You’re probably frustrated by Stop SOPA Day today, your work is going slow because Wikipedia is blacked out, and you can’t amuse yourself because Reddit is out too, and you’ve already signed Google’s petition, what’s left to do? You can read about another reason to despise the big media companies (if trying to censor the Internet wasn’t reason enough).

I finally watched the Sundance documentary MissRepresentation. Everyone should watch this. Girls, boys, women, and men.

MissRepresentation covers a wide range of cultural issues focused on mass media’s pervasive objectification of girls and women, the widespread under-representation and outright dismissal of women leaders in the media, and mass media’s societal impact on both women and men.

This documentary is a sobering reminder of just how powerful and pervasive media is, and its chilling effects on girls’ and women’s sense of self-worth, and on what men are taught to value in women. Basically, that as a woman, it doesn’t matter what you have accomplished, you will be judged on your appearance first and foremost. If you’re not “beautiful”, you will be derided and ignored, and if you are, you will be objectified and dismissed. And what’s considered beautiful is the media’s very narrow definition lifted from a shallow teenage male fantasy.

Beyond just socializing girls from a young age that only their looks matter, the effects of prevalent sexual and violent imagery in the media are profound. The stats of the increasing percentage of women with eating disorders and who suffer from sexual violence in America are sobering on their own, but combined with how many very young girls are now included in these numbers, it is truly shocking.

We are so media-saturated that it’s difficult to distance oneself from the non-stop bombardment of how we’re supposed to look, what we’re supposed to like, and what we’re supposed to want to be. So I don’t blame people who don’t think it’s a problem that women only hold 17% of seats in the House of Representatives (the US is 90th in the world when it comes to women in national legislatures), 3% of Fortune 500 CEOs or - a topic dear to me - less than 10% in fields like computer science and most disciplines of engineering. Even a little blog like mine attracts comments like this: “Why do you “obviously want to see more women in tech and entrepreneurship”? Do you also “obviously want to see more women in prison or homeless”?”

The skeptics say it’s not a problem because this isn’t what women actually want. Women don’t actually want to lead, don’t want to be CEO, don’t want to learn math/science/technology, etc. Women are just more suited to being nurses, vets, and working in beauty salons, or how about just staying at home. But stop and ask yourself is it learned behavior? The documentary goes into more depth on the history of advertising-sponsored TV shows that were designed to show that there was only one role for the happy woman - the stay-at-home mom. But a particularly telling quote from the movie is that the number of girls and boys who want to be President of the United States is the same at the age of 7 (a whopping 30%!), but sadly for girls, this number rapidly diminishes to almost nothing by the time they reach 15.

What’s really sad is that there have been so many gains made by women everywhere you look, in education, in pay, in management, and so many amazing women doing amazing things, and yet the media is bent on perpetuating this fun-house mirror image of the world, where women’s boobs and ass get enlarged and the brain shrunk.

You can’t be what you can’t see.

Watch the film, visit MissRepresentation.org to learn more about media literacy, and be a role model to girls and women.

Side Note: I will be mentoring a team of high school girls as part of the Technovation Challenge over the next 9 weeks to build a mobile app. It’s a great way to be a role model for girls at a crucial age, and I encourage more women to get involved!

Be the change you want to see.

It’s not easy hailing a cab in San Francisco, a city that seems to have a perpetual shortage of taxis, but it’s almost an impossibility the night of New Year’s Eve.

So it was almost bordering on religious fervor when we ran towards a glowing taxi sign, and determined it was not a mirage, but a true empty cab.

But the ecstasy was short lived, as another guy had run ahead of us.

Joy returned to our hearts when the taxi passed right by the guy and stopped in front of us waving us in. The other guy came running up demanding to know why the cab driver didn’t stop for him.

When the possibility of sharing a cab was nixed by the driver threatening to drive away without anyone, we quickly piled in leaving the guy behind.

As we drove away, the cabbie explained: “I didn’t pick him up because he’s wearing a stupid hat”.

Long story short: don’t dress like Kevin Federline if you want a ride.

Happy New Year!

