Music Monday - The Greatest Love of All

I may have linked to this once before, but many of the lyrics are coming to mind for me again in the wake of last week.

Dr. Chanda posted her Black & STEM Playlist, and the song above is one of the ones on my STEM Women playlist.

I believe the children are our future. Girls, boys, every color.

My mother read a lot of self-help books, ones that discussed human potential, so I've grown up thinking about what we as human beings need in order to be our best.

• Health helps, a lot. It may not be required to be a good person, but a healthy body can train hard, study hard, or both.
• Proper nutrition, which fuels a healthy body.
• A good education, which supports our interests and allows us to follow our unique gifts.
• Opportunities, not only for extra-curricular activities, but also internships, role models, travel, etc.
• Supportive relationships.

I spent one summer in Florida when I was 14, and heard a sermon topic: "People become who we say they are," about the human tendency to live up (or down) to expectations. I'm pretty sure the minister kept most of the examples on the positive side. As I've matured and learned more about abuse, I've learned more about how true this can also work to the negative. I've never forgotten that.

Independently, during my adolescence, I came to believe in the UU first principle: "The inherent worth and dignity of every human being." Each and every person matters, and that is why Black Lives Matter (too).

And Ahmed Mohamed's life matters.

I really don't care whether he developed his clock from scratch, or transplanted it to the pencil case from existing 1970s technology. It's the curiosity that matters for electrical engineering. Everybody has to start somewhere, and many engineers begin by taking things apart. That is good, and should be encouraged.

Women engineers, though... I was not encouraged to disassemble things as a child. We didn't own a lot that *could* be disassembled, and what few electronics we had... I preferred to keep intact so we could keep using them.

Many of the articles I have read about diversity in STEM point to a need to allow late bloomers as well as the people with early interests to find their way here. For example, Harvey Mudd's efforts in computer science.

Inclusive STEM Linkspam

Many of the posts I've seen on GeekFeminism lately have been what they call "Linkspam," a collection of links to articles and blogposts relevant to the Geek Feminism community. Since this is a late and quick post, and many things have happened since I last wrote, there will be many hashtags and links to longer discussions.

Last week in Nashville, Tennessee, there was an Inclusive Astronomy conference. I wasn't there, I followed it through the Twitter hashtag, #IA2015 . Here are some good blogposts about the topic:

• Confronting My Own Racism
• What are Microaggressions?
• How to Talk to Minorities, Part 1

In future posts, I want to revisit the concept of patriarchy, and particularly the Biblical Patriarchy movement. Because I was raised in one thread of the movement, it gives me a few insights into both the Duggar situation and possibly Rachel Dolezal (Kristin Rawls, @kristinrawls on Twitter, pointed out some similarities). I link to Love, Joy, Feminism on my sidebar, and would connect to specific posts in the series.

I've lived in the South for 15 years now. I ended up making a series of tweets about this earlier in the week, which I will probably turn into a blogpost at some point.

Key point? Check out #NotInOurNames and #NotInMyName. The South Carolina shooter made statements claiming that he was protecting white women. I repudiate that reasoning. The people in Bible Study were not harming me and did not deserve to die.

For the technical community, you should also read #NSBESpeaks to hear their stories.

I want to share some of the articles from Facebook about the Battle Flag:

• Christian Science Monitor: How Confederate battle flag debate is twisting history
• The Atlantic: What This Cruel War Was Over
• The Daily Beast: The ‘Southern Avenger’ Repents: I Was Wrong About the Confederate Flag

Also, a meme that was created to address the sexism in Science hashtags. Dawn Bazely had a Storify to keep up with the hashtags, I'll try to link it later.

Media and the Path to Leadership

On Friday, I discussed how words can lead to violence. In fact, this process is implicated in last month's death of Grace Rebecca Mann at the University of Mary Washington. I focus this blog more on the ethical and moral aspects of diversity & inclusion, however there are also legal implications for businesses and schools.

The issue of women in STEM has multiple parts. It involves:

1. Media depictions of women
• "You can't be what you can't see."
• Relevant article: How Hollywood Keeps Out Women
2. Women in all phases of education
• Teachers and mentors have a key role in supporting women and Under-Represented Minorities through an often-hostile process of education.
3. Women in Academia, Business, and Industry
• Mentorship doesn't end with graduation, and in fact sponsorship is necessary to ensure that opportunities for advancement are fairly distributed to talent.
• The data in the three reports referenced indicate that 50% of women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics fields leave the field within ~10-15 years of graduation. In order to retain and promote existing women, there must be a path for advancement.
4. Women in Leadership, as business leaders, in politics, government, and academia
• A diverse and inclusive culture must be supported by top leadership in any organization

One of the things that my two years at an all-girl's high school gave me, is that we watched "Killing Us Softly: Advertising's Image of Women" in class. We discussed societies expectations, and how imagery and media affects our thoughts and our words.

The work was recently extended in the Miss Representation film. The extended trailer below begins with media imagery that may not be safe for work, and progresses to comments from leaders like Condoleeza Rice.

