Breaking Barriers: Tackling Sexism and Boosting Inclusion in Tech and Open Source – Tech.Strong.Women. EP41

Hi, everybody. Thanks for joining us for another episode of Techstrong Women, where we feature amazing women doing amazing things in tech. I'm Jodi Ashley, executive producer here at Techstrong, and I'm here with my co-host Tracy Ragan, creator and CEO of Deploy Hub.

Before I introduced our guest today, I just wanna remind you all that you should be tuning in five days a week now to Techstrong tv. We have so much great content every day of the week now, so be sure and get out there and check it out. com site on a regular basis.

We have tons of great virtual events happening. com. Hey, Tracy, what's on your mind today?

All right, I'm first gonna tell a story about, so they happened to me in the past, and then reference it to a story that just recently happened. Um, back in the day, Dr. Dobbs used to have an annual conference, and I would attend it oftentimes, um, alone.

And one of these conferences, I decided to be brave enough to go to their night event. Oh. Which I always didn't because most of these conferences were mostly men.

I walk into this event to find about 10 nurses, young girls dressed in really short nurse outfits, really, really revealing nurse outfits. And when I walked into the room, they all ran to me, but they realized that they were in this horrible experience of this show with nothing but men on the floor, and they were the only women. So that evening, I spent my evening with 10, uh, 10 young nurses.

Nurses, um, and we played all the games, and we played like, I don't know, it was, uh, you know, guitar Hero. And we just had a great time and they were all horrified in the, the experience that they were having. And I was horrified by it, but we made the best of it.

And I hoped that, that we had never, would never see anything like that again. Okay, let's fast forward. Almost, you know, probably 15 years.

And Palo Alto Network decides to dress up two women in black evening gowns that are revealing and put lampshades on their head, head as an entrance to one of their events. Come on, people. We are way beyond this.

And if you wonder why women don't like to go to these types of events, if you want to, um, prevent women from being in technology, then do that, do exactly that. And I think that, you know, women today, we have to talk about this and it has to stop. Please stop.

It's not, it's not okay. That's what I have to say today. Now, I just can't even believe that someone, I was an event planner for corporate meetings for years.

5,000, 6,000 people. The fact that no one on that team walked up and said, what the hell this is? Just, just move them away.

All they had to do was take their hands and walk 'em out of the room. And the fact that that didn't happen is it's just, and I've had the same experience, Tracy, as an event planner, 10, 15, well, 20 years ago, I would literally put my hotel room at off in some corner. I'd have them hide me so that no one knew where my room was.

'cause I'd get drunken patrons knocking on my door otherwise, or calling my room at night. And it, it was horrible. And, you know, just when we think maybe things are getting better, this is what we get to see all over LinkedIn and everywhere else.

I was just, I was appalled. I'm just, I'm still appalled. I'm still processing how gross that was.

But we have a great show for you today. We have an amazing guest, Katherine Druckman, and I'm gonna let her introduce herself to all of you. Katherine, take it away.

Awesome. Well, well, thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

I am Katherine Druckman. I, during the day by day, I am a, uh, an open source evangelist at Intel By night, I don't know, I used to have a better at night story, but maybe I'm just, uh, I occasionally do some, some hobby podcasts as well, and, and other things. I'm, I'm trying, I'm an aspiring open source superhero, I guess.

I don't know. Um, but yeah, that's, that, that's what I do. I've been, I've been around the, the open source tech world for quite a long time, and I've always had that kind of open source bias.

So if you hear me say that phrase a lot, that's, uh, probably why, because I don't, eh, it's all kinda all I know. So for, for better or worse. But yeah, I appreciate you having me.

There's so much to talk about today. It seems like There is, what are your thoughts on Palo Alto Networks? Oh, I, I mean, I, I would like to say that I'm shocked, but I'm not because, uh, and I think this is a larger conversation, right?

Because I think there, the tide is turning and not in our favor. I think there's a lot of, um, unfortunate pushback against diversity, which seems mind blowing, you know, given, given all the work that's been done, I think, to advance, uh, inclusion in tech. But, so I, I wanted to actually bring up a, a thing that I read just yesterday, and that's, um, that was coming from a, a notice from Anita B who puts on the Grace Hopper celebration, and they're really struggling.

