gender discrimination | Chris Aldrich

👓 Not my shoes | Music for Deckchairs

Kate Bowles (Music for Deckchairs)

Disrupt your industries, if that is what you are in business to do, but do not disrupt the bonds that tie employees, however loose or unspoken they may be.
—Isabel Berwick, 'Workplace communities matter–now more than ever'

Kate has a fantastic parable here. I highly recommend everyone reads it. While she talks about her daughters and their shoes and applies it to inequity in higher education, it applies to nearly every facet of our lives. We need to fix these problems, not only to improve equity within our economy, but to improve our humanity and our lives.

Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia

In this future, we’re all being asked to accept that the sticker price of our success is indifference to how things turn out for others. Of course, this isn’t a novelty, and it’s barely a disruption; this is how the demands of profit have needed work to be managed for a long time. ❧

December 03, 2018 at 09:01AM

It’s treating someone else’s wellbeing, someone’s lost job, someone’s public dressing-down, someone’s stolen idea as somehow not your problem, not your shoes. ❧

December 03, 2018 at 09:01AM

This is what higher education is currently saying to its long-term casual staff. While universities are underfunded for teaching and expected to compete globally on the basis of research, then the revenue from teaching will be diverted into research. This isn’t a blip, and there won’t be a correction. This is how universities are solving their funding problems with a solution that involves keeping labour costs (and associated overheads like paid sick leave) as low as possible. It’s a business model for bad times, and the only thing that makes it sustainable is not thinking about where the human consequences are being felt. ❧

This last sentence is so painful…
December 03, 2018 at 08:58AM

🎧 “Bread from the Dead” | Our Daily Bread | Eat This Podcast

Listened to Bread from the Dead | Our Daily Bread 13 by

Jeremy Cherfas from Eat This Podcast

It’s a good thing the Egyptians believed strongly in an afterlife and wanted to make sure their dead had an ample supply of bread. The bread and the tomb inscriptions tell us something about how grain was grown and bread baked. To really understand the process, however, you need to be a practical-minded archaeologist like Delwen Samuel, who first set out to replicate Egyptian bread.

Photo of a model from the tomb of Meketre, Metropolitan Musdeum of Art, Rogers Fund and Edward S. Harkness Gift, 1920.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 6:14 — 5.1MB)

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🎧 Tech Was Supposed to Be Society’s Great Equalizer. What Happened? | Crazy/Genius | The Atlantic

Listened to Tech Was Supposed to Be Society’s Great Equalizer. What Happened? by

Derek Thompson from The Atlantic

In a special bonus episode of the podcast Crazy/Genius, the computer scientist and data journalist Meredith Broussard explains how “technochauvinism” derailed the dream of the digital revolution.

I was excited to hear Dr. Meredith Broussard, a brilliant colleague I’ve met via the Dodging the Memory Hole series of conferences, on this podcast from The Atlantic. I would recommend this special episode (one of their very best) to just about anyone. In particular there’s something to be gained in the people side of what the IndieWeb movement is doing as well as for their efforts towards inclusion.

From a broader perspective, I think there’s certainly something to be learned from not over-sensationalizing artificial intelligence. Looking at the history of the automobile as a new technology over a century ago is a pretty good parallel example. While it’s generally done a lot of good, the automobile has also brought along a lot of additional societal problems, ills, and costs with it as well.

I hadn’t yet heard about her new book Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World which I’m ordering a copy of today. I suspect that it’s in the realm of great books like Cathy O’Neill’s Weapons of Math Distraction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy which was also relevant to some of the topics within this podcast.

🎧 ‘The Daily’: The Rampant Problem of Pregnancy Discrimination | New York Times

Listened to ‘The Daily’: The Rampant Problem of Pregnancy Discrimination by Michael Barbaro from New York Times

A New York Times investigation finds that many pregnant women are systematically sidelined at work, passed over for promotions and fired when they complain.

👓 How Some Men Fake an 80-Hour Workweek, and Why It Matters | The New York Times

Read How Some Men Fake an 80-Hour Workweek, and Why It Matters (nytimes.com)

A look at how the professional world differs for men and women, and an implicit critique of a corporate culture that values long hours above all.

📑 How Some Men Fake an 80-Hour Workweek, and Why It Matters | New York Times

Annotated How Some Men Fake an 80-Hour Workweek, and Why It Matters (nytimes.com)

The result of this is easy to see: Those specifically requesting a lighter workload, who were disproportionately women, suffered in their performance reviews; those who took a lighter workload more discreetly didn’t suffer. The maxim of “ask forgiveness, not permission” seemed to apply. ❧

👓 Jocelyn Bell Burnell Discovered Radio Pulsars in 1974, But the Credit Went to Her Advisor; In 2018, She Gets Her Due, Winning a $3 Million Physics Prize | Open Culture

Read Jocelyn Bell Burnell Discovered Radio Pulsars in 1974, But the Credit Went to Her Advisor; In 2018, She Gets Her Due, Winning a $3 Million Physics Prize (Open Culture)

Say you made a Nobel-worthy scientific discovery and the prize went to your thesis supervisor instead. How would you take it?

👓 40 Years Later, Talking Heads’ Most Valuable Member Is Still Its Most Under-Recognized | Paper Mag

Read 40 Years Later, Talking Heads’ Most Valuable Member Is Still Its Most Under-Recognized (PAPER)

Bassist Tina Weymouth contributions are some of the band's most iconic.

👓 Lenore Blum shocked the community with her sudden resignation from CMU. Here she tells us why. | Next Pittsburgh

Read Lenore Blum shocked the community with her sudden resignation from CMU. Here she tells us why. by Tracy Certo (NEXTpittsburgh)

This high-tech rockstar has done so much for women in the community, making her own experiences with sexism even more stunning.

Things like this are painful to hear, particularly given the recruitment and numbers that CMU has compiled over the past several years. I’m glad that Lenore and her husband have the wherewithal to do this and raise their voices to draw attention to it.

👓 Why It’s So Hard to Be a Working Mom. Even at Facebook. | Wired

Read Why It's So Hard to Be a Working Mom. Even at Facebook. (WIRED)

Opinion: I was a data scientist and mom. Then I had to choose.

For Facebook to say that they can’t do this is simply stupid and insane.