| | | Robots, apps, and a short story by Alice Sola Kim | | | | | | | | | |  | | | | July 19, 2016 | Letter No. 43 | | | | | | | | | A Week of Women in Science and Tech from GE + Lenny | | | | | | | | | |  | | | | | | | | | Sugar-Sweet Lennys,
My father is a sci-fi nerd of the highest order. Before the Internet, that meant a closet full of dusty 25-cent paperbacks, their covers crawling with cyborgs and barren lunar landscapes and microwaves that could commence time travel. Every Saturday we would walk across then-barren Soho to the now-defunct Science Fiction Bookstore, where, desperate to be every inch his daughter, I would search for my own reading material. But even at age seven I already knew what I liked: stories about girls. And it soon became apparent I wasn't going to find any of those here. The young-adult series, like My Teacher Is an Alien and Johnny Swift, had scrappy male protagonists traveling through space on glorified skateboards. As for the adult books, the only women I found were nude blue aliens with jaunty antennae, ready to sexually satisfy lonely space captains. I didn't yet know about Ursula K. Le Guin or the other grand dames of sci-fi, but then again, it didn't occur to anyone to tell me.
Science fiction is notable as a genre not just because of its escapism, but because of the way it grapples with our current reality: what are science, technology, and innovation doing to the human mind and spirit, and when they reach their inevitable full-on collision, where will that leave us humans? These are the big questions that were being contemplated in my father's 25-cent paperbacks. But never by women. Not as writers nor as heroes.
Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (fun and easy acronym: STEM!) are not worlds we associate with women, yet they are full of female pioneers whose stories demand to be told. GE and Lenny have partnered on a program that doesn't just tell you that women should be at the forefront of science and technology, but shows that they already are.
So it seems only natural that GE would also share our goal of supporting an emerging female sci-fi author as she herself wrestles with questions of science and human consciousness and whether the twain shall meet. Alice Sola Kim is a writer of uncommon philosophical depth and also great imagination. Her story envisions a world in which sick people don't die — they enter a state of cryogenic stasis instead — but the question remains: what's in their heads when they've been placed on pause? In a series of vignettes, our (gal!) protagonist slowly realizes she may not be among the living anymore, but, because of the advancements in medicine and technology, she is also not dead.
We've been excited about our partnership with GE from the jump — we have the chance to profile industry leaders like Beth Comstock and an all-female robotics team, and to show our Lennys just how hard women in science and tech are showing up to play. But I'm especially thrilled that my child self now has some sci-fi she can get behind. No horny three-boobed alien princesses here, just an often hilarious and sometimes painful look at a future where technology enriches our lives and yet we still can't quite escape being human.
Love & Calculus,
Lena | | | | | | | | | |  | | | | | | | | | | | | The Next World and the Next | | | | By Alice Sola Kim | | | | | | |
Franny went to college, graduated with honors. After that, she got her masters and a Ph.D, and then another Ph.D, for which she completed a thesis on the hermeneutics of online bodybuilding forums. She got tired of the humanities and went back to undergrad so she could do med school. It took a lot of time, but she had the time. She made the time.
After med school, Franny decided to get an MFA. She wrote a story about catching squid with her dad, applied, got in — it all seemed to happen so fast! Franny sat in a small conference room, waiting for the other students to arrive. She hoped at least one or five of them would be cute. A cute girl walked in and sat down across the table from Franny. Franny smiled at her, the girl smiled back, and time passed in a weird way. Franny looked at the clock, which she couldn't see very well. Her eyes were probably blurry from all the studying. "Where's everyone else?" she said.
The girl smiled. All she had done, this whole time, was smile. It was getting a little old. "I ate them," she said, and opened her mouth teasingly. A drop of blood trickled out, then a spurt, then more and more and faster until the blood was gushing from her mouth. The girl was still composed, now laughing, as blood covered the floor. Franny thought, I should have never gotten an MFA, then all thought left her as she paddled frantically, the blood rising to her chest, her chin, her nose, filling her eyes—
Maria had come here through a portal in her hallway closet, and now she was on the road. She was journeying toward a mountain filled with lava in order to destroy a dangerous magical ring. There were many who would attempt to stop her, but she was stalwart, and she was with friends. There was a hot short guy, another hot short guy, a hot tall guy, a hot sociopathic detective and his hot doctor friend, and these two brothers who killed demons together (also hot), who had traveled here from the future.
One day, she awoke to find them all slain. "Run," someone screamed into her ear, and before she could think, there was a tugging at her belt and she was run-run-running, she was running and being run so fast her feet left the ground and she fluttered like a pennant in the wind—
Jim was a good boy! He couldn't see red or green, but what he could smell was better than any color. Pebbles, soccer balls, cats, Italian hoagies, car seats, pennies, perms. Jim had no future and was happy all the time. He lived with some friends who were tall and had very long wiggly legs with flat faces balanced on top.
One day, a friend was walking Jim through his neighborhood when, suddenly, the leash went slack. Jim looked up. His friend had disappeared. In his friend's place was a large, dark, buzzing cloud collecting itself directly above him, thickening by the second. Jim whined.
Everyone is dreaming very busily
When Aya visited her sister, she didn't try to talk to her.
Other visitors did talk to their stacies, leaning close to the cryocases, resting their hands on top until the cold became unbearable. As you passed, you could hear their murmurs over the unending exhalation of the machines. But there was no point in Aya talking to her sister when her sister couldn't even talk back. It would feel very bad. It would feel like every worst fight they'd ever had, her sister so nonchalantly sullen that it didn't even seem like she was angry — more like, Aya had just suddenly never been born, so of course her sister wouldn't think to speak to her or acknowledge her existence. Which was when Aya would freak out and apologize, saying absolutely anything her sister wanted to hear, because she couldn't stand glimpsing that dark, lonely universe where her sister would not hear and understand every thought Aya wanted to share with her.
Which were honestly a lot of them.
Aya's sister was wide and long and flat like Gumby, or an Olympic swimmer. Her shoulders filled the cryocase like she could rip it out of its mooring if she turned over even once during stasis. She had the most sweetly soft look on her face, as if she was about to wake up and ask a question.
But Aya knew better. She was a materials scientist, and so were her best friends. It wasn't like that TV show with the group of best friends where one was a chef and one was a fashion designer and one was the president and one was a ghost that lived on the Internet. Aya and her closest friends had met and banded together at school, at work, at work-related conferences. Her friend Min worked in cryostasis. She had helped to develop the plasma complex that replaced the stacies' blood. Min told Aya that what looked like a window on the cryocase was actually a screen. "Stacies aren't cute," she said. "Dead is dead." Min was not unaware of people's feelings and sensitivities; rather, she considered them and then decided it was best to be blunt anyway, which Aya usually appreciated.
It had bothered people that they couldn't look at the faces of their loved ones in stasis. It felt abstract and chilly and stupid to visit, like, a giant silver pill. Anything could be in there. Bad for morale, bad for funding, but it would all be even worse if the visitors saw how the stacies really looked, so instead the cryocenter had screens put into the cryocases, displaying cute, cleaned-up, highest-fidelity 3-D images of the stacies resting within.
Aya thought that it was hard to know so much.
Unlike the other stacies, Aya's sister had a private room at the cryocenter. Aya had paid for it, and for a higher quality of care. She had a lot of money, but she spent all her time hanging out with her dead-not-dead sister and working. She loved work, but she could definitely be having more fun. Going to Belize, watching the coral rebuild. Partying in a Manhattan watermanse. She had the invitations and everything; her work had helped make it all possible.
Her sister's room was not a nice room. There was a cot in case Aya wanted a nap alongside her sister, no window, and, despite her complaints, there were always persistent dust flurries caught around the bottom of her sister's cryocase, the same way dust and hair collected around every crevice of Aya's free weights. But she knew that everything was as expensive as it didn't look. It cost a lot of money to thwart death. It was hard work to keep a body ready to be alive when all it wanted was the other thing. You had to make the body so cold that entropy would ignore it, tricked into thinking that it was out of the game and thus beyond entropy's notice. But also, this frozen body had to be a place where life could possibly return in the future, where shoots might come up and blood would rush in.
The last time Aya spoke to her sister was right before she went into stasis. The more Aya thought about it, which was a lot, the more firmly she decided that maybe this was one of those opportunities that no one should have. Her sister had been inconsolable about the prospect of dreaming for so long. During stasis, you were meant to have a kind of brain activity that was sort of like dreaming, but more consistent. The first generation of stacies had been lost because no one had known that they needed a bunch of interesting, distracting stuff going on in their brains; like, stasis was supposed to be stasis, so who knew? But what happened to the first generation was creepy and undeniable, even though everything else had gone as it should.
"What if it's a bad dream," her sister sobbed. "I don't want a bad dream. I don't want to have anything."
"It's not," Aya had said. "It won't be. It's not." She said it over and over again as if quantity could compensate for quality, for actual factual information, because who even did know? There was no second generation yet.
She was so tired. She had come to visit her sister from work, where the current project was a new kind of membrane for a third round of desalination machines, through which seawater sieved and came out fresh. The old ones worked OK, but they weren't as energy-efficient as they could be, and California was still thirsty. People were moving back in droves — she really should visit. Aya knew she been born to a dirty world. A tired world. Her mother and father had waded through it, and Aya had been born miraculously, seemingly fine despite all that, but not her sister.
And it was seeing this little sister of hers in pain, in trouble after trouble after trouble, that made Aya vow to not worship a god that was a man or a deity but instead become her own god, to study and learn so that she could grow up to remake and unmake Earth how she thought best — and it was working, wasn't it? Aya and the women she knew were creating a better world, whether they were harvesting giant beds of genetically engineered kelp or staying the hand of death.
She loved work and she loved her sister and she could not tell which of these things was making her feel tired. It should have been neither, right? Aya lay on the cot, leaving a foot on the floor like she was drunk, and dozed off for a moment.
She heard people talking. Their voices loomed over her, pleasantly stretchy and smooth. She was still sleeping and couldn't move.
"I'm worried about her."
"What's to worry about?"
"This readout."
"It's within normal. These variations happen. It's a long time. Just chill. Haha, get it?"
"Ugh, please stop. I guess you're right."
"Look, it's not like she's the only one—"
Their voices kept going but now they were quieting, dwindling, as if they were getting sucked out into space. But suddenly there was a new voice.
"Do you think we should eat her?" it said, right by her ear.
Aya awoke, freezing cold. She had just had a dream, possibly the most boring dream ever, about a conversation she had had a few days ago with Min about her sister. Except in the dream, she wasn't herself, she was her sister, unable to see or move or do anything. She could hear, even though stacies couldn't hear anything. The dream had ended weirdly — Aya couldn't remember how, but she felt terrible. That was the thing about dreams: They could make you feel so mad or sexy or scared even when you couldn't remember a thing about the dream. All that remained was the animal part of your brain that was convinced something had happened.
She left her sister's room and walked down the hallway. Sometimes people worked late at the cryolab, but tonight everyone had gone home. In the bathroom, it was so dark for a moment that the darkness had heft and texture, a goopiness, but then the lights flickered on. Aya would have preferred for the lights to have been on already. Motion-sensor lights, but ones that could predict the future and would turn on right before they detected your motion so you'd never have to be scared of the dark! She yawned so hugely her mouth threatened to eat her face.
She peed, washed her hands, tried to be kind and generous about the droopy, unpromising image reflected back at her. As she left, Aya heard a sound and turned. In the stall closest to the door, she saw a pair of bare feet drop down daintily and pivot to face her. The lights flickered off. This time the dark was definitely a thing with intention (bad) and movement (swift, in her direction).
Aya dashed toward her sister's room and slammed the door behind her. She looked out of the little window inset in the door. There was nothing in the hallway. However, there was something in the room with her. Two women and a dog were huddled in the corner. One woman was covered in blood, one woman in dirt. The dog seemed normal, happy, even. They all looked familiar.
The dirty woman stood. "Halt," she said, "Do not go out there. You are in grave danger."
The three of them had been fighting for days, they said. The bloody woman, whose name was Franny, had been attacked first. She had kicked a window out and spilled into the dirty woman's world. The dirty woman, whose name was Maria, had fought off the creature with Franny's help, and they had been moving from world to world together, but were too late or weak to save the others from being devoured. They had just rescued the dog, whose nametag read "Jim."
Franny and Maria did not agree on what the thing was, if it was an alien or if it was bad people or if it was a manifestation of their own minds. They just called it a thought-creature. What was clear was that at some point, they would need to fight it. But not here, not yet, not when they were cornered.
Maria said, "What you must do is find the weak point into the next world."
"Hold on," said Aya. There was a knock at the door.
"It's the demon," said Maria.
"It's the serial killer!" said Franny.