And, and I thought, well, this is an indication of something, of something that's not good. And I think it's, um, you know, I think larger organizations as we're experiencing, uh, financial challenges and churn and, and things, I think funding for a lot of diversity initiatives is suffering. And, and I can't help but, but think these things are related.

You know, when, when, when both of, when I see both of these things yesterday I saw the, the public announcement that Anita B is having to restructure a bit. And then, you know, I, I see this Palo Alto thing. I, I, they, you know, they, they kind of, I, I draw connections in my mind.

And that's a little scary and unsettling, isn't it? I think it's very unsettling, Catherine. I, I, I really, really think it's very unsettling.

Um, but as we all are going to be saying, we will not go back, we'll not go back, we'll, not, we'll not go back. Um, it, it, you know, I've heard discussions about diversity and inclusion, and by the way, we usually have really technical discussions and we'll get back to that. But I think this is important.

I think all women are feeling it, and there's no reason why we shouldn't talk about it. But I've heard about diversity and inclusion, um, with this idea of diminishing someone because you're pursuing diversity and inclusion in a panel discussion, and you're diminishing who, who is being diminished in this process. Um, you know, I guess you could say, if you have a panel of four people that you're submitting for a show, and you have, you have to include a woman.

You're demi diminishing men by 25%. But if you really wanna know what diminishes somebody, Look At the pictures from Palo Alto Yeah. Or calling somebody a token, just because you're, you're, you're forced to.

Uh, Well, and I do this day in and day out, you guys, we're not diminishing anybody. We're working a little harder because there's so few of us. I have to work harder to find those women.

And it doesn't mean I'm diminishing anyone else that's there. And it's not just women, it's, it's diverse men. It's, it's not just a panel of four white dudes, let's face it.

Right. And, and, well, I, it just irritates me. I got in a conversation with somebody about this the other day.

It was like, well, we run this women's organization and we don't ever talk about it. And I'm like, well, then you're part of the problem because you can't just ignore the problem and think it's gonna go away by not having a conversation as an organization. And we went back and forth and I said, okay, agree to disagree.

I said, you can do both things. They're not mutually exclusive, but this is what I do day in and day out. I find people, I reach out, I get people to participate.

And our company is, as Tracy knows, just diversity is top of mind. And we are run by all men. But they all agree that we have more than three men on a panel.

And we need diversity, whether it's somebody of color, whether it's a woman. We need diversity. And we try and stay true to that.

Now, granted, sometimes the customers choose those panels, and we don't have a say, and we do the best we can to encourage them, but there's only so much we can do. But we try really, really, really hard. But I don't think it diminishes anybody.

It does not. And in fact, in diversity is what brings diversity of thought. And that's really what we're trying to achieve.

Diversity of thought, more opinions, more, uh, you know, more access to windows or how other people think and how other people do things is really critical. And I, you know, and let's get us back to this open source, uh, topic. 'cause, 'cause I know, um, you know, this is Catherine's kind of wheelhouse.

Absolutely. Um, we struggle in the open source community to have women contributors. Mm-hmm.

It's always been that way. Yeah. It's, it's always been that way.

And, you know, Catherine, I, let's talk about that for a minute. How do you think, what is it that we're, that we need to do to get more people that look like you and I into this open source community? What, what are we missing?

What are we not doing? I think about it all the time. Okay.

I mean, there are so many things. So I, when I started my, uh, in my life in the open source world, it was the, the numbers were always something like, well, you know, in, in tech in general, there's about 20% representation from women, right? But in open source, it's maybe two.

I worked for, um, remember back when magazines were a thing? I worked for Linux Journal for many years. And it was, it was always this kind of strange irony that the, the people running it were, or women, but the audience w was again, 96% male.

Um, and so, you know, so it was, it's always something that's been on my mind. And then, but as a technologist, you know, I got my start in the Drupal community. And the Drupal community, for example, always prided itself on being a little bit better than the overall open source community.

So at one point it was, yay, we have 10% and 10% of us are women. 10% of the contributors are women. And it was maybe 20.

