Much of the Aberystwyth Contingent: Rebecca, Begum, Praboda, Me, Edel, Danniela, Abby, Joanna, Jasmine, Grace, Savannah and Tamzin (missing: Amanda and Anita)

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On April 4th, we held the 17th BCSWomen Lovelace. I’ve been running or co-running this conference for longer than I’ve been running this blog… so it’s time for an event report. There’s a few missing in my event report sequence as I started this blog in 2009 (after the first Lovelace), I didn’t make it to #3 in Cardiff 2010 (I was working in France at the time), and it seems like 2021 Lovelace didn’t get an event report on this blog even though it definitely happened (online). A well-run conference involves more work in the run-up than anyone could possibly think, and the LovelaceRead More →

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We (me, Clem Herman at the OU and Gillian Arnold of Tectre ltd) are running a short project on gendered microaggression in computing at University. We have run some focus groups and are now at the survey stage. SO! This post is to help advertise the survey, which you can fill in in English or in Welsh: https://openuniversity.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/gendered-microaggressions-survey https://aber.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/microymosodiadau-rhyweddol-mewn-adrannau-cyfrifiadura We’d like responses from students, as we’re interested in the current picture, but we’re also interested in the experiences of grads and staff. We ask about microaggressions you’ve experienced but also those you’ve witnessed. This means we want to capture responses from guys as well asRead More →

Cupcakes

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Gosh. Where to start. The 16th BCSWomen Lovelace happened a few weeks ago, and I was the event chair. Again. After retaking the reins and leading some events in lockdown, it was time to go face-to-face with the best women undergrads in computing in the UK. Again. Should I start on the day, with my brain waking me at 4, then getting me up at 5, for a stroll around a lake to clear my head before facing all the people? Or should I start three weeks earlier, when I took delivery of a badge machine to make a load of pronoun badges so weRead More →

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Programmed Inequality by Mar Hicks is a history of early computing in the UK, starting right at the beginning. The book concentrates on the experiences and conditions for women in tech, and their changing status. Much like Recoding Gender by Janet Abbate (which I read recently but didn’t, for some reason, blog about) it looks at the way the computing profession is first invented and then changes over time, influenced by and influencing women’s position in tech. The simple tale is one that’s been told a few times… 1940s-50s – to begin with, computer was a word that referred to someone who computed, probably aRead More →

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BCSWomen Lovelace 2022 happened! It happened online, again, for the third time. Little did I realise that when we moved 2020 online due to threat of COVID and lockdown, I’d be chairing Lovelace 2022 online whilst actually suffering from COVID. I cannot recommend the experience of hosting a conference and being ill with COVID. From our core team of 4, one had been off with a virus in the run up and two of us had COVID so the whole event was a bit snotty. I’ve written a detailed account here: https://bcswomenlovelace.bcs.org/?page_id=398 so if you want to see who won and watch the talk videosRead More →

Me, about to deliver a keynote

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In the first week of April I went to my first in-person conference since all this [gestures at world] kicked off. ACCU is out of my area (it’s a programming conference, and not an academic one), and the invitation to deliver a keynote arrived back in June last year. When making a decision about whether I could do this I looked back at their past list of keynote speakers and hoo boy there’s some big names there – it’s perhaps unsurprising that they’ve had the inventor of C++ (Stroustrup) but they’ve also have the inventor of Haskell (Peyton Jones), and Python (van Rossum). Whoa. AnywayRead More →

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Sometime before xmas I was working from home and there was a bang on the door (around school drop-off time). I opened it to find Clive, the curator of TEDxAberystwyth, wanting to discuss lineup, promotion and so on. I’d been heavily involved in the first one as an organiser, on the small team that pulled it together. So I am familiar with the rules of TEDx and have even negotiated the whole “building a TEDx-compatible website” and “booking a room and making it look a bit like a TEDx event” things. The knock on the door turned out to be my “Would you like toRead More →

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A couple of weeks ago I was interviewed by Brian Runciman of the BCS for the Gem of All Mechanisms podcast. We talk about gender, obviously, but also pinkification, tech, robots, male allies and more.

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I’ve recently finished reading “What Works: Gender Equality by Design”, a book by Iris Bohnet out on Harvard University Press and it’s one of the best books on gender matters that I’ve read recently. I can seriously recommend it. She takes a clear topic for each chapter and looks at the literature on behaviour change and design around that topic, considering a broad range of evidence from psychology, anthropology, economics and business to craft a wide research base from which to recommend behaviour modification strategies to support equality. The general idea comes from behavioural design, which is the field of “nudge” units and subtle designRead More →

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I’ve published lots of writing – articles in journals and conference proceedings, mainly. Also quite a few magazine articles and one poem (aged 14, in the Skateboarding magazine RAD, but that’s a different story). Last week our book came out so now I can say I am a published author. It’s taken a while – over a year in total, with 6 authors collaborating online – but today I got the paper copies and so it feels a bit more real. The book aims to be a handbook and a practical guide – so if you are interested in diversity and more importantly interested inRead More →