Jim barked.
Franny said, "Open that thing."
"No!" said Aya.
Franny glared at her and kicked the cryocase. When Aya went to stop her, she saw that the cryocase had changed. Instead of her sister, it was Aya who was lying inside, sleeping, looking like she was about to wake up and ask the question. Oh. She wondered what the question might be.
The knocking grew louder, booming against the door.
Aya was nothing if not pragmatic. She was adaptable, not a dumb person or a pushover, but someone who was fully aware of all the beautiful and dark possibilities of the world. She knew she had a very short time to mourn everything. "Wait," Aya said. "What was it like, where you came from?"
"Adventures available to brave men and women alike. Friends banding together against evil. Many hotties," said Maria. "I want to go back."
"Time enough for everything," said Franny. "Me too."
"And yours?" they asked.
Aya told them about jets the size of mansions. Mansions floating on water in Manhattan, coral reefs corseted and bolstered back to life, skyscrapers in earthquake zones that jiggled instead of cracked. "Sure," they said. "OK."
She told them that the world had become harder to live in. But that it was their fault, they knew that, and they were fixing it. They were learning from their mistakes. She told them about Cassandra, her friend who loved flesh so much she could think of ways to create and shape it that had never been seen before. Cassandra had developed a comfortable polymer that protected and supported the skin. It didn't feel like you were wearing anything, and it even flattened your eye bags. She was the most beautiful woman Aya had ever known in person, and she had a different face tattoo every week. Vain Cassandra with her sumptuous kindness, who had been burned on over half her body as a child and would have no one know what it felt like to be in such suffering.
Franny and Maria looked at each other and shrugged.
"Truly, a world of miracles," said Maria.
"I wish I could stay," said Aya.
"For our sakes, I hope that some of this world is real," said Franny. "It sounds like a beautiful place. I'd take a piece of it. But we really do have to go right now."
"I love my world," said Aya. "I will fight for it."
"We'll all fight for it," Maria said.
The door began to crack. They opened the cryocase onto a narrow gray void and each jumped in, Aya last, giving one final lingering look at her world, a world made and fixed by her and her friends and people she would never meet now, her gorgeous world which she was either dreaming up or dreaming in.
Alice Sola Kim is a 2016 Whiting Award Winner whose stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Tin House, McSweeney's Literary Quarterly, Lightspeed, and other publications. | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  | | | | | | | | How to Save a City Through a Website | | | | By Kendra James | | |
Before talking to Tiffani Bell, most of what I knew about the Detroit of the 21st century was blinkered by my location and class: It revolved around the city's bankruptcy, the Obama-approved auto bailout, and the occasional conversation with friends wondering whether moving there would be the most financially responsible decision that we could make. After all, Detroit is "the new Brooklyn," and, according to one headline, "a millennial paradise."
That's not the Detroit that Tiffani turned her focus to when she started the Detroit Water Project — now known as The Human Utility — in July 2014.
Tiffani found out that thousands of the city's residents were going to lose their access to one of the most basic human rights and necessities: water. While recent college grads were moving to Detroit and taking advantage of the city's comparatively low cost of living, thousands of the city's native residents were unable to pay their water utility bill. And if the city didn't get its money, it was simply going to turn the water off.
As a passionate student of computer science and former Code for America fellow in Atlanta, working with the city's traffic courts, Tiffani knew what local government bureaucracy could look like and how slowly the cogs of resolution could turn. After finding out about the impending human-rights crisis, she decided to take direct action and cut out the government middleman.
The Human Utility is similar to other social-economy startups like Kickstarter and Patreon, but different in that it focuses on one singular goal: letting people around the world pay water bills for the citizens of Detroit (and now Baltimore). It's also a nonprofit tech startup run by a black woman. So, as we talked on the phone for over an hour, I asked her how her identity has colored her experiences in STEM.
What followed was a conversation that opened my eyes to a municipal water crisis in Detroit — one very different from the crisis in Flint — and the consequences for the city's population.
Kendra James: Ghostbusters came out this weekend, featuring three women scientists, all white, and one non-scientist who is black. There been a lot of talk lately about how there is little representation of women in STEM, and specifically black women in STEM in pop culture. Did you find that to be difficult when you were younger?
Tiffani Bell: I saw the trailer, and I was just like, "Why does the black woman have to be the one that doesn't know science?"
