Girl + Computer = ?
Junior level female Computer Science major at Northern Arizona University, considering the college life in Arizona and speculating about the proper ways to inspire women and girls to pursue engineering-related disciplines.
Messages are always welcome.
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Sorry about the unfortunate (and unplanned) hiatus!
Usually when there are breaks in my posts, its because I am living the CS life. I definitely have a lot to talk about.
Hopefully this week I can catch everyone up on my experiences and new thoughts this past semester.
I have a feeling my life is going in a different direction soon, also…
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Photo reblogged from femmebot's tumblr
Homeless 17-Year Old Girl Is Semifinalist in the Intel Science Competition
I honestly teared up a little bit as I was reading this awesome story.
Talk about a motivated girl! Way to defy the odds!
Best of luck! -
After reading about the LEED-Certified Architect Barbie Dream Home, I decided to do a little investigating on this “I Can Be” Barbie campaign. Talk about fantastic. It essentially is a line of dolls based off real career tracks - Computer Engineer Barbie was even selected from online voting. Imagine the implications - the majority of people who participated specifically wanted Barbie to be a programmer!
For me, this is great timing. I have been struggling between balancing my identity as both an artistic person who likes fashion and discussion and a person in the CS world. I don’t personally know anyone else like me, which can be rather isolating. Although laughable, its nice to know Barbie - a childhood icon - can do both.
I have really struggled with my identity during my college training. Sometimes it can be easier and more fun to be the techy tomboy - jeans, weird tee-shirts, little makeup, laughing along to the off-color jokes my peers make. Sometimes that is how I like to express myself.
However, I also know that I love fashion. I love art. I love ethics and philosophy. I love religions. I love philanthropy. And I love discussing equality, privilege, and what shapes our media. Many of the people I know in CS do not know this side of me.
Sometimes I feel weird wearing a dress to CS classes. I fit in better when I don’t.Part of finding where “Maggie” fits in with “Programmer” and “Engineer” has been through getting to know other girls in my field. Part of it is in asserting my femininity with friends like Colton and Kolby. Part of it is explaining my techy-side with smart, sassy, lady-people like Glenna and Marissa. Part of it is through my own, private discoveries. Most of it is through communicating with other people about all the things that fit together to make ourselves.
And how did we communicate with other people about what makes us ourselves as children? By playing pretend or mimicking games - whether it was playing cops & robbers, or with doggie toys, or with pretend swords, or with Barbies.
There were some comments in the articles I found about if the best opportunity to introduce young girls to technology fields is with a Barbie doll. Will kids even care? Will it really impact kids to pursue such a field?
I don’t know if this was typical with young girls who played with Barbies, but I know that when I happened to get one with a laptop as an accessory (it was Mari, from the Generation Girl line), I used that thing in every single game.
I definitely had games with web-page designers, hackers, bloggers - usually it was with my Mary-Kate Olsen doll, because she was definitely my best one.
Lesson is, when given a techy accessory for Barbie, I used it constantly. Intrigued by technology at a young age, being able to bring that into pretend games with dolls fostered my interest.Just because little girls play with Barbies doesn’t mean that they will always grow up to be image-obsessed. Chances are, a majority of young women my age today in the U.S. played with a Barbie at some point in some way. I’m not saying Barbie is the ideal toy for kids, nor am even I promoting the brand, but if there’s going to be a toy that breaks down barriers, why not Barbie? It seems apparent to me that everyone underestimates her because she’s blonde and extra-feminine.
Girls’ toys are so filled with princesses, weddings, clothes, and unicorns that its nice in any situation for a doll to have something more realistic like a laptop, a cell phone, and an adorable pair of glasses. This can only be a positive thing.
And you can bet that when I walk into the office my first day of work in my first post-college job, I will have one of these guys sitting in my cubicle to inspire me.Thoughts??
For more articles discussing Computer Engineering Barbie, please look at these:- “Barbie’s Next Career? Computer Engineer” by Claire Cain Miller, in Bits, New York Times
- “Computer Engineer Barbie Has a Ph.D. in FUN (And Breaking Down Stereotypes)” by Brian Barrett, in Gizmodo
- “How Mattel Designed Computer Engineer Barbie to Excite Adult Geeks, Young Minds” by K.T. Bradford, in Laptop: the Pulse of Modern Tech
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Photo reblogged from FUCK YES EMOTIONALLY VOLATILE BEAR. FUCK. YES.
![fuckyeahemotionallyvolatilebear:
[Picture shows a background split into a spiral of 8 different colours. Clockwise: light purple, dark brown, dark purple, light brown, dark brown, light purple, light brown, dark purple. In the middle of the picture is a brown bear shown from waist up while standing. The bear’s mouth is wide open and its paws are raised. There is text on the top and bottom. Top text says: “Don’t understand something in class” Bottom text says: “Oncoming emotional breakdown”]
Probably one of the most isolating feelings I have in my computer science classes is the feeling of not understanding a concept. Since a lot of the people I know in these classes seem to pick up the information rather easily - and honestly, I seem to also, in some regard - I feel really embarrassed and humiliated admitting if I don’t understand something. I can be an extremely emotional person, so often times feeling humiliated can quickly turn into something worse like crying.
