1. Why are you interested in programming? What have you done to expose yourself to programming so far?
When I was very young, my mother worked as a contract computer programmer out of our basement, typing code on a keyboard that was plugged into an old television, and saving her data on a tape recorder. She taught my sister and I some very basic skills, using books that provided buggy code for making not-very-sophisticated things happen on the screen. Neither of us ended up as programmers (yet), although we both work very comfortably with technology in our professional lives in large part due to this early exposure to it.
This childhood introduction to computers has made me more comfortable with them than many people (I am everyone’s go-to first-line tech support person), although my formal programming education is confined to a single introduction to computer science course that I took as an undergraduate student. As the web became more and more important, my work as a graphic designer expanded to include web design and development. Through my work at the University of Washington, I worked with web developers on setting up a Drupal-based website for our department enabling/forcing me to learn enough PHP and CSS to be able to make some updates. This past year, I set up a graphic design firm with a friend, and a large part of the work that we have done has been designing and setting up WordPress sites. The more I worked on the sites, the more I realized that the backend coding had become the more interesting part for me. I took a few online Treehouse courses to try to fill in the very huge gaps in my understanding, but found that I would prefer a more interactive learning environment.
In summary, I have been programming-adjacent for most of my life. It is something that I have always been drawn to, and have found myself more and more wanting to be able to do full-time. I currently do a lot of writing and design work, but I find myself eagerly putting that aside in order to figure out how to write a useful excel formula or CSS line. I enjoy the challenge of puzzling out a solution, and I very much like knowing that there is an answer—and indeed, probably more than one. I find it extremely satisfying.
My career path so far has been made up of seemingly disparate threads that have come together in serendipitous and unexpected ways. I have worked as a graphic designer for over 20 years. I have a Master’s degree in Public Administration, and a PhD in Women Studies. I have been fortunate to have spent most of the past two decades in a position that allowed me to make use of each of these skills in a deeply satisfying way.
My hope is that in 5 years these threads, in combination with the education I receive from the Ada Academy, will lead me to a position from which I can use my leadership, coding, and anti-oppression teaching and facilitation skills to make the tech industry more inclusive. My leadership studies and experience have led me to approach these types of institutional culture issues from a non-hierarchical, more interactive, education-based perspective. Change needs to come from both pressure from outside forces (such as EEOC enforcement and larger societal change) and from within. My hope is that I can be part of the internal movement for growth.
Last year, I began two new projects that also helped me to think about how I can combine my work in women studies more directly with the tech industry. The first is an anthology on geek feminism that I am editing with a friend. This book will be the first academic analysis of what, to me, seems very clearly to be a new strain of feminism that I really would like to see further explored and developed. The second project was instigated by a former student of mine who owns her own software company—she asked if I could help her develop a diversity curriculum that would make use of a Slack application that she had initially created to build community among her employees who worked in different geographic regions. I ended up doing a lot of research to identify some of the current issues facing workers who are not cis-gendered, heterosexual, white men in the tech industry. The research was fascinating, but I also found the question of how to communicate complicated and nuanced ideas through re-purposed technologies to people who may be resistant to them to be challenging and thought-provoking. And while the project stalled after some unrelated issues with her company, the experience left me with a desire to do more on the subject.
One of the things that became very apparent to me in working on both projects is that despite the fact that I feel a strong affinity to the tech world, I have not, in fact, been a part of it, and that is something I would like to change. Outside of the fact that I really want to become a coder (as detailed above), I also feel strongly that change happens when communities have people within to model what respectful, collaborative, and productive work relationships can look like. There needs to be voices from within who have been trained on how to help people who are resistant to ideas that challenge their world views open up to new possibilities. Because the Ada Developers Academy grounds its teaching philosophy and mission in a commitment to diversity and social change, I believe that its curriculum would offer an excellent start to my plans for the next 5 years of my career.
3. After reading Ada's Vision, Mission and Inclusivity Statement, how will you contribute to Ada's vision for an inclusive and diverse community? http://adadevelopersacademy.org/program
I have identified as a feminist for practically my entire life. When I was 5, my parents signed me up for the first co-ed t-ball league in my hometown; I have a very clear memory of calling all of the boys on the team male chauvinist pigs when they challenged my right to play. This early understanding that my being female should not have anything to do with my opportunities and capacities has been complicated over the years by an education that developed my early sense of injustice into a more nuanced understanding of systemic oppressions, personal privilege, and intersectional politics.
My contribution to helping to realize Ada’s vision for an inclusive and diverse community (I assume this means both within Ada’s program as well as within any future work communities) would come from my years of studying and teaching feminist thought and history—I bring years of experience with working with people with a range of understanding about why diversity matters and how systems of oppression operate. I have been fortunate that most of my work has been in situations where those discussions are foregrounded and expected, rather than viewed as something to be avoided.
While I have frequently been in the role of teacher or leader, my experience has taught me that listening and learning are a fundamental part of creating an inclusive community—no matter where I am positioned on the organization’s hierarchy. As a teacher and as a supervisor, I have learned many times over that my voice is not always the most useful or important one. And as a middle class, cis-gendered white woman, I also know that what I have to offer varies in response to the situation. Sometimes it makes sense to make use of my privilege to speak out when it may be safer for me than for others in the room, while other times being quiet and listening is the best course of action. What I most have to offer is an awareness and understanding of how my identity impacts how I move through the world and my position within diverse communities, as well as a good amount of experience with making use of that knowledge to help build communities that are inclusive and functional. For me, building and nurturing healthy, diverse communities is a necessary foundation for all productive and functional working and learning environments. The labor that goes into building and maintaining those communities is neither separate from nor secondary to the work that the group is meant to produce, such as learning code or producing software.
4. Tell us about a time you made a mistake that you learned a lot from. If you encountered the situation again, what would you do differently?
Whenever I think about mistakes I have made in my life, I always first think about one I made in my first job out of college. It was a potentially expensive one—I was working for a concert promoter in Washington DC at the time and the mistake involved getting a date for a Sheryl Crow concert wrong when reserving the venue. My boss didn’t get angry with me; she just told me that it was the kind of mistake that everyone makes once. That stuck with me because her response involved both forgiveness and the recognition that learning as we go is a fundamental part of being human.
As I have moved through life and continued to make mistakes, I always keep her words in mind. When I was team-teaching several years ago with a colleague, we did an exercise called the Power Flower, in which we drew a giant flower, with each petal labeled with a different identity category—race, class, gender, sex, sexuality, religion, ability, and so on. The exercise is meant to get the group to recognize that we all have different areas in which we are more or less aligned with dominant identities, as well as to give people the opportunity to learn that they should not make assumptions about the identities of the people in the room. When it was my turn to fill in the petal for gender, I wrote “female” and moved on to the next one. One of the students became very upset with me, and told me that as a transperson, he felt erased by my use of the term “female” rather than “cis-female.” At that time, I had only begun to hear that term, and I had not figured out what it meant. But I heard what the student was saying, and after class, returned to my office and promptly googled it. He stopped by my office to chat, and I showed him what I was doing. We talked about what had happened, and I learned how to better answer the question, “What is your gender identity?” the next time I heard it.
The story is humbling to tell—acknowledging that my ignorance caused someone else pain isn’t fun. But it is also humbling to admit that even with a PhD in Women Studies, I still had so much to learn. Our language around identity and difference is constantly evolving, and it was a wake-up call that I needed to be more proactive in staying abreast of these shifts. But on top of all of that is a recognition that in situations where people are vulnerable (and sometimes that’s me, and often it is not), that frequently the most productive response I can have is a patient generosity. It is important to be open to listening to other people’s ideas and experiences, without retreating to anger or defensiveness. Mistakes are inevitable. Learning from them should be, too.