And, and, and so I, I tried to kind of look to that as an example of what really did work. And I think that community early on, uh, was far more proactive about, um, discouraging just hostile communication. And, you know, again, for those of us who have been around, we've seen, we've seen some, we've seen some things, right?

We've seen some really weirdly hostile behavior. Um, we've seen, uh, women targeted when they participate in online forums. And, and if a community comes together and has zero tolerance for that, I think it's, you know, that's the first step.

But, but generally, how do you get people even to the table, uh, to, to cross that kind of threshold to being a part of a community is really tough. You have to be, you know, you need mentorship, you need, you need people actually, you need almost one-on-one mentorship. Um, and that's tough, especially in, you know, when, when things are as they are now, when people have so little bandwidth.

But, And I, you know what, anytime I'm in a, you know, the, the Continuous Delivery Foundation, I have to, you know, say that they have been a great organization that has been pretty, pretty diverse. Um, you know, there have been a lot of women who have been in on board positions, on technical positions. And it's such an interesting experience to be in a, in a open source organization that has achieved some level of equality between, um, you know, as men and women and diverse men and women.

And our conversations are amazing. Um, other open source communities. I, I've had one of my work experiences at a conference I've ever had happened in April at the, uh, open source summit.

Um, I walked into a room of, uh, you know, we were gonna be talking about metrics of metadata is basically what I said I wanted to chat about. And I left feeling so degraded and so spun around that I went back to my team and said, I'm going to my room. Wow.

I felt like I wanted to vomit, to be quite honest. I was treated so poorly, literally treated with so much disregard. Um, and it made me really question everything about me that I just had to pull myself together in order to finish the conference.

Um, it made me think, do I ever wanna go to a conference again? And I'm like, God, these are the thoughts that women have when they have these experiences. And how do we, you know, I should have spoke.

I feel like I contributed because I just didn't tell 'em all how I felt. And I didn't know how to do that. You know?

How do you do that? How do you just say, Hey, you guys are really, you know, you guys are, this is not, this is not right what you're doing to me right now. I should have said that.

And in what, in a way, I feel like I participate in the problem by not standing up for myself. And if another woman hadn't been in the room, I may have stood up for myself. Yeah.

But it sucks that none of the men there were an ally either. 'cause they have a responsibility, you know, you know, Mitch, you know Alan, either one of them would've stepped in and went, Hey, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. This is, you know, they would've, they would've smoothly participated in a way to let everybody else know that they were outta line.

And we need more men to do that. It's, we're I outnumbered again? So we need, you know, we, we say about our LGBTQ plus community, that we need to be their allies.

We need to step up. It's the same thing here. It's no different when somebody's in a room.

And you can tell that crap's happening. Somebody needs to be their ally no matter whether they're a man or a woman, or they're gay or straight or whatever. We need to be willing to, but it's hard, Tracy, I wouldn't, I am, I'm like, I get fired up and then I say stuff I shouldn't, you're much more even keeled than I'm, I'd be like, I, you know what?

I just try to defend myself as much as possible. And I was curious at the whole time why I had to, right now, we, and I, I remind people on this show that we had, um, the woman from Manpower, and I should remember her name, but she talked about A woman from Manpower. Sorry, Hilarious.

Right? I think we laughed about that At the time. Yes.

She talked about the, the impact Covid had on women in this industry in particular, and how it was really hard for women after four years or three years of being out of the workforce to get back in because things had changed so drastically in tech, even in technology. And women tend not to, you know, they, it's hard for them to go on a three-year hiatus and then start applying for work. In particular, how res, how resume matching is done through AI now.

Ugh. So that she, she talked about the problem of that and how it is biased in the sense that some of these, you know, resume these job seeking tools. They don't take an account that there was a three year gap of Covid where women were sitting at home being teachers because they had to be.

Um, so, you know, there's challenges all over the place. And, uh, um, somehow we have to, um, get it sorted out. Um, and, and Catherine, in your work, um, you know, you, you've been a really great advocate at for diversity inclusion with the open SSF, um, and for everybody who doesn't know, Catherine and I are co-chairs of the marketing committee and the dev rail committee.

