I talk about diversifying your news feed, but have you actively looked for fiction created about or by people other than white men? If you need a spot to start, this list can get you going.

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Optional extra: Looking for good candidates for stories? Start with this Amazing women who need movies made about them board, the Film Her Story board, or the #FilmHerStory hashtag on Twitter.

* I looked for women of color in computer science for the examples above, and although I can find current examples, I wasn’t able to find historical ones. So if someone could get started telling their stories, that would be awesome too. Though along the way, I found Katherine Johnson, a NASA mathematician and computer scientist who helped rescue the Apollo 13 astronauts. I don’t recall her being shown in the Apollo 13 movie, unfortunately.

A dangerous misunderstanding of rape

Gun, photo by adamtbaily (Flickr)

There’s an opinion piece making the rounds claiming that it’s a “feminist” idea to arm women on campuses to prevent rape. It’s not. It’s a terrible attempt to meld two causes together that have nothing to do with each other.

The piece starts with what I’ll charitably call a gross mis-characterization of California’s new law. She claims it requires “signed consent contracts before (and during!) sexual intercourse”. The new law merely establishes an affirmative consent standard — namely, that to have sex, both parties must have in some way indicated that they wanted it. This isn’t hard or complex; it simply requires paying attention and caring about the person you’re about to bump genitals with.

But more importantly, if you bother to educate yourself on rape in the US even a bit, it’s obvious that the majority of rapes are not of the “stranger in a dark alley” variety where a weapon might be useful. If Cosmopolitan is writing about this, it’s pretty mainstream. Digging further, forceful physical resistance is not commonly used by victims in rape situations. So it’s a thin argument to marry gun rights with rape prevention.

Hold on to your drink (Flickr)

Add that to the well-known link between rapes and alcohol (mostly because rapists place themselves near people who are drinking), and the notion of adding guns to the mix seems even less sane. Not to mention that in many places, it’s won’t even be legal —  in at least 26 states, mixing alcohol and guns is illegal. And then, just like with alcohol, we’ll start seeing stories that tell women not to surrender their guns at the fraternity door, or to avoid drinking alcohol, or not go to parties on campus — instead of figuring out how to stop the predators.

That’s the main problem with this: It’s yet another suggestion that women not get themselves raped. And there’s no dearth of public service information about how women can prevent their own rapes. I challenge you to find a woman in the US who could not list a largely identical list of all the ways she’s supposed to avoid being raped – wearing appropriate clothing, not being out alone after dark, not drinking too much, never taking a drink without seeing the source, never letting your drink out of your sight, not flirting too much, avoiding clubs, learning self-defense, staying with a friend at a party, having someone your date knows is waiting for you to get home… The list goes on and on. The messages are so pervasive that I generated that without even pausing.

Toy guns, photo by Pascal (Flickr)

What does work, other than guns? Well, it’s an area of emerging research. But the fix isn’t quick or simple; positive signs point towards creating a culture where people know to watch out for one another and to step in if they see someone being preyed on. I suspect it’s a lot like bringing down any other crime; there’s a need for a community change, support for victims and rehabilitation for abusers, and additional policing and law enforcement.  If it were as easy as arming everyone, the self-defense training programs that were so popular in the 80s and 90s would have eradicated rape. Clearly, though, they haven’t, and neither will arming college women.

Where women are a bad idea

The sentence at work drew my eye immediately: May not be the best idea to send a female. 

The sentence was in an email about sending one of us on the engineering team to a customer in the Middle East. This gem was on an otherwise bland list of notes about work culture in the country. Even though tech has a long way to go, it’s a mark of how much sexism has gone underground here that my first reaction to the sentence was shock followed by anger.

The Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, photo by olakara (Flickr)

In Saudi Arabia, a woman is legally required to have a male guardian to move through public spaces and women cannot drive or vote. Saudi Arabia is trying to generate more economic growth through tourism.

The recent constitutional rewrite in Egypt removed statements about non-discrimination against women and when it does talk about women, places them entirely in the domestic sphere.  Depending on year, tourism in Egypt is a 5-12 billion dollar industry.

Al-Mahwit City in Yemen, photo by rodwaddington (Flickr)

In Yemen, a woman’s voice is worth only half a person’s in court and requires a man’s voice to support her. (Although to be fair, Yemen has enough other problems that tourism is unlikely to be a significant source of income anytime soon. “It’s beautiful if you don’t get kidnapped,” doesn’t quite work as a vacation tagline.)

I love to travel. I am part of the tech elite; I have tourist dollars to spend, and do, pretty much every year. If this stat is right, women dominate travel purchases by making 75% of the travel decisions. It’s worth thinking about what that means for the economies of places that, through their very legal system, make it clear that we’re not really welcome. I would love to see that amazing plaza of Al-Masjid al-Nabawi or Al-Mahwit in person. But I will not spend my money in places where I am legally less. I don’t insist that places be culturally identical to where I live – that defeats the point of traveling entirely – but I’m not going to places where gross inequality is enshrined in law. The law is often a leading indicator for equality; places with laws describing equality may lack actual enforcement on the ground. But it’s a start.

One of my gay friends has said for years that that he will not move to or work in states that do not have marriage equality. He is phenomenal at his job and is well-respected and heavily recruited by multiple companies. Another one of my gay friends (equally in demand in the workplace) recently refused to travel to do work for a company that is based in Florida, because of the state’s recent resistance to court orders confirming marriage equality. I have to wonder, do the business leaders in those states understand what they’re losing?  It’s easy to pay attention to the noisy locals and not the people silently staying away, especially if you don’t realize that there are people silently staying away.

How many women travelers are silently staying away from places that seem unfriendly to women? And how much are those countries losing for it?