Gender and Technology

We’re excited for the upcoming Ruby on Rails Workshop for Women event.  The enthusiasm of the ruby on rails community has exceeded expectations.

We’re proud that we’ve been able to offer childcare to our attendees who might not have otherwise been able to attend and due to a generous donation made by Julia Ashmun, the referral fee has been waived!

The focus of the event is to encourage women to participate in open source development.  So workshop coordinators made the request that men who wish to attend find a woman to sign up who might not otherwise have considered checking out a tech event.  There was never any intention to exclude men from the event, but rather enlist their help in broadening the community.

So in response to community feedback and to be as inclusive as possible, we’re opening the event up to anyone who would like to attend — girl geeks, boy geeks, and all geeks in between.  Just sign up here. Looking forward to the day!

The Berkman Center at Harvard University in coordination with the Center for Research on Computation and Society is putting together a Ruby on Rails workshop for women on October 16th and 17th.

We are seeking to create an attitude-free, newbie-safe and mama- friendly tech event to encourage women to join the Ruby on Rails community. Men are warmly welcomed when they find a woman who wants to learn Ruby on Rails who will register and bring a guest.

Women are a minority in most technical communities, but in open source communities the numbers are even smaller — by a factor of about ten or more. Moving forward, we would like to encourage our newly empowered programmers to meet monthly and use their skills towards open source projects in a welcoming, collaborative, mixed gendered environment.

For more details, read on…

This is a bit of short notice but nonetheless:

Girls in Tech | Boston

The Boston Chapter of Girls in Tech will be hosting a lifestyle panel discussion designed to explore the following issues:

* work/life balance
* career management
* leading a purpose-driven life

Agenda:

* 6:00 – 7:00 pm » Networking
* 7:00 – 7:45 pm » Panel Discussion
* 7:45 – 9:00 pm » Open Audience Discussion

Event Details

* Date » Tuesday, June 30, 2009
* Time » 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm
* Location » 38 Cameron Gallery, Cambridge, MA

This event is FREE. Hors d’oeuvres and refreshments will be served. Reservations are required.
More info here.

@ HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

From The Dress-Up Corner to the Senior Prom: Navigating Gender and Sexual Identity Development in the K-12 Setting

Do you have questions about how to address issues of gender and sexuality in the classroom? In schools? In districts? How do you respond when first graders start a debate about “boy” colors and “girl” colors? What happens when 3rd graders start using “that’s so gay” as a put-down? How do you help your gender variant 5th grader navigate the complex social world in school? Gender Identity and Sexual Identity are aspects of everyday life in K-12 schools, whether these issues are part of the formal curriculum or not. School age children develop their own personal identities- and learn about culturally sanctioned identities- all the time. By middle school and beyond, the stakes get higher. According to the 2007 GLSEN National School Climate Survey, 86% of LGBT students reported being verbally harassed, 44% reported being physically harassed and 22% reported being physically assaulted at school in the past year because of their sexual orientation or gender expression. LGBT students are at risk; students who are perceived to be LGBT are at risk. And all students, regardless of their identity, need accurate information and appropriate guidance regarding these issues. On April 9, 2009, an 11-year-old 6th grade boy who attended a charter school in Springfield, Massachusetts hanged himself after enduring chronic bullying from classmates, including daily taunts of being gay. This kind of tragedy can be prevented.

QueerEd and the Office of Student Affairs are sponsoring a workshop dedicated to starting the dialogue about LGBT issues in K-12 classrooms, featuring clips from the the award-winning documentary, It’s Elementary: Talking About Gay Issues in School. (http://groundspark.org) The workshop will be facilitated by Jennifer Bryan, Ph.D. Dr. Bryan is a psychologist and consultant who specializes in helping educators consider gender and sexuality, as these issues relate to K-12 school life. (http://www.jenniferbryanphd.com) We encourage educators with all backgrounds, identities, and experiences to bring their questions and join us for this important and interactive learning opportunity.

Light refreshments will be provided starting at 7:00 p.m.
When: Thursday, April 30, 7:15- 9:00 p.m.
Where: Larsen G08

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This looks interesting. Anyone want to attend and blog on it?

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

4pm

Fong Auditorium, Boylston Hall

Refreshments will be served

Please join us for the public launch of MenSpeakUp.org: a new online initiative dedicated to showcasing the majority of Harvard men who care about ending sexual assault, promoting gender equality, and creating a positive dialogue.
This website is a student initiative and will serve as a platform for the community featuring psa clips, blog postings, and pledges of support from campus leaders and alumni.

