Parole Femmine

I recently had the great pleasure of meeting up with Kathryn McKinley, a faculty member at the University of Texas at Austin. She let me know that she is publishing an editorial pushing for double-blind reviewing in SIGPLAN conferences. The editorial is EXCELLENT. Here is a snippet:

“The purpose of double-blind reviewing is to focus the evaluation process on the quality of the submission by reducing human biases with respect to the authors’ reputation, gender, and institution, by not revealing those details.”

Simply put, sexism and nepotism are real. They may be unintended, but they happen. Double-blind reviewing improves quality and ensures that the best work really does rise to the top!

I had a nice conversation with Margaret Burnett yesterday. She is a faculty member at Oregon State University, and one of her research interests is end-user software engineering. She and many others — Neeraja Subrahmaniyan, Laura Beckwith, Valentina Grigoreanu, Susan Wiedenbeck, Vaishnavi Narayanan, Karin Bucht, Russell Drummond, and Xiaoli Fern — wrote a paper on male vs female debugging strategies published in CHI 2008. The subjects were not programmers, and they were debugging spreadsheets.

Roughly speaking, they found that successful men used dataflow (slicing) and testing strategies, and that successful women used code inspection and specification checking strategies. What a difference! Is it a difference between global thinking and sequential thinking, perhaps?

Here at parolefemmine, we don’t shy away from controversial topics. Here is a guest blog post by Jaymie Strecker, graduate student at UMD. Opinions, of course, are Jaymie’s and not necessarily mine.

Graduate Employee Union at UMD

By Jaymie Strecker, Graduate Student and Research Assistant,
Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park

Women in computing careers aren’t as numerous or as successful as we could be. To use Fred Brooks’s terminology, it’s not the essential complexity of computer science that holds us back—women can learn and apply computer science just as well as men—but the accidental complexity of the way the computing field has been implemented. Studies have identified a slew of difficulties stemming from this accidental complexity (this study is a good example), but I’m going to focus on two difficulties here: gender discrimination and trouble balancing career and personal life. I’ve picked these two because an organization is forming at the University of Maryland (UMD) that will work to resolve these difficulties for grad students—not just for women but for men, and not just in computer science but university-wide. The organization is
Maryland Teachers and Researchers (MTR), a union of grad employees.

You might think that gender discrimination is adequately addressed by UMD already. With a strong non-discrimination statement and an array of equity and diversity initiatives, UMD has striven admirably toward gender equality. Yet at least one gaping gender gap remains: the inexcusable lack of guaranteed maternity leave (let alone parental leave) for grad employees. The current policy places a grad employee seeking maternity leave at the mercy of her faculty employer—an uncomfortable situation at best, and an intolerable one if the faculty member refuses to grant the leave.

The subject of maternity leave leads into the difficulty of balancing career with personal life. To some extent, this may be an essential difficulty of being a grad student—a job which none of us expects to be easy or glamorous. But accidental complexity arising from our jobs as teaching assistants, research assistants, and administrative assistants—specifically, our vulnerability to exploitation by our employer—make the career-life balance even harder to achieve. A survey by UMD showed that teaching assistants were working more than the 20 hours per week they were paid for—not 1 or 2 hours more, but an average of 9 hours more per week. Grad assistants have never been paid much, and our pay raises are not even keeping pace with the cost of grad housing. With our low salary and the shortage of housing, it’s extremely difficult to find a safe, affordable place to live in the College Park area. All of these unnecessary difficulties can rob grad employees of time and options to pursue their personal lives.

How can MTR help? By giving grad employees the ability to participate in University decisions that affect us. By empowering grad employees to negotiate our work contract with UMD. By providing a meaningful grievance procedure for grad employees in case that contract is violated. Learn more at mtrumd.org.

MTR needs your help. Grad students, you can join at no cost. Faculty and staff, you can show your support (like Vibha has) by adding your name to the list of faculty and staff allies.