Companies headquartered in California can no longer have all-male boards.
Companies headquartered in California can no longer have all-male boards.
Meanwhile, there are occasionally signs that the effort is paying off. Security hasn’t been too bad but it’s had its #MeToo moments and the conferences used to have “booth babes” and a lot of “locker room talk.”
When Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of The United States sold its millionth copy, there was a celebration in New York City. Zinn was there, as were others.
Recent discussion in some comments brought up the nature/nurture question and Steven Pinker’s book The Blank Slate.
Warning: Rape
Judging from some of the reactions on the internet, consent is a very difficult thing to figure out. Personally, I’ve never had any problem with it. Here’s my algorithm:
If you’re not sure you ask. If the person you ask is too drunk or fucked up to reply with an enthusiastic “yes” then wait.
In my recent article about Jack Ma [stderr] I was horrified by the way the camera and interview format dwelt on the interesting and important rich guys, and pretty much edited out a young woman who was also on the panel. Who is she? What has she done?
I talk to venture capitalists a fair bit because I’ve been involved in a bunch of start-ups and technical advisory boards. And I do an interview column for Searchsecurity, where I try to interrogate interesting people in order to find out how they got interesting. This morning I was transcribing the audio of an interview I did with a woman executive who was a venture capitalist for years, then went on to start her own company.
It’s fairly rare to find woman executives who are willing to talk about gender bias, because, I’m sure it just increases their inter-cranial pressure to the explosion point. But we went there, anyway.
Margaret Hamilton’s impact on computing would be hard to overstate. For one thing, I nearly wrote “impact on software engineering” but apparently that’s a term she had a lot to do with promoting, during her tenure at NASA.
This one’s a bit tough. Hanna Reitsch was simultaneously a very complicated, and a very simple person: she loved to fly and would pretty much love anyone who let her fly – and the person who gave her airplanes was Hitler.
But, holy shit, could she fly.
Charles Dana Gibson, American illustrator, renders “proper” beach wear for young ladies, circa 1905.