Saturday, October 14, 2006
ARGH!
I've been spending a fair amount of time putting together a proposal for a feminist press that had put out an RFP for a project they're working on called Girls and Science, to try and get girls more interested in the area.
I was excited, because I've long noted the absence of women (and of people of color, for that matter) in software engineering. When my stepdaughter Anastasia was around eight, I wrote a book for her about Ada Lovelace, arguably first computer programmer, certainly first technical writer; and later I enlarged it with a glossary and anecdotal sidebars and activities, and tried to sell it, but to no avail. So I made it the cornerstone of my proposal, outlining a series of five such books highlighting women in computing, with the same collateral material. I did research to indicate how and why good role models can help change one's way of thinking about something. I put together all the studies about women and computing, how from a very young age girls are excluded from the boys' clubhouse (girls use computers to *do* things -- word processing, music, accessing sites like MySpace; but they're not terribly interested in *how* they work). All that. Sent the proposal in.
Answer came back almost immediately: we're not interested in proposals for elementary-aged children, we want high school and college level proposals.
Can I COUNT how many things are wrong with that?
First off, nowhere in the RFP was any age group mentioned. Secondly, if you really want to change the world you need to start with younger children. But, um, this is a feminist press, and they refer to high school and college-aged females as *girls*?
You've come a long way, baby.
Guess I’ll keep shopping my proposal elsewhere. It’s the perseverance that pays… and keeps me beyond the elements of style!
Jeannette Cézanne
Customline Wordware, Inc.
I was excited, because I've long noted the absence of women (and of people of color, for that matter) in software engineering. When my stepdaughter Anastasia was around eight, I wrote a book for her about Ada Lovelace, arguably first computer programmer, certainly first technical writer; and later I enlarged it with a glossary and anecdotal sidebars and activities, and tried to sell it, but to no avail. So I made it the cornerstone of my proposal, outlining a series of five such books highlighting women in computing, with the same collateral material. I did research to indicate how and why good role models can help change one's way of thinking about something. I put together all the studies about women and computing, how from a very young age girls are excluded from the boys' clubhouse (girls use computers to *do* things -- word processing, music, accessing sites like MySpace; but they're not terribly interested in *how* they work). All that. Sent the proposal in.
Answer came back almost immediately: we're not interested in proposals for elementary-aged children, we want high school and college level proposals.
Can I COUNT how many things are wrong with that?
First off, nowhere in the RFP was any age group mentioned. Secondly, if you really want to change the world you need to start with younger children. But, um, this is a feminist press, and they refer to high school and college-aged females as *girls*?
You've come a long way, baby.
Guess I’ll keep shopping my proposal elsewhere. It’s the perseverance that pays… and keeps me beyond the elements of style!
Jeannette Cézanne
Customline Wordware, Inc.
Labels: frustration, girls, proposal, RFP, science
