Category Archives: feminism

Stop Policing How Women Speak

Originally posted on Medium.

People are so mad at women. The way they dress, the way they speak, the way they dare to exist in modern society. People are never not going to be mad, but I’m going to try to break down the latest problem with women anyway.

Women sometimes do this thing where they talk and we’re supposed to listen, but they sound so annoying that it’s hard to focus on the content of their message. I mean, who cares what a woman has to say when she keeps doing that croaky vocal fry tone bullshit and every other word is um, like, sorry, just, actually — it’s so unprofessional! What if we made an app that stopped them from using those weak filler words? Maybe then we could take them seriously!

I know what you’re about to say. It’s not about women! When people of any gender talk unprofessionally, they lower their credibility. They sound incompetent and insecure. By eliminating phrases like “I think” and “sorry, I just…” from their language, women can get proper recognition for their ideas and become better communicators. We’re helping women get ahead in the professional world by showing them how they undermine themselves with their linguistic choices.

On the surface, this sounds fair, but it’s loaded with assumptions about the way the world works that aren’t true.

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Your Culture Has Consequences

Allies, put your career where your mouth is.

There is no fire under any tech company’s ass to change their ways. Over the past few years, we’ve seen every major tech company release a statement about their abysmal numbers, their token efforts to improve, and how much they value diversity and inclusion at their companies. It’s been a feel-good hug fest where everyone gets an A for effort.

Yet from the same companies, we see all this talk of not lowering the bartolerating of abusive behavior from their employees, and unwillingness to hire from the existing pipeline. How could this behavior be so pervasive when tech companies claim to be so concerned about diversity and inclusion?

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The Harm in Being a Diversity Pick

When I was 17, I desperately wanted colleges to accept me based only on my academic achievements — my “merit” — without consideration for external factors. My family and school counselors insisted that I emphasize my immigrant family / low income status in order to gain sympathy from admissions officers. To me, that meant not getting into my dream school through my own talent. I spent my first year at Stanford doubting myself and fearing that people would realize I wasn’t talented enough to be there. This sounds like textbook impostor syndrome, but it was worsened by constant comments about my minority status. Students from other high schools said they wished they had my background so they could get into whatever schools they wanted. Everyone assumed it must have been easy for me to get accepted. Stanford likes poors like me. Of course I got in. I learned to not mention my upbringing because people would think less of my qualifications and belonging at Stanford if they knew.

At the end of my sophomore year, I was lucky to end up in a required writing course with a black professor who understood what I was going through (having spent over a decade working on social justice issues). She encouraged me to investigate affirmative action stigma for my term paper as a way of understanding my own feelings about being a “diversity pick.” My paper focused on research surrounding the psychological impact of being considered a diversity pick on minority students. That research is what I want to summarize now.

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The Pie is Rotten: Re-Evaluating Tech Feminism in 2016

Back in December, I wrote an article for Model View Culture. You can find it here. I’m proud of it because it’s my first paid article ever and it deals with a topic that had bothered me about the tech industry and women’s advocacy efforts in general. Enjoy!

Update: Because MVC is no longer publishing, I have re-printed my article here for posterity. Continue reading

Advice for Responding to Backlash Against Minority Outreach Programs

So you organized an outreach event or program for a marginalized group that you care about and you’re really excited about doing your part to improve diversity in your field. You’re all pumped about your work, but then you start receiving negative comments that accuse you of being sexist/racist/etc. for putting so much focus on your chosen minority group rather than providing resources for the whole group. In my case, this usually takes the form of complaints about sexism and inequality in the outreach programs that I organize for women in tech — why aren’t there similar scholarships and conferences for men? Why aren’t there men’s-only tech events?

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Your Power is in Another Castle

The trivialization of women’s interests throughout history and what we can learn for the future

In the 1920s, flight attending was a predominately male profession. Passengers were fearful of this new mode of transportation; having an all white, male staff reassured them of the safety of commercial airlines. These men were perceived as capable, competent members of the crew, right alongside the pilot in importance. It was only after World War II, when women took over the job as men left for war, that flight attendants lost their respect, instead becoming sexualized and trivialized.

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Discussions We Don’t Need To Be Having Yet

Let’s leave imagined gender differences, evolutionary psychology, and the idea that “women just aren’t as interested” out of the discussion.

Earlier this week, Dave Winer wrote a blog post about why he thinks there are so few women programmers. He suggests that it dates back to our roots as hunter-gatherers:

Programming is a very modal activity. To be any good at it you have to focus. And be very patient. I imagine it’s a lot like sitting in a blind waiting for a rabbit to show up so you can grab it and bring it home for dinner.

The Internet has been in an uproar about this and several people have written excellent responses to his post. I’ve included some links in the further reading section, which you should check out if you’re interested in the debate surrounding whether women are naturally inclined towards or against programming. I don’t have much to add to that conversation that hasn’t already been said.

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Stop Following the Script

How a guy blindly following bad advice unwittingly led to harassment, manipulation, and me questioning my safety.

It began innocently enough: A classmate read my first Medium post and messaged me on Facebook to discuss it. It soon devolved into a debate about the women’s rights movement as a whole, rather than just the aspects I had discussed in my post. This debate spanned several days. I felt as though we were having the same argument over and over, and he eventually said he believed the women’s rights movement was “overblown” and that the glass ceiling was not really an issue.

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I need terrible female engineers

I originally posted this on Medium. You should go there to get the full effect and sweet header photo. I’ve reproduced it here just for my own archiving purposes.


Think of a woman in the tech industry you admire. Describe her. If you’re thinking of someone particularly memorable, you might say, “She’s amazing! She’s an awesome software engineer, always has interesting things to say, and is really pretty.” I’ll be the first to admit that I’m fascinated with these women because they reject all the stereotypes to which I’ve grown accustomed. They’re perfect.

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