Monthly Archives: March 2016
“She’s a Good Girl”
Tom Petty is my favorite singer in the whole world. He has a song you may have heard of, called “Free Fallin'”. There are a couple of relevant lines in that song: “She’s a good girl, loves her mama…”, “And the bad boys, are standin’ in the shadows, and the good girls, are at home with broken hearts.”
We were all raised to be “good girls”. Quiet, thin, agreeable, smiling, helpful, good listeners, unselfish. I have always been a “good girl” – I didn’t smoke or drink in high school, I was valedictorian, I felt horrible the one time I didn’t make my curfew, I wore dresses, I liked the color pink (well, still do, but it is a really flattering color), and incredibly, I never had detention. Not once. One of my greatest regrets of the middle school – high school years? Never getting detention. Would it have been so bad? Would the world have ended? No – I would have just been a normal teenager, and I probably would have been a bit more comfortable with deviating from the “good girl” script.
As the years went on, I became more comfortable with imperfection – I got some Bs in college, I had messy relationships and even messier breakups, I had crappy jobs, I lived with weird roommates, I moved to Mexico, and finally, I gave up my last effort at being a “good girl” – burning out in a “helping” career I hated and made no income – and transitioned to tech, coding specifically.
During this transition, which was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, mentally, emotionally, and financially, I started to realize the benefit of trying. The benefit of applying for jobs, even if I wasn’t 100% qualified. The benefit of asking questions, of doing exactly what I wanted to do, of not asking permission, of not putting up with abuse in the workplace. When a coworker expressed a wish for his daughter to be successful in a tech career like I had been, wondering what had worked for me, I suddenly realized that teaching a girl to be a “good girl” is the worst possible thing anyone could do.
I just finished watching a TED Talk that addresses this issue – “Teach Girls Bravery, Not Perfection” by Reshma Saujani. I kept thinking about my “good girl” theory. “Perfect” is the ultimate goal of the “good girl”, and something I have to overcome every day. Saujani captures a lot of points really well – we are missing out on so much potential by raising girls who believe that nothing (as demonstrated in her “blank text editor” example) is better than something done imperfectly. She also expresses how writing code is a great way to become comfortable with imperfection, which I’ve found to be very true in my life as well.
Although the “good girl” mystique has already done a lot of damage to adult women trying to succeed in jobs that they aren’t “perfect” at, or apply for jobs they don’t meet 100% of the qualifications for, or run complicated lives that will never be “perfect”, going forward we can be disruptive, ask questions, make jokes, be ironic, make messes, fail over and over, forget things, procrastinate, work too much, be lazy, and pursue dreams that no “good girl” would ever get to experience.
Geeks Girls Carrots Mentoring
One of my fave meetup groups has always been Geek Girls Carrots (not to be confused with Girl Geek Dinners, another awesome networking/professional development group with equally awesome food and locations). Last spring, Geek Girls Carrots led the second of the Code Carrots courses. Ladies with any level of programming experience come together, form groups, pick an “app” to develop, decide which stack to use, follow an “agile” schedule of week-long sprints, and work with a mentor to advise on all of the above. I was lucky enough to be one of those mentors to a group of four ladies working on a Django project related to reporting sexual harassment in the workplace.
The main challenge here was time. We all worked full-time, and met after work once or twice a week. There was rarely a week when all group members could meet in person at the same time. I set up a Slack account for us to use, and it really helped when one or two group members were remote. I was also a git/github resource – such a tricky technology to novice programmers to get used to. It’s hard to keep the cognitive load low enough for actual learning – trying to use git correctly, not “break everything”, get code to work, and write code well at the same time (as any developer knows, even when years into their career).
In fact, on the first day of the project, I was called on to do an impromptu intro class to using git and github to the whole group of about twenty women. Let me clarify – I had zero idea I was going to do this until the organizers said, “Jessica! You know github, right?”. It was really challenging, but really fun, and reminded me of what I enjoyed about teaching. By the end of the class, everyone was able to clone a repo and contribute to it. Success!
After eight weeks, all the groups presented their projects. All had a working prototype, and many had one hosted online, like Heroku. It was a great experience that I hope they repeat soon (nudge, nudge).
Volunteering at Ada Developers Academy
One of my goals during my career transition to tech was to be a mentor and role model for other women who wanted to transition to a better career. Luckily, I’ve been able to do that formally in two wonderful contexts (see my post on Geek Girls Carrots Code Carrots 2.0 mentoring), and informally in dozens more.
Currently, I have the privilege of being able to TA with Ada Developers Academy. If you’re not familiar with Ada, here is the info.
I spend five hours every other week helping new developers on their coding projects. Depending on the stage of the cohort, it could be working through nested loops in Rails or trying to figure out how to stub an API response in a new testing framework, or even trying to plan a long-term capstone project. I even recently taught a fellow volunteer how to write his first React.js app in our down time. Frequently, I’m a live rubber duck for students to work through problems out loud. Most importantly, I’m an empathetic ear who has definitely been through these same frustrations and come out a better developer in the end.
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