Dinosaur pie!

I wanted to make a special pie for my amazing boyfriend, Matt, on his birthday a month ago. Naturally, I decided to make an apple pie because he likes apple pie and because I can make a mean apple pie with fresh ground cinnamon and a small amount of pre-cooking the apples on the stove. But that's a recipe for another post.

Finished dinosaur birthday pie for a very special birthday boy!

What really made this pie special was a new idea I tried for shaping the upper crust - cookie cutters. I rolled the pie crust as thin as I normally would for an upper crust, about 1/4-inch thick, before cutting and imprinting it with dinosaur cookie cutters with stamps of their bones.

Coating the dinosaur crust in cream

Rolling it out as thin as usual meant that the imprints made that part of the dough thinner than I ever would making a stamped cookie. I don't really have any evidence that this made the final product have clearer detailing, but I do believe that by not thickening the pre-cut, pre-stamped crust, the crust expanded less than than it would have with a thicker crust and kept the outlines of the dinosaurs clearer. Brushing with cream also probably helped define the design by helping to brown the crust.

Presenting the dinosaur pie to the birthday boy!

I look forward to maybe making a Star Wars themed pie in the future - maybe a Darth Vader blackberry pie?

Dresses, 'dressing up', and the software industry

A few days ago, Lea Coligado, a junior at Stanford, wrote about some of the sexism she's experienced in computer science. One of the things she mentioned was how wearing dresses caused her to be treated differently. I, too, prefer dresses because I find them much more comfortable than pants; I (probably) wear pants once or twice a year outside of the gym and cleaning my apartment. I, too, have noticed that people treat women differently for deviating from the "software engineer uniform" of jeans and a t-shirt.

It seems like fashion choice shouldn't be that big of a deal within academic environments and the workplace, as long as it's appropriate.

An acquaintance mentioned that he gets treated differently when he wears nice slacks to his workplace. His experiences match up with the ways I've seen my male friends get teased by others in the industry for dressing up, and they'll hear comments like "Oh, are you going on a date tonight?" and "What kind of occasion could be cool enough to warrant putting in that much effort?" Both my friends and Lea are dressed up because they think it's important to "seem like they tried," and they both get responses for it.

It is unfortunate that our industry questions people who choose to regularly or occasionally dress up for work. But there are a couple of ways that this bias manifests particularly badly for women.

The first is that wearing a dress and "dressing up" aren't the same thing. Similarly to how there are places where jeans and a t-shirt would be highly disrespectful, there are dresses too casual for many settings as well. Many women, Lea and myself included, wear dresses for the same reasons that many men in software wear t-shirts: comfort and personal preference more generally. It's no more of an attempt to flirt than wearing a witty t-shirt; it's just another option.

On top of that, the responses I've gotten when I've worn dresses are usually directed at my character or skill level. The kindest of them call me naive or better suited for non-engineering positions: "Software engineers learn they don't need to dress that way." Men, too, are mistaken for different roles, though for dressing up as opposed to simply wearing a different article of clothing. However, women are told much more frequently than men that they are just not suited for the positions those people already know they hold: "Real coders don't focus on fashion." I've even seen men who don't dress the part get extra credit for commanding respect in spite of their atypical clothing choices!

Clothing choices have nothing to do with technical ability, and conflating the two will only help perpetuate the gender gap in an industry that already has a serious problem retaining women.

Why is it easier to teach girls to code than to teach ourselves to treat women well?

When we ask ourselves "why aren't there more women in tech?", we're quick to discuss how the pipeline fails young women. I would be lying if I didn't think there's room for improvement here - I've written about my own negative experiences as a young programmer - and it's exciting to dream about new ways to expose eight year old girls to programming, with or without pink. Unfortunately, we only have limited efforts to put into solutions, so it's important to understand how we can be the most efficient. Wanting to get more girls interested in computer science is fun and non-threatening. Changing workplace environments would have a more immediate impact.

Half of the women in technology leave.

We know that we lose women over caregiving issues. There are too many maternity leave policies that show workplaces are uninterested in their female employees having healthy family lives, and we expect mothers to put in time at odd hours just to keep up. Our industry needs to find ways to be flexible with talented women who also want to have families.

But the main reason we lose women isn't related to caregiving - it is a myth that pregnancy is the main thing that holds women back when it only accounts for a sixth of women who leave engineering. We primarily lose women to toxic work environments: misogyny and sexual harassment are commonly cited as reasons for leaving. This ranges from assumptions that women can't possibly be good engineers to a man erasing the work of a woman because she refused to date him. Treating women fairly could very well be the simplest way to increase the number of women in technology.

But we don't discuss the importance of fixing these problems like we discuss the importance of the pipeline. Discussing the pipeline is convenient - we've agreed that improving the pipeline is a complicated and daunting task that we can't be expected to solve in a quick timeline. So we're able to put it off and pat ourselves on the back for thinking about how to fix things in ways that make us feel good about ourselves. Blaming the pipeline means we don't have to confront the internalized misogyny in our day-to-day environments. It's a cop-out.

Admitting that the culture can be hostile is admitting that there's something we can work on changing now. It's time for us to decide to change.

The next time someone asks you to help get girls interested in technology, also ask them what they're doing to support the women who've already made it through the pipeline.

xoxo

XOXO stage banner

You and I meeting
for the first time.
Together, we found
spaces
built in polygons,
yellow, orange, and red.

Places to experiment, learn,
play, create.
The safety to
talk of speed bumps, loss,

failure.

But you and I -
an army -
propping up those colored polygons
to turn defeat against itself or,
at least,
make it something we take on
together.

Places and spaces into
moments and memories and
bonds to hold onto
beyond those polygons,
yellow, orange, and red.

An update on Keybase verification

Keybase updated their verification methods to include a command line method that relies on echo, gpg, perl, and curl. I really like this so-called "hardcore mode" because it uses only tools I already trust - I don't have to install anything from Keybase. The process involves running a script they provide, and you get to read through it and see exactly what it will do.

This actually happened a few months ago, but I just used it to verify my Keybase identity. I'm excited to see Keybase improve the web of trust.