Incentivizing Understanding of Customer Needs

One of the issues with diversity & inclusion discussions, is that it can often create cognitive dissonance.

One example of cognitive dissonance played out during the 1990's, at a time when I had taken to reading Parade magazine from the Sunday paper. The Time Everyone “Corrected” the World’s Smartest Woman. Marilyn Vos Savant posts the published material here: Game Show Problem .

To me, the thousands of letters Ms. Vos Savant received are an early prelude to the Internet dog-piling culture we see today. Some of the letters seem as if they could have come straight from Derailing for Dummies.

In Long Fuse, Big Bang, Haseltine discussed a behavioral conditioning box:

Myths & Guessing vs. Data-Driven Solutions

When I started blogging, my intent was never to be a current-news blog. I prefer to present a well-thought-out and researched post over an insta-pundit thinkpiece. That said, attempting the discipline of blogging everyday has shifted things a little, as I've tended to write more about recent Twitter and Facebook discussions.

While this post IS inspired by a recent Twitter discussion (#DiversityJC chat yesterday), the data in it is old news. On October 8, 2014, as part of the annual Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) of Women In Computing, they had a panel of Men as Allies as a plenary session.

I was not present at the conference. I have yet to go the the GHC, although I hope to at some point. What I have read from accounts is that, as a plenary session, the Men as Allies panel was the only event occurring at the conference at that time. There were no concurrent sessions for women to "vote with their feet."

A hashtag was developed for the event, #ghcmanwatch, and there is a storify of those tweets.

I can say that there was follow-up, at least one of the men met with women later, to listen to their inputs instead of telling them what he thought.

May the Fourth...

... be with You!

What self-respecting Geek can pass up a pun like that? It's a great day to celebrate our love for Star Wars.

On Friday, the Twitter weekly #SciFiChat discussed Geeky holidays. It wasn't until the end of the chat that I realized it was on account of this Punny holiday.

Being a geek, I've put quite a few on my blogging calendar, intending to mark them. As I started journaling about a taxonomy of Geek holidays this morning, I realized that while several (Pi Day, Yuri's Night, Star Wars Day) have become popular and well-known around the internet, many "holidays" are more personal.

Similar to the GeekFeminism page, I take a broad view of what interests make a "Geek":

Passing and Privilege

Who I write for, in this blog, is something that has shifted over time.

At first I was writing to the younger "me"s: engineering students, and high school girls interested in engineering. People facing economic difficulties going into college. Occasionally to other parents, although this is not primarily a "Mommy Blog," not focused on my child.

As my own diversity journey has progressed, as other things in life have happened, my "probable audience" has shifted. This year, I've been trying to write more to smart professsionals, primarily in Science, Technology, Engineering, or Mathematics fields, and often (but not always) young adults.

People interested in or curious about diversity efforts, but not necessarily knowledgeable on the subject. Usually white, or otherwise unfamiliar with intersectional discourse / critical race studies.

I wrote about the Thirty-Meter Telescope last week, in part to share with my audience the issues, and in part to process my own thoughts and feelings about it. At the end, I asked people to listen.

I actually didn't promote that post. I was not sure that I said the right things at all. I posted it once, which right now automatically goes to Google+. Then I sent it to three people on Twitter, open to feedback if they had time to review.

One of the things I have learned in the years of following the literature on diversity, is that often diversity efforts are placed on the shoulders of oppressed peoples. Requests to be on Diversity Councils, requests to join committees addressing Diversity. The committees and councils need adequate representation in order to be successful, and yet because minorities People of Color are so under-represented, there may be an over-demand for their time.

Inclusion, Innovation, and the Aerospace Industry

In 1968, for the first time ever, humans got an image of Earth from space:

The blue oceans. The swirling clouds. The continents without political borders. The thinness of the atmosphere.

The imagery may have influenced both the environmental movement and the movement for peace in this world: the concept of the global village, and efforts to move beyond tribalism. It is that tribalism, I think, that influences so many of the phobias we see today.

Inclusion and The Goal

For those of you interested in the DecolonizeSTEM discussion, please see Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein's Medium article with her Decolonising Science Reading List.

One of the things I've read these past few months, was Eli Goldratt's The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement. I have read quite a bit about Theory of Constraints over the past two years, but this was my first time reading the classic book that started it off. Some of the principals make sense, for example I am trying to "focus and finish" my reading.

However, some of what Goldratt writes about The Goal, appears to conflict with the data on Diversity & Inclusion.  Specifically:

"productivity is the act of bringing a company closer to its goal. Every action that brings a company closer to its goal is productive. Every action that does not bring a company closer to its goal is not productive." [1]

Diversity & Inclusion discussions in business, are often viewed as "a waste of time," or worse, "unproductive."

Yet the data on Diversity & Inclusion's impact on business shows that it improves performance. I wonder how much of this happened because The Goal was focused on the factory environment and production, and how much of this happened simply as a matter of assumptions.

What do you think? Would you update The Goal to reflect the data? How?

[1]  Goldratt, Eliyahu M.; Jeff Cox (2014-07-01). The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement (Kindle Locations 691-693). North River Press. Kindle Edition.