The event is open to the public. Please join us on Tuesday and sign up on our Facebook Page

Supported by:

Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response

By Anita Patel, Junior Web Developer, Berkman Center for Internet & Society

The March 18th Mini-Conference had great discussions and led to a lot of varying thoughts and ideas. The speakers varied in areas of expertise:

• Duncan Kennedy — considered a historical feminist framework
• Eszter Hargittai — examined gender difference in perception of technology skills
• Nancy Hafkin — questioned the international world: broadband access; SES issues; international branch developing countries
• Judith Donath — looked at trust and identity. construction of gender… through the internet..how flexible are the constructions?
• Dena Sacco and Diane Rosenfeld — dicussed legal issues in pornography, rape, crime on the Internet
• Margo Seltzer & Elizabeth Stark –searched for models and experiences of visionary -gendered leadership

The thoughts gathered from these discussions were so diverse that the best way to represent them is through a mind map. So I made one. To view the Gender and Technology Mini-Conference Mind Map, click here

At the Gender & Technology Mini-Conference on March 18, 2009, HLS professor Duncan Kennedy presented 7 threads or topics in Feminism & Critical Legal Theory from second wave feminism (late 1970’s-Mid 1990’s). We’ve posted the video of his fifteen minute presentation and attached a graph of his framework.

AUDIO OF DUNCAN’S TALK :

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/genderandtech/files/2009/04/gendertechaudio.mov

One of our goals for the mini-conference was to do some mapping of the theoretical space, and DK’s presentation provided a helpful historical sampling and much food for thought. We carefully selected the term “gender” to encompass the activities, areas of inquiry and scholarship that we hope to support with this Initiative, but we are also interested in understanding the impact of various schools of feminist thought on scholarship on gender in the digital space. At times these waves feel like a tapestry and at times feel like a snarl. We don’t know yet if these 7 threads are complete and/or are satisfactory, but they do mark a beginning and they indicate a possibility: how might a Second Wave Feminist framework apply to Gender & Technology studies?

Tuesday, April 7, 2009 5:00  7:00 p.m.
Radcliffe Gymnasium, 10 Garden Street, Cambridge
RSVP by April 6, to  svp_singer at harvard.edu or at (617) 495-9143

A Conversation with the authors of Getting to 50/50, Sharon Meers (Harvard College 86) and Joanna Strober, followed by a discussion with Harvard working couples. Reception immediately following the discussion.

Sharon Meers and Joanna Strober are professionals, wives, and mothers with five young children between them. They understand the challenges and rewards of two-career households. They also know that families thrive not in spite of working mothers but because of them. After interviewing hundreds of parents and employers, surveying more than a thousand working mothers, and combing through the latest government and social science research, the authors have discovered that the entire family all reap huge benefits when couples commit to share equally as both breadwinners and caregivers. The starting point? An attitude shift that puts you on the road to 50/50plus the positive step-by-step advice in this book. Here are real-world solutions for parents who want to get ahead in their careers and still meet their family obligations.

Sharon Meers was a Managing Director at Goldman, Sachs & Co. until April 2005.
She serves on the advisory council of the Clayman Institute. Sharon and her husband, Steve, founded the Partnership for Parity at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Dual-Career Research Initiative at Harvard.

Joanna Strober is currently a Managing Director of a fund that invests in private equity partnerships at Sterling Stamos Capital Management.

Event Sponsored by the Harvard Dual-Career Research Initiative, Office of the Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Development & Diversity and the Harvard Human Resources Office of Work/Life

Thank you to everyone who attended yesterday’s Gender and Technology Conference at the Berkman Center.  It was an amazing and overwhelming afternoon.  And while we wished we could have fit in more discussion on each topic, I hope that everyone had a chance to chime in and be heard.

The committee is still working on culminating thoughts, notes, bibliographies, etc from yesterday’s meeting.  A video of yesterday’s conference is forthcoming and will be posted to the blog as soon as we have it.  And while the Google Moderator tool wasn’t utilized as much as we would have hoped, there was a bit of action via Twitter which you can check out here: http://tinyurl.com/c3xp6c

We also have a good number of folks signed up to blog for the month of April.  Feel free to contact us if you would like to contribute.  We’re always happy to hear from you, so don’t be shy about emailing us if inspiration strikes later.

Unfortunately, we failed to mention our FaceBook presence yesterday.  The Berkman Gender and Technology facebook page can be found at: http://bit.ly/j7ttM.   This group has been somewhat neglected by the Berkman Committee and yet it boasts 1060 members and a number of interesting threads already in progress.  We’re hoping to revive it as a way to keep our conversations and momentum flowing.  

I’d like to start things off by initiating a renaming conversation.  In light of yesterday’s diverse conversations, what should the umbrella committee at Berkman call ourselves?  Log in and join the group to post a suggestion here: http://bit.ly/fwuMs.

You can also continue yesterday’s discussions via FaceBook here: http://bit.ly/hXreB. 

Thanks again for an amazing afternoon.  Please check back with us soon for more!