On 11/30/12 9:51 AM, Shaun Ellis wrote:
>
> I also added a post on mentorship to the subreddit, since I'm 
> particularly interested in that.  Karen, while I think your comments 
> on "promotion" and "giving credit" are important, I'm not sure how 
> they are related to mentorship.  Would love to hear more about that in 
> the subreddit.
Rather than taking that discussion to another channel, I'll add it here 
(first) -- (not sure how many code4libers are reddit users)

Shaun,

Thanks for asking.

Mentorship is (generally) for people to pass along their knowledge to 
newcomers of some sort. There is a tendency, though not a law, that the 
mentor/mentee relationship is seen as "expert/novice." The need for 
mentorship is not limited to women, of course, but we must carefully 
avoid the assumption that women are less visible in technical areas 
because they know less, and therefore mentoring solves the visibility 
problem. In fact, highly expert women can be invisible [1] in their 
field and this is one of the factors of sexism. So the whole "equal pay 
for equal work" (or "equal x for equal y") was and is about the fact 
that women with the same skills are not given the same rewards as men in 
this here and now.

My "promotion" issue is that we cannot stop at mentoring, because we 
will STILL need to work for "equal cred/status for equal work" in our 
community. And because we already have women with a high skill level and 
who do not need to be mentored to bring their skills up to some 
"average" level, we need to take the next step for them. So my call is 
for making a conscious effort at treating people equally, even though it 
is very likely to make some folks uncomfortable at first. My personal 
goal is to raise the visibility of women in technology, not just in 
libraries but everywhere. This is because we need for our technology to 
be created by a more representative sample of our society. Because I am 
a woman I focus on women, but in fact there is even greater inequality 
in technology for African Americans and Latino/as. I'm not in a 
position  to take any kind of lead in that area, but would love to be 
able to support a movement for equality for such minorities.

kc

[1] 
http://kcoyle.blogspot.com/2012/11/turings-cathedral-or-women-disappear.html
>
> -Shaun
>
> On 11/30/12 12:30 PM, Mark A. Matienzo wrote:
>> On Fri, Nov 30, 2012 at 12:07 PM, Karen Coyle <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>> Wow. We could not have gotten a better follow-up to our long thread 
>>> about
>>> coders and non-coders.
>>>
>>> I don't git. I've used it to read code, but never contributed. I even
>>> downloaded a gui with a cute icon that is supposed to make it easy, 
>>> and it
>>> still is going to take some learning.
>>>
>>> So I'm afraid that it either needs to be on a different platform for
>>> editing, OR someone (you know, the famed "someone") is going to have 
>>> to do
>>> updates for us non-gitters.
>>
>> Karen, I've added instructions about how to add contributions without
>> knowing Git to the README file:
>> https://github.com/code4lib/antiharassment-policy/blob/master/README.md
>>
>> If you'd like, I'm happy to have feedback as to changes here. A small
>> handful of people have also asked if we could move this to another
>> platform such as the Code4lib wiki. I'd be happy to get feedback if
>> that would be a preferable option.
>>
>> Mark
>>
>

-- 
Karen Coyle
[log in to unmask] http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet