On 11/30/12 9:51 AM, Shaun Ellis wrote:
I also added a post on mentorship to the subreddit, since I'm
particularly interested in that. Karen, while I think your comments
on "promotion" and "giving credit" are important, I'm not sure how
they are related to mentorship. Would love to hear more about that in
the subreddit.
Rather than taking that discussion to another channel, I'll add it here
(first) -- (not sure how many code4libers are reddit users)
Shaun,
Thanks for asking.
Mentorship is (generally) for people to pass along their knowledge to
newcomers of some sort. There is a tendency, though not a law, that the
mentor/mentee relationship is seen as "expert/novice." The need for
mentorship is not limited to women, of course, but we must carefully
avoid the assumption that women are less visible in technical areas
because they know less, and therefore mentoring solves the visibility
problem. In fact, highly expert women can be invisible [1] in their
field and this is one of the factors of sexism. So the whole "equal pay
for equal work" (or "equal x for equal y") was and is about the fact
that women with the same skills are not given the same rewards as men in
this here and now.
My "promotion" issue is that we cannot stop at mentoring, because we
will STILL need to work for "equal cred/status for equal work" in our
community. And because we already have women with a high skill level and
who do not need to be mentored to bring their skills up to some
"average" level, we need to take the next step for them. So my call is
for making a conscious effort at treating people equally, even though it
is very likely to make some folks uncomfortable at first. My personal
goal is to raise the visibility of women in technology, not just in
libraries but everywhere. This is because we need for our technology to
be created by a more representative sample of our society. Because I am
a woman I focus on women, but in fact there is even greater inequality
in technology for African Americans and Latino/as. I'm not in a
position to take any kind of lead in that area, but would love to be
able to support a movement for equality for such minorities.
kc
[1]
http://kcoyle.blogspot.com/2012/11/turings-cathedral-or-women-disappear.html
-Shaun
On 11/30/12 12:30 PM, Mark A. Matienzo wrote:
On Fri, Nov 30, 2012 at 12:07 PM, Karen Coyle <li...@kcoyle.net> wrote:
Wow. We could not have gotten a better follow-up to our long thread
about
coders and non-coders.
I don't git. I've used it to read code, but never contributed. I even
downloaded a gui with a cute icon that is supposed to make it easy,
and it
still is going to take some learning.
So I'm afraid that it either needs to be on a different platform for
editing, OR someone (you know, the famed "someone") is going to have
to do
updates for us non-gitters.
Karen, I've added instructions about how to add contributions without
knowing Git to the README file:
https://github.com/code4lib/antiharassment-policy/blob/master/README.md
If you'd like, I'm happy to have feedback as to changes here. A small
handful of people have also asked if we could move this to another
platform such as the Code4lib wiki. I'd be happy to get feedback if
that would be a preferable option.
Mark
--
Karen Coyle
kco...@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet
