Working with the Student’s Union sensitised me to the problems women face in Technology. One of them is that while there are no biological reasons for it, there are way less women working in Technology than men. There’s got to be a reason for that, right?

Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, at one point had less than 10% females majoring in computer sciences. As of 2006, an initiave was started to find out why, and how this could be changed. techcrunch.com published a video on how HMC changed their gender ratio to nearly 50:50. If you’re more into reading, there’s also an article on the changes on npr.com.

One important story told be all the young women the University approached asking for things that made them reconsider their choice of study is this: “People told me, and still tell me, that I shouldn’t try this. There are no women working in this field.” – Details may vary, it may have been questions, it may have been implications, but all in all, people tell girls, young women and also adult women that what they are trying to do is too hard for them, because no woman, or only very few women before did it.

So what I’ll be trying to do is the following: I’ll try to find female role models of all kinds of technology and science, and post something about them. One role model per week should be doable, and I’ll keep it up as long as possible, but at least until end of April 2014.

Submissions are very welcome, just post a name in the comments section below, or contact me on whichever channel that you found this post on. I’ll start writing the first post right away, posting it tomorrow: Sunday is role model day!

This post is related to the one I published two days ago, especially the first paragraph.

I received a lot of feedback regarding the whole post, mainly “WTF are they thinking?”. But also, especially regarding the first paragraph, I got a lot of stories that told the same thing: The question “Are you sure you want to study Informatics? There’s a lot of maths courses to be passed during those studies.” had been asked a lot of people, and seemingly male future students, too.

So I guess this is the right time to talk about communication.

The issue here is that what was said might have been meant as a piece of advice, or a possibility of filtering out people who thought Informatics was about MS Word.

But the magic of communication is in how to send a message, how to make sure that the person adressed does understand the meaning.

And that’s the problem.

Let’s say you bring me chocolate cake. I like cake, so that’s a good start. I taste it, and I think you made a good cake, though my boyfriend’s chocolate cake is even better. Yes, indeed, my boyfriend makes cake!

Now, I could tell you “Wow, that’s a great cake you made, though my boyfriend’s is better.”. Or I tell you “My boyfriend makes better cake”. Or I tell you “That’s a great cake!”

So, I’ll give TU Wien this: Putting this question into the obligatory interview that basically kicks off your time at University is pretty uncool. And not giving a fuck about how this might be interpreted by students is rather stupid.

No posts from me in more than 5 months. This can mean only one thing: I’ve started playing the Discworld MUD again. Intensively.

Apart from attaining achievements, advancing lots of skills, meeting old friends and making new friends, I still had a life offline to tend to, with lots of studying to do, old friends to meet, new friends to make and, in general, stuff to do.

Again, a resolution for the future: I want to keep writing. It’s a great way of keeping track of things. Thinking about what happened in the last months, I realize how much I probably forgot just because I didn’t write it down immediately. But hey, fortunately I have my calender! It tells me that I …

• attended my brother’s wedding
• created a wedding book for him (well, it’s not quiet finished yet)
• went skiing with Mum
• attended Yoga classes on a weekly basis for some time
• met some awesome women at #FemCamp13 and #FemCampLinz
• tried for some weeks to find a job for the holidays, and succeeded at a hostel in the end
• had some really awesome couchsurfers – Joji from India, Silvia from Graz, Artu from Serbia, Friso from the Netherlands, Lidia from Spain
• went to a medieval market with one of the women I met at #FemCamp13
• went to Berlin with the BF for a weekend
• had an old friend and her boyfriend visit from Barcelona
• had my parents visit for my birthday
• got the coolest birthday present ever: miniature anatomy model!
• started working at a hostel
• quit work at the hostel because it’s far too chaotic IMO
• found a new job (which will hopefully be awesome)

Also, I read the Hunger Games trilogy, started using Twitter, and finished most of the courses that I planned to do in the first attempt. I failed 2 exams, but will re-take them in Autumn. A 3rd lecture I had postponed to Autumn right from the start.

And yeah … there’s nothing about upcycling in that list. Because I didn’t do any more 🙁

If yes, go check out ifoundyourcamera.net. After partaking in the PostSecret project, a guy from Canada started his own thing: A website where he publishes pictures from lost cameras and memory cards. The idea is of course simple: if enough people look through these pictures, one of them might recognize someone on the picture, and thus the camera (or memory card) could be returned to its rightful owner.

If you did not lose your camera, consider yourself lucky. But go to the website, nontheless! you might be one of the people to recognize somebody or help finding out where a picture was taken. Georg and I, for example, could tell them where the three pictures of this post were taken. One of them was even taken in Innsbruck! The camera by the way already made its way back to its owners thanks to the editor of a local newspaper (first comment to the blog post).

And if you found a camera but until now did not know how you could possibly find the owner – here’s how to take part in ifoundyourcamera.net.

Why do trips to Ikea always end with me asking why I always end up with more stuff than I intended to buy, but still not bringing all the stuff I intended to buy?

This time: We need some extra hanging baskets for the bathroom. We brought these, plus a new desk and chair for me, but we did not buy the laundry bag/basket for Georg.

Classic.

The kindle arrived 2 days after I ordered it. And I’m so happy with it, it’s unbelieveable 🙂

I can put the task description for the weekly exercises on it, all the slides from our lectures and even the script they gave us for Technical Basics for IT. The only thing with Text-PDFs is that the zoom is not designed for such. It’s very good with the slides, as they usually cover one whole page, and are well readable, but the longer texts (as scripts) I have to convert to a kindle-able format, which destroys all the previous formatting. It looks a bit better when the screen is turned by 90°, though.

And of course, I can download books just like that from the kindle store, because I did not care about 50 Euros more and bought the kindle 3G. So when I finally remembered that I wanted to read “A Dance with Dragons”, I just opened the kindle store, looked it up (keyboard FTW!) and bought it. One minute later, I could start reading.

That was last Wednesday evening. I finished yesterday.

This might be one of the reasons I’ve been so lazy during the last weeks 😉