Rather than post a partial post, I plan to just quietly raise my glass to a few women I know who have personally inspired me in my career, and do a lot of reading today instead of writing.

You can find the Ada Day posts in all of their glory at Finding Ada.  Happy reading!

I snapped this picture of Namco's Pac-Man float as it went by.

In case you’re wondering, the Rose Parade was amazing.  Way better in person than it is on TV, and you can really appreciate all of the time and attention that goes in to even the smallest, humblest float.  As a former marching band nerd myself, I am in awe of the students who traveled from near and far to walk, play, and dance the five miles of parade route on what for some of them must have felt like a really cold morning to be outside.

Pac-Man here was undoubtedly my favorite float. I failed to read ahead in the program, so I had no idea it was coming, and I’m sure I screamed right in my Dad’s ear when it came into view.  Huge, vivid, and amazingly detailed, this float alone was worth the price of admission in my opinion.   The float was accompanied by its own band, complete with Pac-Man tuba covers, which you can see toward the bottom of this picture here.  I wish I had video, too, because the float was playing Pac-Man Fever and it really was quite the sight to behold.

I was slightly disappointed to see that La Canada Flintridge didn’t pick up the Viewer’s Choice trophy for their animated construction vehicles bopping along to The Safety Dance, but I did love Cal Poly’s float as well, so I was pleased to see them pick up Viewer’s Choice honors.

It’s hard to believe that I was sitting there on Colorado Boulevard in (that day, at least) sunny Southern California only a couple of weeks ago as I’m looking out at the mammoth snowbanks surrounding my domicile here in the frozen North.  I wish I could say that I’m relaxed and refreshed and ready for school to begin on Monday, but circumstances being what they are in less idyllic corners of my world, I haven’t gotten in as much true downtime as I would normally like to fuel my semester sprint.  Nevertheless, I’m gearing up as best I can and looking forward to a good next semester.  It seems like a small milestone, but I will officially cross the half-way mark sometime this semester and it feels good to be making progress through the program.

As an aside, a few gaming non sequiturs:

• Super Scribblenauts: Stealing a gift from an ex’s wedding?  Really?  Who writes this stuff?
• Little Big Planet 2: I was expecting lighthearted and I got steampunk instead – I’m interested to see how it plays out.
• Worms: The best old game I had completely missed.  Hat tip to my brother for introducing it to me!
• DSi XL: Love it.  And not just because I downloaded Dragon’s Lair 2: Time Warp!

Off to buy some textbooks, my dears – hope you’re having a wonderful 2011 so far.

• Playing Harvest Moon: Grand Bazaar on my new DSi XL
• Reading Womenomics
• Baking (cookies, possibly a pie)
• Swimming
• Watching the Doctor Who Christmas Special
• Attending the Rose Parade in Pasadena
• Buying a new phone, hopefully the HTC Evo
• Seeing actual friends and family members in person (ah, semester-induced isolation…)

I wish all of you a wonderful holiday season and a Happy New Year!

As I mentioned in my last post before I went on semester hiatus, I used to be into things that my peers reviled me for being into. It wasn’t just my peers, actually. I had a heated argument in class with my 7th grade science teacher, because he tried to insist that there was no life on other planets. I thought he should append “as we know it” to “life” because to me, it seemed not only possible but likely that other planets orbiting other suns evolved some form of life. And as I was into sciencey things, I knew that people were talking about the possibility of silicon-based life forms. But, no – he berated me in front of the class for this intellectual curiosity, and if I hadn’t already been labeled as a huge nerd, that surely would have sealed the deal for me with my peers. But you know what? It turned out I was right. Put that in your arsenic-based pipe and smoke it, Mr. N!

I know it isn’t much, but I wanted to add my voice to the list of people letting Katie know that she isn’t alone.

Katie, I made a similar decision about chess when I was a kid. I wore glasses, I was smart, and I was already into so many things that made me seem nerdy and “weird” to my classmates that to this day, I don’t play, even though I would probably really enjoy it. My cousin D is 14 now, and she recently made a similar decision about giving up her musical instrument, because of how the band members are perceived at her new school. It makes me sad that all three of us felt like we had to make changes to things that we liked or might have liked to try to fit in. But I understand why you made this decision, and I’ve been there. I don’t know what D will grow up to be yet, but I can tell you that like so many others before me, I have grown up to be a woman who works with computers, who blogs, who loves video games and plays them avidly, who loves Doctor Who and Star Wars and Tolkien, and who is proud now to call herself a geek.