Lego is at it again: trying to make Lego appeal to girls. The introduction of “Lego Friends” should be good news right? With evidence that Lego is a gateway to science and engineering, and that playing with Lego improves spatial, mathematical, and fine motor skills, surely this will help with the gender imbalance in STEM? Yet my first reaction was a cringe.

Let me begin with a little history. My love affair with Lego began when I was 7. That was the year I moved to Germany, the largest European market for Lego. The Economist reports that in Germany last year, building sets account for 13.4% of all toy sales, compared to 9.7% for dolls. Contrast that to Spain, where dolls account for 16.8% of toy sales. Is it a coincidence that Germany is strong in engineering? I think toys are a harbinger of mainstream culture.

Back in 1992, Lego had an amazing series aimed at girls, called Paradisa. I had the pimpin’ pool house, complete with a convertible and my own pool boy, and Dolphin Point, a lighthouse with an ice cream parlor. But the best part about these sets was that they gave me the building blocks to design and build my own houses, because what mansion doesn’t need a spiral staircase and huge glass windows? These were pieces you can’t get from the castle and spaceship sets. Just seeing pictures of these sets makes me want to fly home, find the giant box of Legos in my parents’ basement, and play again.

So when Lego discontinued Paradisa, I was devastated. What was even more distressing was that Lego then introduced another series for girls, called Belville. I was immediately turned off by the large awkward figurines, which wouldn’t fit into my houses, and lack of reusable Lego building blocks. Belville was heavy on accessories and light on building material (aka real Lego). I didn’t want to groom plastic horses, I wanted to build cool stuff!

Little did I know, Belville wouldn’t be the worst offence. I was outraged 10 years later, well past my prime Lego playing years, at the introduction of Clikits. I remember thinking WTF, this isn’t even LEGO! Clikits are dinky little plastic flowers and bits to stick on to purses and picture frames. How lame can this get?

So now you understand why I meet the news of Lego’s latest foray with trepidation.

It’s hard to miss that Lego has focused its marketing exclusively on boys for the past decade. There are ever grander sets of castles, spaceships, and robots, all in the “boy’s aisle”. Even the more unisex Lego City sets tilt towards police and fire station paraphernalia, which is okay, but they don’t come with any girl heads! I liked Paradisa because they always had girl heads with stylish ponytails, not the ugly bright red flip hair in regular sets. But it is with the introduction of more and more specialized pieces and movie franchise tie-ins, I feel like the special magic of making your own creation is being drained out of Lego.

Nonetheless, I am somewhat encouraged by the fact that Lego has refocused itself on its core product, and has spent years doing research with home visits and observing kids at play, to design its new product. While the colors and preference for veterinary clinics are reinforcing gender stereotypes, and I’m not wild about the new figurines (apparently the only thing you can change is the hair, vs the traditional figurines which were totally interchangeable), I think it’s important that girls are at least playing with Lego. On this point, I agree with Lise Eliot, neuroscientist and the author of Pink Brain Blue Brain, a survey of scientific papers on gender differences in children. As she puts it: “If it takes color-coding or ponies and hairdressers to get girls playing with Lego, I’ll put up with it, at least for now, because it’s just so good for little girls’ brains”.

The book Influence cites a study where it took just a 23 minute video of an anti-social child appropriately integrating into a group of other children shown to antisocial preschoolers, for these kids to become socially integrated, and even becoming social leaders in some cases. So I think perhaps it will be the $40 million marketing budget that Lego is putting up to launch Lego Friends that will do the trick. Hopefully once girls see ads of other girls like them happily playing with Lego, they will stop thinking it’s a toy “just for boys” or tomboys. Because Lego at its heart is truly one of the most gender-neutral toys ever.

Even now as a childless adult, I can’t walk past a Lego store without going in to take a peek, and so it was with great delight when I discovered the Lego Creator Beach House last year. Despite the ages 8 -12 label and a $45 price tag (for a bunch of plastic, but it has skylights that open!), I brought it home with great enthusiasm and immediately set to work building the different versions. Of course that was just the pre-requisite to what I was really after, building my custom dream house.

I hope Lego will go back to its roots and provide more building blocks like the Creator series that let the children’s (and adults!) creativity shape the play. Because it is this act of building, creating and unstructured play that forges the creativity, problem solving and other skills that will make great engineers down the road. It’s not about following a blueprint, it’s about creating your own. I want my future kids to have the same experience playing with Lego as I did.

I can post to Tumblr, which automatically posts to Twitter, which posts to Facebook, allowing me to post to banned sites in China. I can also read banned Tumblr blogs in my stream as long as I’m following them. Seriously China? You’re banning Accidental Chinese Hipsters? Seriously? Anyway, there you go. Might be useful on a future trip behind the great firewall without the hassle of setting up a VPN.

Edit: Apparently all of Tumblr is blocked, but the iPhone app was working for me.

An Inc. article was posted a few weeks ago provocatively titled “The Case Against the All-Male Start-up”, and the same story appeared in Business Insider under “TRUTH: Women-Led Startups Have Fewer Failures”. The article cites a recent study conducted by Illuminate Ventures (registration required to download), which itself references and summarizes a wide body of other research. Notably, that women-led tech companies are less capital intensive, and have fewer failures.

After these articles were posted, there was an outpouring of tweets and shares that were along the lines of “Women rule!”. Although not explicitly stated, there was an undertone that this study is proof that women are good (or even better) at running tech companies. But if you read the study, it actually attributes this success to gender diversity. Ostensibly, the more women the better.

However, no one (that I’ve seen so far) has attributed this success to the women themselves. Not women in general, but these particular women, who had to overcome stereotypes and differential treatment, in order to lead their companies to success.

According to the Kauffman Foundation, female entrepreneurs only receive 4% to 9% of available venture capital, while the number of women-led businesses was 28% (2002). We can safely assume that the successes referred to in the study (successful IPO or M&A exit of $50M+) by and large had to raise VC money. So these women, on top of an already gruelling process of pitching and due diligence, had to overcome additional obstacles, including investor bias. So wouldn’t it make sense that this additional selection, though unfair, means that only the very best women are able to get funding and grow their businesses to successful exits? Viewed like this, the study results are not surprising.

I can draw a parallel to women in male-dominated fields of study, e.g. computer science and engineering. In my own experience and in research, female students have higher grade averages as a group compared to male students. I don’t think in this case anyone would argue women are better at being computer scientists or engineers, or that this is somehow due to gender diversity. I think it’s just the small percentage of women that stick it out have to be smarter and more resilient, otherwise they would be filtered out by the additional obstacles.

To me, the additional selection imposed on women through overt and subtle stereotypes, biases, and differential treatment contributes to fewer women in male-dominated fields, like running a tech start up, but it also results in higher quality. This is analogous to survival of the fittest.

I started writing this post when the article first came out, but I hesitated these past weeks, because I expect my view to be unpopular. This view runs counter to the rah-rah enthusiasm for the articles that are making a blanket statement of women == good for tech start ups. Nonetheless, I think the findings of this study are best explained by the achievements of the people running the start ups, who happen to be women. This is a more logical conclusion than women are better at making tech start ups succeed, and in my opinion a much more significant contributing factor than gender diversity.

So after days of suffering from intermittent Core Data crashes that look like this NSCFSet Collection was mutated while being enumerated, on a multithreaded iOS application that does heavy background thread data processing, I think this has finally resolved it.

I had multiple ManagedObjectContexts on the main thread, one for each controller, and it seems like they were interfering with each other in some non-obvious way. Consolidating them into one MOC on the main thread with one contextDidSave handler to merge changes from the MOC on the background thread appears to have fixed it. Time will tell.

Happy Friday.

EDIT: That didn’t work. Back to the drawing board.

EDIT: Aha! Inserting a whole bunch of data, immediately deleting it all, and then inserting a whole bunch of the same data is causing this. What’s weirder is that it doesn’t happen on iOS 5.

EDIT: [managedObjectContext lock] is your friend. No more random CoreData crashes.

Apparently “brogramming” is now a “thing”. Looks to me like yet another way for adolescent men to prove to each other how cool they are, despite evidence to the contrary. But hey, if Robin can be a bona-fide bro in How I Met Your Mother, maybe brogramming is something I could get into, too.

After some googling, I found that Brogramming is already a topic on Quora with top question “How does a programmer become a brogrammer?” and there’s also the 10 Commandments of Brogramming.

But when I got to the part about “What to do: … Rage in PHP or your favorite language … Rage at the gym, to attract the chicks and scare the dicks” and “#7 shirts optional” (are these guys trying to tan using their monitors? If so, they need to wax.) I decided that this is not for me. And…seriously, PHP?

Then there’s Commandment #4:

I don’t often test my code, but when I do it I prefer to do it in production: Cowboy up and ship code to the live site.

No thanks.

So I started looking for a female equivalent, and they’re all terrible. The “industry-accepted” term is apparently proglamming, but that just sounds like you’re pro at wearing body glitter, and it reminds me of Rupaul. Don’t even get me started on brogrammette, or worse, hogrammer. I like Deborah Jordan’s answer on Quora “What is the female variant of Brogramming” the best:

“That’s like saying, “what is the female variant of a douchebag.” Doesn’t exist. Female coders don’t need to pretend to be cool.”

Well said! Is it a coincidence that the guys identified as brogrammers are incredibly douchy-looking? More like Jersey Shore cast offs than smart coders. Keep your tight-fit polos on, please.

So I’m still looking for a term for women that’s not derogatory, diminutive, or flippant. How can English have so many words, but be so inadequate at the same time?

Whatever that term is, this is what I want it to embody:

• You can code just as well as the boys, but you don’t think you’re a god.
• You don’t get religious about programming languages, and instead focus on choosing the right tool for the job.
• Your desk and apartment aren’t littered with empty Dorito bags, Red Bull cans, and pizza boxes, because being a good coder doesn’t mean you have to be a slob.
• You think about user experience before you start writing code.
• You prefer flats, but can pull off killer heels as well as any social media maven when the occasion calls for it.
• Your wardrobe consists of more than witty T-shirts and hoodies, and you don’t need $200 designer jeans to prove you have style, and you especially don’t wear them with running shoes.
• You don’t need to brag about how much you can drink nor your sexual conquests to prove you have a life outside of coding.

What can we call this? Any suggestions?

A recent blog post making the rounds is “Date an Entrepreneur”. If you haven’t read it, here’s a representative excerpt: “Date an entrepreneur because you deserve it. You deserve a guy who can give you the most vibrant life imaginable.” Sounds like a L’Oreal commercial: sepia tones, set in Paris, female lead is twirling around with an umbrella even though it’s not raining, male lead has chiseled cheekbones that could cut butter. Wait…what?! Rewind. I don’t know what the author is smoking, because this is what it’s actually like to date an entrepreneur:

• Getting your dinner or weekend plans thrown out last minute (yet again) because (choose one): a big meeting has come up, install went wrong, client wants to move the deadline, huge opportunity just came in, servers didn’t recover properly, huge sev-1 bug found, need to cover for a sick employee
• Waiting in the car at 8:30pm waiting to pick her up for dinner because she’s going to “just finish one last email”, which was half an hour ago
• Hearing “I’m flying out tomorrow morning at 6am” on a Friday
• Realizing that he is in more of a relationship with his co-founders than with you
• Your folks wondering why she doesn’t come with you to visit and why she’s always on her laptop even when she does
• Making dinner and watching it go cold, and finally giving up and going to sleep at 1am, waiting for him to come home
• Totally blanking out while you’re talking because she’s thinking about work all the time
• Not being together for Valentine’s Day or birthdays
• Not being able to buy a house or getting your house re-mortgaged
• Not getting a commitment because he’s “not ready”, and realizing that 3 years later, he’s still not ready
• Breaking up because you’re tired of eating Ramen and want to build a real life, and your significant other’s life is her start up

Unfortunately, the reality is that couples do break up because the strain is just too great. Having to take a backseat when the company often comes first is hard to accept for anyone. While it’s not impossible to have a successful relationship with an entrepreneur, entrepreneurs do sacrifice a lot to make their company successful, and their partner inevitably goes along for the emotional roller coaster of a start up, too. Dating an entrepreneur is the ultimate relationship test. Which also means, if you’re both willing to do what it takes to make it work, it can be the most rewarding relationship ever.

To the most patient people in the world that still date us despite so many faults, I salute you, because we couldn’t do what we do without you.