Um, what do we need to tell ladies to get them involved, especially in the Dev rail committee? 'cause you don't have to be a member of the open SSF if you wanna start dirty outreach for open source security. So I, I always think about this in terms of what would I have told my younger me, you know?

Uh, because it took me a long time before I worked up the courage to contribute to an open source project many, many years, because I didn't, I thought that was, well, that was for somebody else. You have to, you have to be a real engine. Like, I don't know what that means, but the, what's the root, we're all faking it.

Like, let's be honest, but, uh, not really. Anyway, I like, there's a, there is a level of courage that I think that we need to encourage other women to have. And that is, don't assume that other people know more than you, because they probably just don't, they may be just saying it more confidently, except there's that, but really it's just, it's getting women to have, um, to Kind of let go of some of the baggage.

And again, I'm kind of talking to myself here, but let go of a little bit of the baggage and just, you know, grab the microphone, grab the CFP, you know, do the conference talk proposal. You might be surprised at what gets accepted and what doesn't. I, you know, I think we tend to have a lot of kind of negative self-talk, and that, that it comes from the environments that you just highlighted, right?

We've maybe had a bad experience or two at a conference. We've had a, a bad experience or two in a forum online and a Slack channel in any kind of community. But, but, um, for whatever reason, and I, I don't necessarily know what it is, but women tend to step back a little bit more.

And I, you know, I, I think as I've internalized things like Cheryl Sandberg's message about, you know, don't take, don't step back from the table until you absolutely have to, right? That I remember that being a, a message going around years ago. There's not, but there's also the, the, the kind of message about how men will tend to apply for a job if they only tick 50% of the boxes, where it would tend to only apply for a job if they think they meet 90%.

I swear the second I started saying, you know, what, if men can do it, so can I, I swear my life improved. And I know that seems silly, but it's true. You kind of have to absorb the fact that you have something to contribute as much as anybody else, no matter where you are in your career, wherever you, whatever your skills may be.

And you kind of have to just take the leap of faith. Um, so that's what I would've, if I could go back in time and tell myself that, that's what I would tell myself. And, and I think that's, that applies to probably other people as well.

So, did you have somebody in your, uh, life as a, as a young person or a child, that, that helped you build confidence that allowed you to think that way? Uh, I was an only child and an only grandchild for a while. And I think I did, I do have the side advantage that I grew up with.

People telling me that, uh, I was the smartest person in the room does build confidence whether it's true or not. Um, but yeah, I, I, uh, you know, I, I dunno, I dunno if I did I, or I, I, I like to think that I was raised by some very tough women. So I, I'm pretty resilient and I have a pretty thick skin, and I'm willing to kind of go in there and, and beat my head against a wall if necessary.

But, um, but I, you know, I, I think I also experienced, um, the same insecurity that everybody else does. And that is, um, you feel like you have to achieve something before you can, again, going back to the submitting conference talks topic, you have to feel like you have ticked all of these boxes before you can start putting yourself out there and giving talks on whatever topic interests you. And that's just not true.

It's just not true. I would hope that, you know, more of these conferences, I feel like, um, one of the check boxes when submitting to conferences should be, have you ever presented before? Right.

So They, it is usually, I think, I feel like I get asked that a lot. Some Of 'em I do. Some of them are, some of them don't.

Um, most of 'em will say, have you presented this topic? Yes, There you go. They've Ever presented before is a different topic altogether, because oftentimes people have never presented, they don't have a recording to share.

So they're prevented from presenting. Um, at the Arterius project, twice a year, every six months, we do some kind of online event. Now, we may not have a whole lot of people show up, but it provides us a lot of content and it provides a structure for new presenters.

And I, we encourage women to be involved, um, so that they can have that content so they can have that experience. Because sometimes it's hard to, it's impossible to get that experience at CubeCon. Um, it's really hard to get in to do a talk.

Well, yeah, it's getting harder. I, I, everybody, Catherine is going to be presenting, um, at the, uh, Grace Hopper conference. That is true.

I've, And I'm really excited About that many times. Um, so I feel like maybe what, what we need to be doing at, to, to improve this, and this is for any new time, new, new presenter, is create more, more, um, more ways to present. Mm-hmm.

But you can start learning to do it. Learning to submit abstracts or maybe not something we should talk about in the derail committee at the open SSF. Yeah, Absolutely.

University, university outreach is where to do it, right. If we get more women thinking that they can present at these conferences. Um, one of my finest achievements, I feel like, um, we had a young, uh, contributor for ATUs, and she's presented at one of our talks, and I encourage her to present for DevOps world.

And during the, during Covid when we were doing online events, and she's from India, she was accepted to do a, a talk at DevOps world based on the talk she had done for ATUs. And I am so proud of that because we, we allowed her to have that platform. We've gotta figure that out.

I think, um, generally in the Nina Dere community, Yeah, it really does help to have that, uh, a safer environment and encouraging environment. Um, so somewhere where you can get, you know, po uh, constructive feedback on your talks, all of that kind of stuff will lead to the outcomes that we wanna see, which is, you know, we, I would like to see when I go to an a tech conference, open source or not, I would like to see 50% of the, the presenters as women. Like, I, I would like to see 50% women and, and I, I, I don't remember the last time I I if I've ever seen that, except at events that were specifically geared to women.

No, I, I I think that maybe at most 15 or 20% at very most. Yeah, I know. That's wild.

It's foundation strives for, but it's way too low. Yeah. There are a lot of us in the world.

Like, what, where are we? I ask that all the time. Where are the women?

I feel like I able to stand up on my roof and scream out, where are you technology women? But only your horses would hear you. Exactly.

You need to be in like New York City for that real impact. No kidding. You live out in the middle Of nowhere Land.

So, um, the other topic I think was, is interesting is women writing blogs. Now, Catherine, you are re you've been great at building the blog program at the open SSF. Why don't we talk a little bit about how much easier it would be to submit blogs than even a, a talk.

But the thing about it is, if you get a blog submitted, you could actually build a talk from the blog. Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. I mean, I, I always, you know, advocate, if you're gonna, if you're gonna take the time to do the research and then put and create some content, use it in, however, in as many formats as you can, I think that's a great idea. Um, but yeah, I, I, well, I thank you for saying that.

I don't know. I don't know. It's, it's, it's tough to, Oh gosh, aspiring writers again, I spent many, many years at a magazine.

It's, it's tough to, again, work up the courage, just like, you know, submitting a conference talk. It's tough to internalize your own personal value in terms of, uh, what you might have to contribute in the form of a technical blog or article. But all of that said, um, it is a really great way to, you know, you don't have to stand up in front of an audience.

You don't have to, uh, you, you don't have to put yourself out there and in quite the same way. And I think it is a really good way to start kind of testing the waters on sharing content and building your, your own kind of reputation. And, and even it, it's a really great way to, um, test out ideas, right?

From a technology perspective, if you have, if you're kind of working through, oh, I don't know, anything from a proof of concept to, to something that you're struggling with, technically, it's such a great way to put it, to get feedback on your ideas. Uh, you know, again, if you can find a, a constructive environment to do it. But yeah.

You know, and in the past, it's so funny, like, I don't wanna get too sidetracked on this, but I could go down a quite a long rabbit hole about the ways the web has changed from, you know, 20, 30. How long has the web been around anyway, from 20, let's say 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago. Um, we, we used to have this very interactive world where the web was made up of dis distributed sites.

Everybody had their own personal blog. And remember when we had things like blog rolls where you would link to other people's content, but now it's totally different, right? We, we share content in silos.

Like it's all, it's Facebook, it's Twitter, it's, um, maybe it's Mastodon or Instagram or we we're, we're kind of tied into these platforms, and it's a little bit less, uh, I don't know, collaborative, I think, than it used to be. You used to be able to, in the olden days, you know, hash out technical problems in the comments section of an article. I don't see a lot of that happening anymore, but I would like to, Wow, I forgot about that.

Yeah. Right. Remember in the good old day when you had meaningful interactions and comments, it wasn't just trolling.

Amazing. Amazing. Yeah.