I’m so glad that your mom told everyone about you so that we could write to and about you, and I hope that things are getting better for you at your school.

One thing that I would just like to add, briefly – I’m sure that a lot of the people who have been posting about you really do mean well when they tell you how much boys will love you for liking Star Wars when you’re older. Except that not all boys like Star Wars, and if they did, I still wouldn’t want to set up their future approval of you as a prize that you should be striving for. Today, right here, right now, I really hope that you approve of you. I hope that you know you’re not alone. And I hope you know that the Force will be with you, always.

Check out this live version, complete with live typewriter (!) accompaniment:

This song makes me so proud to be a geek. It resonated with me from the very first lyrics, because they put words to a phenomenon that I have experienced for as long as I can remember: “All the cool kids keep enthusiasm rationed / Right down to the last explosive ounce.” Being “too into” the many things I liked as a kid – especially the nerdiest things that I enjoyed, like Hebrew school or literature – was emphatically NOT OKAY with many of my peers, and they had no problem telling me so. I love it that this song starts out by taking this narrow-mindedness to task by brazenly asserting, I’d rather be interested in the world and the many things that I appreciate about it than be cool, or as Call puts it: “But I’d rather indulge my many passions / Even if my squaritude’s a little too pronounced”

The long, slow process of becoming the proud, happy adult nerd that I am today is the result of making precisely this kind of choice over and over again. Each time I have decided to rant instead of dissemble, to explain rather than let it go, to research rather than take something at face value, to learn for fun because I want to, to care and game, to read and write and opine – all of these moments contributed to the satisfying, passionate interests that make my life so full and interesting.

Many thanks to Marian Call and Geek Feminism for making me feel so glad to be a geek today, and a pleasant Hobbit day to everyone!

What did surprise me was that my hubby hadn’t seen it either, given how much better his movie awareness tends to be. So when we were searching our Netflix queue for something interesting to watch last night, we decided on Dune.

First reaction from hubby: Holy crap, this looks like the Cremaster cycle.**

First reaction from me: (insert irreverent, mocking wisecracks, interspersed with “WAT.”)

Although the movie is somewhat unintelligible, it was made worse by the fact that we live on a busy corner. Add in fan noise on the humid evening we were having last night and we had a hard time deciphering all of the whispering. Which is unfortunate, because as I discovered when I read the transcript (Observer FTW!) there is a lot of important plot exposition going on there, in among the fluids and the over-acting and the endless, blowing sands.

I can’t say I liked it or even understood it, and don’t even get me started on the Water of Life gender stuff and the Bechdel test. But at least now I can say I’ve seen it.

** Why yes, he is a professional art nerd! How did you guess? :-p

Hiatus has been full of school and family and weddings, oh my, among other things. I’m recovering my mental bandwidth bit by bit, hopefully not at the expense of my recently-acquired knowledge of macroeconomics.

New things that I discovered on hiatus:

• The folks at Techdirt are my kind of nerds.
• Posto in Davis Square is a new favorite, with outstanding food and wine.
• Flatbread, an old favorite, has opened in Davis, in a quirky space that features over 40 taps, stellar cocktails, and candlepin bowling.
• My nephew, Walrus, can speak with inflection now, and his vocabulary is huge.
• The high holidays are apparently right around the corner, to the detriment of my start-of-semester schedule. Ah, the joy of being a student in the real world.
• Bergamot is promising vegetarian dishes for Restaurant Week.
• I might have to lift my Restaurant Week moratorium. (see above)
• Prop 8 has no basis in reality (yay!), but must be enforced anyway (boo!), at least for a while.
• This year’s tomatoes at the farm definitely make up for the ones we missed so much last year, and it’s almost husk cherry season.
• I can add rooting to my list of technical skills.

So all-in-all, it’s been a good hiatus, but I have a lot of topics backing up in my posts queue and I’m reading to finish some of them up. Here are some of the topics I’ve been contemplating:

• Reviews for Endless Ocean: Blue World and Cooking Mama 3.
• Reviews for Posto and Flatbread.
• Some comments on the notion of geek feminism.
• A brief word of thanks to the wonderful people at Hollaback.
• What I make of the recent unpleasantness over at Penny Arcade. (Yeah, I’m not sure I want to go there either)
• Reuniting via Facebook: Ms. Boards edition.

Looking forward to getting back into a posting routing and having a little more to say for myself very soon.

The Marca.com World Cup calendar.  This is by far the most impressive thing I’ve seen on the web in years – breathtaking elegance meets practicality in a beautiful way.  The sheer user-friendliness and attention to detail belies the underlying complexity in a way that only brilliant design can. (Memo to Fifa.com: Hire these engineers for 2014.)

Now that’s how to use the NCWIT 56% stat in context.  A tall glass of frosty lemonade goes out to ReadWrite Enterprise for interpreting these statistics without undermining the intent of NCWIT’s actual research or shifting the blame away from companies, where it rightfully belongs.  Well done!

Hollback launched their new iPhone app last night! These activists envision a world free from street harassment and they are using all of the technical tools available to them to make this vision real – one click, one photo, one dot on the map at a time.

Mary at GeekFeminism writes about why IT women do or don’t recommend IT careers to other women (or to girls), and what the ramifications are of such warnings.  I expect I may be returning to this topic at some point.

And finally, go read Dr. Jennifer Hunt’s excellent article at Forbes Woman about why women really leave STEM* fields. The conclusions may surprise you! (Peep the long comment for some unintentional humor.)

In the meantime, feel free to leave any questions you have for me in the comments.

On first skim, I didn’t find the advice terribly helpful, but I hadn’t really taken the time to pinpoint why I felt that way. So each time I get a new link to this, I’ve been clicking through. Once I realize it’s the same article, I’ve been rolling my eyes and moving on.

Yesterday morning, though, I received yet another tweet about this, this time from school. Et tu, Simmons? So I decided to give it the benefit of the doubt and read it through. I confess that I was as disappointed as I expected to be. Here I thought I was educating myself for power and principled leadership! What this article describes is more like how to play gender double-bind Twister.

Author Tara Siegel Bernard begins with a review of some research on this issue:

“We have found that if a man and a woman both attempt to negotiate for higher pay, people find a woman who does this, compared to one who does not, significantly less attractive,” said Hannah Riley Bowles, an associate professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, who has conducted numerous studies on gender, negotiation and leadership. “Whereas with the guy, it doesn’t seem to matter.”

Fair enough. The several hundred people surveyed by market research firms in Riley Bowles’ various studies have spoken, I guess.

It’s the specious conclusions that I find so off-putting, though (emphasis mine):

A new study concludes that women need to take a different approach than men. Women, it suggests, should frame their requests in more nuanced ways to avoid undermining their relationship with their boss.

Wait, what?

Let’s review for a moment. Bosses find women who ask for more money less attractive.* In short, bosses have a bias (unconscious or not) against women who ask for raises. But instead of recommending that bosses work to recognize and address this bias, the recommendation is that women change to accommodate this bias, as if it is an unmovable, unchanging reality and not the product of organizational behavior that can be changed.

I wholeheartedly object to this framing.

I’m a woman.  I’m also a manager, and I manage women. Should I just accept this state of affairs as normal? Maybe – if I’m not a principled leader. If I am, though, shouldn’t I use techniques like these to try and address the problem where it starts – with me?

In this article, the answer is no. Instead women are told, once again, “The world is like this, so moderate your behavior.” If it sounds like a familiar rhetorical strategy, this is because women hear this all the time. Want a potential or actual male partner to like you? Don’t ever correct him, even when he’s taking you to the wrong exit on the highway! Want to prevent rape? Don’t go out after dark alone! It is framing like this that makes sexism seem inevitably entrenched and places the burden on women to adapt, contort, and suffer the consequences. In short, it is part of the problem.

In fairness to Bernard, she does say the sexism inherent in this framing kind of bothered her, so, you know, kudos on that.

The rest of the article is full of a lot of contradictory messages that pass for advice.

Don’t be a doormat, Bernard asserts: “If you believe you deserve a raise, don’t sit around and wait for someone to notice.” Women, after all, are usually doormats about raises!  But choose your time carefully, you don’t want to upset your boss – s/he might get really annoyed about your assertiveness.  Bizarrely, she suggests that “after an annual performance review” might be a good time to ask your boss for a raise. Because asking for a raise during the actual review and compensation process would be what – too strident? Color me confused.

Of course, you must only work in industries and for companies that are willing to cough up accurate salary range information because, “in industries where salary standards were ambiguous, women accepted pay that was 10 percent lower, on average, than men.” Bad women, accepting less than we’re worth! Who have we been talking to, other women?