There’s this sense of one-up-man-ship that happens in our department that I’m not sure if I’m imagining or not. I feel like there’s some casual friendship in the classroom every now and then, but from my point of view a lot of it seems to revolve around technology talk and not necessarily about ourselves. Sometimes I wonder how most of the guys in my classes would react to someone exposing their worries and weaknesses - especially me.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_llz7kkwz2L1qkrlmco1_400.png)
fuckyeahemotionallyvolatilebear:
[Picture shows a background split into a spiral of 8 different colours. Clockwise: light purple, dark brown, dark purple, light brown, dark brown, light purple, light brown, dark purple. In the middle of the picture is a brown bear shown from waist up while standing. The bear’s mouth is wide open and its paws are raised. There is text on the top and bottom. Top text says: “Don’t understand something in class” Bottom text says: “Oncoming emotional breakdown”]
Probably one of the most isolating feelings I have in my computer science classes is the feeling of not understanding a concept. Since a lot of the people I know in these classes seem to pick up the information rather easily - and honestly, I seem to also, in some regard - I feel really embarrassed and humiliated admitting if I don’t understand something. I can be an extremely emotional person, so often times feeling humiliated can quickly turn into something worse like crying.
There’s this sense of one-up-man-ship that happens in our department that I’m not sure if I’m imagining or not. I feel like there’s some casual friendship in the classroom every now and then, but from my point of view a lot of it seems to revolve around technology talk and not necessarily about ourselves.
Sometimes I wonder how most of the guys in my classes would react to someone exposing their worries and weaknesses - especially me. -
“Men-ups” by Clickandclash on Flickr.
As a big fan of pin ups, I can’t help but LOVE these, bahahahaah.
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One of the first meetings of my automata theory classes, my professor made a weird gender reference. This is the actually second time this has happened during my college career.
Without getting too math-y on you, we were discussing set theory - imagine Venn diagrams with numbers from mathematical functions in them. As an example of two separate sets that wouldn’t overlap, he used “girls” and “boys.” He awkwardly mumbled that they wouldn’t overlap, except for hermaphrodites.
What?? Okay, so I may not be the queerest of the queer, but I still thought that concept was extremely incorrect, and sort of offensive! I feel like in today’s world it is incredibly obvious that things aren’t just heterosexual male and heterosexual female. There’s so much gray area.
However, at least he uncomfortably waved his hands to the class and said “hey, we’re computer geeks, we don’t know social stuff!”
You got that right, mister. But is that even an appropriate excuse? Claiming ignorance for something doesn’t mean you can opt-out of social awareness. If you say something rude about a certain race but say you just “don’t know about it,” people are still gonna call your ass racist.
So why can that still fly with gender?When stuff like that happens, I just can’t help but wonder about that person who happens to be in these classes who doesn’t fit in with the norm, who now suddenly feels totally isolated and invisible.
I am privileged to be a mostly femme cis-gendered girl - this means I am lucky enough to fit into pretty much every expectation for women today except for my short hair and apparently odd career interests.
I am just one of a bunch of people in my department. Chances are, at least one person isn’t so lucky, and they deserve a safe space free of judgement or misrepresentation just like all the people like me. Although it sucks that people need to rely on others to foster a safe space for them, I think at the very least professors should be sensitive to this type of thing.Thoughts?
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Photo reblogged from HelloGiggles.com on Tumblr
A delightful argument against the popular idea that being a feminist equals hating men or being unfeminine.
A section I thought was particularly interesting:
Even femininity in its simplest form is societally looked down upon in favor of its superior counterpart, the almighty masculinity. (Insert curtsey here.) Women today have the opportunity to choose between a more feminine skirt or more masculine pair of pants to wear, whereas men in skirts are widely shunned. While this might seem like a female privilege, it’s more of a testament to the universal acceptance of masculinity. It is more acceptable for women to seem masculine (but not too masculine, so watch your step, Hillary!) than men to seem feminine, because femininity at its core is simply not respected. It’s coveted, glamorized and sexualized — for the ultimate pleasure of men, of course — but not respected. There are very few worse blows to a man than to call him a “bitch”. There are very few worse blows to a man than to be thought of as feminine. There are very few worse things than to be likened to a woman — to be a woman. I know. How rude.
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Some ladies I try to embody when I feel unintelligent or like I can’t do it:
Hermione Granger
Ada of Lovelace
Amelia Earhart
Elle Woods (yeah, for reals)
Rory Gilmore -
An extremely dark article about the ever-present yet often forgotten male victims of rape during war time. Don’t skip this one.
Yet another reminder that patriarchal structures fostering machismo and requiring cold masculinity of anyone remotely male is damaging to all people. So many people concentrate on the misogynistic parts of patriarchy without considering the misandristic parts as well.
As a woman, I feel that I see so much girl-on-girl misogyny. As a girl in today’s Western society, it can be easy to be catty or competitive with other girls or spread hatred by ridiculing them.
However, it seems to me that men perpetuating the hyper-macho attitude by ridiculing men who express emotion or vulnerability is guy-on-guy misandry and deserves just as much examination.
These issues are not addressed as much, and we can see an extreme example in this above article.I don’t use trigger warnings much, so please be warned - this article can get rather graphic, so proceed with caution if you are sensitive to this type of thing.
