Author Archive for Liana Leahy

Ever think that you might get further in your tech career if you were only a man?  James Chartrand of Men with Pens proved this theory to be correct.

There is no such thing as gender equality in technology.  Women must consistently prove themselves to colleagues over and over again.  But try representing yourself as a man, and all this changes.

“Taking a man’s name opened up a new world. It helped me earn double and triple the income of my true name, with the same work and service” says James.

But your tech cred doesn’t just drop because you’re a woman.  Your race, your accent, your weight, and even your clothes all come in to play.  And forget about getting any respect while your pregnant!

It’s not shocking to think that a person would hide behind an online persona to be judged on the merits of their work alone.  Have you tried it?  Would you like to?

Read more about James’ story here.

We can’t thank everyone enough who contributed and attended the Ruby on Rails Workshop for Women.  From the feedback, it appears to have been a tremendous success.

So cool that folks travelled to Boston from as far away as PA to attend Ruby on Rails Workshop for Women!!

…it makes a huge difference to be able to ask someone stupid ?s.

I like being able to say that I deployed my first Rails application today before lunchtime 🙂 like running a half marathon.

Totally impressed with the amount of Ruby and Rails info the students absorbed.

I want to thank the teaching assistants at #rorw4w. You were never judgmental and always patient.

You know what’s a lot of fun? TAing at #rorw4w.

It was indeed entirely attitude-free, as promised – unique in my experience! I appreciated that so much, and I had a lot of fun, as well.

Read about what our teachers thought about the workshop.  Sarah Allen wrote about Stone Soup and Andy Gregorowicz wrote about the workshop from his perspective.   Or just check out the tweet stream.

Moving forward, we encourage our newly empowered programmers to meet monthly at the Open Source Code Crunch.  If you want to stay in the loop, please join the OSCC mailing list.

Open Source Code Crunch

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.

The Open Source Code Crunch seeks to promote mixed gender collaboration. Programmers will meet monthly and use their skills towards open source projects in a welcoming, collaborative, attitude-free, newbie-safe environment.

First meeting will be on October 21st at 6pm
The Berkman Center
23 Everett Street, Second Floor
Cambridge, MA 02138
Phone (617) 495-7547

Please join our mailing list for future events and news.

Last week, Boston.com posted Fessing up to being a mom can backfire on job seekers. In this article, it explains that while women are protected against sex-based stereotyping under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, “pregnant women and mothers are seen as less dependable, less authoritative, and less committed to their jobs”.

This is particularly true in male dominated fields such as technology where an employee is expected to devote significant off hours on the computer. Keeping up with industry blogs, maintaining website side projects and contributing to open source is becoming an expected norm among web developers. This makes it tough for parents of both genders to stay current, but its assumed that mothers can’t keep up.

So what do you think? Has the motherhood penalty affected your career? Are unrealistic expectations keeping women from pursing the geekier jobs in web/software development?