The days of your, what, you know, that's a really good point that you make there, because blogs become a, as you point out, they're more, they're more siloed. So what, what are the characteristics for our listeners? What, what are the characteristics?

org, um, ortus, it's an open source project. io. Um, what, what's the characteristics of a good blog?

How many words, what kind of content? Uh, so I, I have, I have fairly strong feelings about, you know, I, I think people, especially today, people don't read, wanna read a very, very long article. Not online.

You know, if you're going, if it's, if it's much more than, I don't know, 1500 to 2000 words, I think that there's some, uh, people want to read it in, or they used to want to read it in more of like a book form, an epub, actual printed material. Wouldn't that be cool? Do we still do that anymore?

I don't know. But, uh, but yeah, you know, I, I think, you know, you, you keep things pretty short and to the point, if you have more to say, write a series, that's my recommendation. Um, I think, I think in terms of structure for technical content, the most popular stuff is just sharing how to do a thing, whatever that thing is.

You know, we, we all work in this, well, not we all, but a lot of us work in a technology field, right? And we're in our day-to-day lives. We've, we've, we face and tackle technical problems.

It's big and small. And even the smallest, the, the smallest problem, um, once you've solved it, you can help solve it for somebody else, right? So if, if you've solved, you know, if you've written a bash script, that was really helpful, write a blog post about it, put it out there and say, Hey, this is what I did.

This was the problem I solved. And, and, and share how other, other people might be able to use it. Um, and, and again, going back to the ideal world in which we're interactive, maybe you even get feedback.

You get feedback on how to improve it. Um, but, but if you can turn it into more than just, you know, a stack overflow post, but an actual, you know, narrative, I think, uh, you know, that's a great place to start. Because at the end of the day, a lot of people consuming technical content are just trying to get through their day.

They're trying to close tickets, they're trying to solve issues. They're trying to get rid of the technical roadblocks to, to creating whatever it is that they're working on. And, and, and so those are, those kind of people are out there searching for the answers.

And, and it's nice to have, um, something that's really well articulated instead of just writing. We, we all rely, we all, we all rely on stack overflow from time to time, but to find a really nicely written blog post that solve that, that outlines how to solve a problem is such a, such a value. And if you can share that with other people, then you know, you, you're, you're on your way to kind of building your repre reputation.

I think, I think it's a really good recommendation for, um, women to, because, you know, part of the problem is we need more women making an effort to brand themselves. Um, I hate to use that term, but that's really what it is. It's a matter of getting your name out, getting people to know who you are, and starting by, you know, creating blogs is a really good way to do it.

Um, one of the ways, as you point out is you know, your, what your experience was. So we're all learning new things. There's a lot to learn in security.

There's a lot to learn in ai. And one way you can do it is to take on one of the open source projects, for example, and try to implement the tool and talk about your experience, what you learned, mm-hmm. What you liked, what you, what you think should be improved.

And that will, of course, get you in a doorway for being part of an open source community. So there's, there's roads to get to, uh, to get more women into these projects. And, um, blogging is one way to do it.

Blogging about an open source tool is a really good way to do it. And then potentially using that, that, uh, information to submit a talk, uh, where one of these open source tools might be, um, highlighted, like at an open source summit or at, um, any of like a Fin Os or any of these, uh, uh, conferences that are related to open source projects. Uh, and, you know, I think the Linux Foundation generally tries to do a good job of bringing diversity in.

We just gotta get 'em up from, I think it's 20% to that, that goal of 50. Yeah. And a lot of that is, you know, is again, the outreach and getting, getting people, you know, wait, once you're on the other side of let's say, a, a, a call for proposals process, a CFP process, there's nothing you can do about it at that point, right?

When you're just evaluating, you have what you have, you have the submissions that you've got. So you have to really start earlier to, to make sure that, and and this is, this is a, a thing I think that lots of communities struggle with and, and know if we had all the answers, we, we could solve them tomorrow. But I think we're, we are, you know, collectively working through trying to solve these problems.

And I don't know. I, I, I, that's why I love, I love, you know, I love this format by the way, podcasts and this kind of thing. Because really at the end of the day, I think a lot of us are just, we all have problems, right?