But remember that women tend to be less connected to male networks in the workplace and are more likely to compare themselves to people they think are similar, Ms. Riley Bowles said. That means they may be comparing their salaries with other women.

I see what the problem is now! Women are not taking enough responsibility for the fact that men may prefer not to network with us! We’d better start insinuating ourselves into those proverbial golf outings and “business meetings” at Hooters, pronto. If we can’t at least figure out how to do that, we pretty much deserve to be underpaid. What, you don’t enjoy golfing or Hooters or the company of your male coworkers? Well, don’t start thinking that having these conversations with other women will help. After all, it’s not possible that talking with other women might uncover serious problems that our institutions should be working to resolve. [/sarcasm]

I did find myself asking at this point how the top-rated MBA program in opportunities for women could possibly be on board with the notion that networking with other women has no value, but I digress.

Let’s take a look at the “tailoring” that Bernard recommends:

A new study by Ms. Riley Bowles shows that women are more likely to be successful if they explain why their request is appropriate, but in terms that also communicate that they care about maintaining good relationships at work.

Back up a moment. Merely asking for a raise makes both women and men managers think that women care nothing for workplace relationships. This indicates to me that there are two problems here. One, women have custody over everyone’s workplace relationships in a way that men do not. Two, women’s relational work is invisible.

This part is sounding very familiar to me. That’s right! I learned about this at Simmons. Relational practice is a core skill in the contemporary workplace, but it is perceived as something women just do and something men can add. We need to use naming, norming, and negotiation to become our own change agents, ensuring that our relational work is both properly recognized and appropriately rewarded.

Sadly, the article doesn’t mention any of this. Instead, it offers helpful clues like this:

Some of the language used in the study provided an explanation on how to explain why you’re making the request now — “My team leader advised me to do this” — while at the same time communicating that you are taking the boss’s position into account: “What do you think?”

So to summarize what I’ve learned from this article so far: I have to make sure I’m asking for a raise, because I should be paid what I’m worth. I should ask it with confidence, because I’m awesome! But I must be very very careful not to accidentally step on the pinky toe of the patriarchy while I’m doing the asking, so I must make sure that my boss knows that in doing so, I’m not trying to damage the relationships that I haven’t gotten rewarded for building but that I will be penalized for jeopardizing just by the mere act of asking for a raise in the first place.   Furthermore, I must do all of this without undermining my original request, because, well, I “believe” I “deserve a raise.” Or, rather, my team leader does.

By the time I’ve successfully accomplished all of this confident genuflecting, my psyche resembles an origami puzzle box, but hey! This relentless pandering to my hypothetical boss’ unconscious biases could pay off! Don’t stop believing!

The article takes a break from raising my blood pressure temporarily when Bernard suggests that we prepare for our negotiation and anticipate potential responses from the boss before we enter our salary negotiation. Preparation and anticipation of responses are core components of negotiation models like Getting to Yes. Hooray for actual negotiation advice!

If you’ve made it this far, you may still be wondering – what is it about this article bothers me so much that I’m churning out an 1700 word essay about it during my school vacation?

Bernard had an opportunity here to expose deeply-held, institutionalized sexism and the way that it harms women by creating a culture of management that punishes many possible presentations of gender in the workplace. If you are passive, stereotypically feminine, or don’t promote yourself, you earn less money than men. If you speak up for yourself assertively and you opt out of or ignore the game of double-bind twister in your manager’s mind, you may get more money in the short term, but limit your career in the long term. This status quo, itself, is a problem that goes entirely unchallenged in this article. In ignoring the elephant in the room – the cultural biases that create the razor-thin margin of acceptability in gender performance – the burden for solving this problem falls on exactly no one, while the burden of navigating this impossible knife-edge rests on women employees alone.

What would I prefer? I’m so glad you asked.

Let’s talk about what managers can do to widen this paper-thin margin of error. Let’s discuss strategies that we can use to encourage, promote, and correctly compensate all of our employees, including our women employees. Let’s talk about having enough self-awareness to address the cultural biases that we, as managers, bring to the negotiating table about what is and is not acceptable behavior for women in the workplace. Let’s provide a wider bridge to financial success for employees who happen to be women, instead of trying to teach them how to walk with their toes touching their heels to avoid falling into the yawning abyss of gender transgressiveness.

Now there’s an article I would gladly retweet.