Whether we're engineers or whether we're in marketing and dev rail, or whether we're the CEO of a company. We have, we run into problems every single day. And if we can share what those problems are, share, here's, here's how we're working to fix them.

But hey, do the rest of you have any ideas? Because we would love to hear them. And that's the great thing about this forum is, and, and this media format is that we can say, Hey, um, listeners, these, these are the problems we're facing.

If you have any ideas, please reach out to Tracy. Please reach out to me. Right.

Um, because, you know, this is how we solve the problem. You know, the sad part about all this is women used to dominate technology, it computer science. Mm-hmm.

Um, my mother was a, uh, you know, she was a hospital, basically. She, she ran the, the files. She was worried about, you know, intake files.

She ran the, the, the chart room, they called it. And IBM walked in and said, we need a good, somebody who would be a good analyst for Bill for automating this. And they, they picked her and said, you know more about the chart room than anybody else.

And so she spent the la the ne I'd say the last seven years of her, her career, being an analyst for IBM and how to build hospital chart rooms, uh, electronic versions of it. Now, if we even go back rather than that and think we, you know, think about movies like Hidden Figures. Mm mm-hmm.

Um, I went to a conference once and were talking about women in, uh, women in tech. And the journey that we've taken and how we lost our position was right, right around the eighties. And she was very thorough about this.

And she showed, um, ads in like Vogue Magazine, where there were, you know, women sitting at computers with these awesome shoes. But that was where they were, right? Mm-hmm.

They were sitting in front, they were, they were not key punch machines. They were sitting in front of old time big computers because there women were the computers. Right?

Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's where the term came from.

They were doing math, they were computing. Yeah. Um, so we've lost our, we, we, I think that women started, and the basis of this talk was that women started losing their position in technology right around the eighties when, um, PCs were starting to be available at home, and men would buy these PCs for boys.

Right. Because they, and the boys started playing on them, and, but they weren't buying them for little girls. So this is around the separation startup around the Yeah.

You know, and then we had things like movies, like weird science talk about its people. Yeah. Careful movie for women, right?

Yeah. Yes. I, I, oh, this is, that's interesting.

I have some other thoughts though too, in terms of like material culture transformation, right? When as objects e evolve culturally, I think that their audience tends to change as well. And I think there's, something happens also where originally computers, again, were people, uh, but then computers as objects became, um, equivalent to an administrative tool, right?

The, the things that might be useful to quote unquote women's work. You know, like a typewriter, right? You might use a, a, a computer of sorts to, to do that kind of file work or, or whatever it is that was diminished in some way.

And then as computers became something a lot more mainstream and a lot more powerful and a lot more pervasive in society, then it, that, I think that's kind of how we lost it. I think, you know, it, I have a weird background and sort of the history of objects, but you think that things in our culture, like I am thinking of random things. Like, um, a friend of mine did a master's thesis on, uh, how I, on how glasses went from medical devices to fashion, right?

Things change. And I think you can say the same about computers. Computers went from administrative tools to, um, I mean, you know, pervasive in our society to running everything that we do, right?

So, uh, I don't know. Interesting. Well, and like what I was growing up, probably you too, Tracy.

You know, we, we had typing class 'cause we didn't have computers until like Yeah, exactly. When I was like graduating from high school, um, and had, you know, the trash 80, I worked in an, oh, I Had one at her, right? Well, that Was the first one I ever looked was a Radio Shack computer.

But typing, being class was all girls home economics was all girls. And the boys took shop, you know, in tech, you didn't ever see girls taking those. It was like no one encouraged any cross pollination.

You know, it didn't occur to the, the people in charge that, you know, there were probably plenty of boys who would've liked to have take home me, but they wouldn't. Right. 'cause that wasn't cool.

Yeah. But that, you know, that's back in the, well, I won't date myself, but it was a long time ago. And I don't think, I don't, oh, we've had this conversation like with coding and getting girls to code and like my granddaughter, my my husband taught her basic coding and she was in middle school, and she just thought that was the coolest thing ever.

And there's a lot of girls that are interested in that. And it's just fundamentally, we don't, we don't still have an educational system that says our little girls should be encouraged on computers and tech and science just as much as our, our boys are. Which just still not happening.

I have two grandkids that are in just, one's just started high school and one's a, oh God, is he a junior or a senior? I don't know. I don't wanna know.

And, um, you know, it's still, I just even see it with them. They're, they're not encouraging girls in the technical side of things. It's frustrating.

And I don't know how, how are we in the year 2024 and we're still not getting it. And I think I, I feel in many ways in the last, uh, five or six years, we've gone so backwards as, as we started out this conversation, we are not moving forward. And somehow we have to say, we are not going back and we're gonna bring more women to the, into this industry.

And we have to, we have to be the ones to mentor and to encourage. And, you know, today's discussion was all about that. And Catherine, thank you so much for those a awesome tips on blogging, how to get things submitted.

Because that the more we see, the only way we're gonna get 50% is if we get women to, to, to, to, to try. And that's the best thing to do, is to encourage them to try, right? Yeah.

So we, I we always have this one, one thing on this, this show, I always ask for a book recommendation. I Knew it was coming, I knew it was coming. Yeah.

So before it gets, and I always do, people do this on a surprise. I don't tell you ahead of time, it's okay if you don't read you, you're not into books. But if there is a book that you think that we should be reading, um, what would that be?

Oh, wow. Well, this is totally random, but I was looking up, uh, an author. I, I read a book, um, uh, by a guy named Grant McCracken, and I read it, I read the book 20 years ago, and he, I think he wr wrote it in like the eighties or nineties.

And it was, I think it was called like Culture of Consumption. And this is totally random, but I wanna read that book again. So I'm just gonna put it out there.

Look up Grant McCracken. He's a Canadian, uh, anthropologist and he's written quite a few books. I remember that one being really, uh, a good one.

Totally not tech related, but interesting about the way that we interact with, you know, objects in our culture. Um, and, uh, Ology is our objects now. Well, Yeah, exactly.

So I'm trying, that's why I wanna reread this book and kind of Yep. 1990 it to a completely different culture and consumption. Yeah.

And he did a follow up to it in 2005 called Culture and Consumption too. There you go. See, I wanna read these again.

Wow. 1990. I've never two in 2005.

That's, that's a, yeah. Nice ator. Yeah.

And he's written quite a few other books and I kind of wanna read them and try and see how those might apply to my current life and see how I, I look at the things around me a little bit differently. Awesome. Well, this was really fun, ladies.

Uh, it was, it was, uh, super entertaining. We had a really good start. It was, it was different.

And I like it, so I'm excited. It so good. It actually felt good.

It did really feel off. So cathartic a little bit. Yeah.

And just get all that. And Tracy knows, I, I make stuff. I like do logos and mugs and all sorts of arts and crassy things.

I think there's some, uh, we're not going back t-shirts and, uh, and our feet. Well, Perhaps lamp shades. I don't know.

Maybe. No, No, no, no. Take it back.

Take control. Do lampshade hats, lampshade handbags. I don't know.

Yeah. Well if some people have their way, they're gonna be red and they're not gonna just be a lampshade. So let's just think about that.

Well just say handmaid still, anyone. Um, so thank you so much for being here today. It was great to have you.

Tracy was like, we have to get Catherine on our show. So I'm really glad that we did, did that. And, um, I'm excited for all the fun stuff that you're, you're working on and what's coming up.

So keep us posted and, and thanks again for, for popping on our show. Trace, you got anything to add? No, just if you're a woman out there and you'd like to get more involved, um, go to the open SSF uh, there should be a page out there, um, under how to get involved for the Devra community.

Catherine and I, you can find us there. We are working on building that dev rail community. So if this is an area of interest and you'd like to learn more about how to do it, we're there, we're there to mentor you, so please join us.

Yeah. And if you can't find us there, find us somewhere else. We're everywhere.

Everywhere. Look on Textron TV people. Well, thanks to everybody for joining us for another episode of Textron Women.

We are so glad that you came. We hope you enjoyed our conversation, and we hope you'll tune in for more episodes. Thanks to everybody.

Have a great day.