I didn't have any role models as far as people that looked like me that did coding work specifically. I didn't have a black female computer-science professor until my sophomore or junior year of college, even though I went to an HBCU.
When I got an internship at Hewlett-Packard there was a black woman there who used to be a developer before becoming a manager. She was the first black woman that I met in the industry, basically. I've only had two significant experiences with black women in the industry.
KJ: In your entire career, even up until now?
TB: If you don't count folks that are my age. Some people need to see role models that look like them, but luckily I didn't. I was just like, "Oh, that's Bill Gates, I can do computer stuff too," and followed his lead. But it never dawned on me that he didn't look like me until later in life.
KJ: What inspired you to create the Detroit Water Project?
TB: I saw an article in the Atlantic about how 100,000 people in Detroit were going to get get their water shut off. I was actually supposed to go to the office that day at Code for America, but I ended up just working from home so I spent the rest of the day reading about what people were doing. Some of them couldn't flush the toilet, so they started to use the bathroom in their backyard; people were catching water in rain bins and going to neighbors' houses to bathe, all because they couldn't afford the bill.
That's pretty shitty, considering 85 percent of the water companies in the United States are city-run municipal water companies. This is a city turning their customers off for nonpayment. I think the stat is like 25 percent of the folks in Detroit are unemployed. When you consider numbers like that, you can't be like, "We're going to shut all these people off and hope they come up with the money some kind of way." You obviously have a huge problem on your hands.
At that time, 50 percent of the Detroit Water and Sewer customers were behind enough on their bills to be eligible for shutoff. That's a combination of commercial and residential customers, but the bulk of that was just residential. There are cities that are pretty much enabling their own citizens to be preyed upon like this. There's all these things that stem from not paying their water bills. You can actually lose your kids.
KJ: Lose your kids?
TB: Yeah. You're going to lose your kids over not having water in your house, because they think of your house as being unfit for habitation. We have to be careful about sharing information about the people coming to us for help with payments, because we don't want to put them in a situation where, through ex-partners or someone else, they can say they don't have water in their house and all their kids are taken.
KJ: When you decided that you were going to start assisting with water bills, how did that work?
TB: I asked the question "Does anybody know somebody that is in this situation in Detroit, and what are they doing?" Nobody was really able to respond with what they were doing. My co-founder, Kristy Tillman, replied on Twitter and said, "I'd pay a bill for somebody if we are able to pay the bill directly for them." So I went and found a public 400-page PDF on the water utility's website that was a list of bills they supposedly couldn't collect.
KJ: Posted publicly?
TB: Right? It was just crazy. They published this huge list, and it had addresses in it, and how much they owed; the only thing that wasn't there was names. But they had account numbers, addresses, etcetera. I took one of these account numbers from that PDF and I just plugged it into the utility company's website to see what would pop up. It turned out pretty much everything was there: payment history, in some cases their name, their billing history, whether they were delinquent or not, whether they were about to get shut off or not.
There was a make-a-payment button, and I thought, What if we collected the PDF full of account numbers? What if we built a website to find people who were having problems paying their bills, and we got their account numbers, and we offer to log into their account and just pay bills for them? That's pretty much how we've paid the bulk of the first early bills.
I think we launched on a Thursday, and we had the first person to pay a bill on the following Monday. In the meantime, people were flamboyantly giving money. The original site was set to have a list of people who needed help paying bills on the front page, but we didn't have enough people coming forward publicly for help. So we ended up really quickly repurposing the site so that donators could provide their email addresses and how much money they wanted to pledge. Then we'd email them a person's account number and direct them on how to pay it and everything. It was imbalanced at that point: More people wanted to pledge than actually had signed up for support, so we had to do something.
KJ: What was the outreach to the people of Detroit? How did you let them know that you guys existed? It's hard to keep up with Twitter when you're working your third job because you can't pay your water bill.
TB: Exactly. Some [detractors] were like, "They need to go to work, they're just sitting around waiting for a handout." And I'm like, "These people probably work harder than you do."
The United Way in Southeastern Michigan reached out to see if they could list us as a resource as a place to get bills paid. We also had a bunch of postcards printed out to be distributed in the community.
KJ: What's the average amount of money that people are donating?
TB: Right now it's about $55 to $75.
KJ: What's the average unpaid water bill?
TB: It's usually a combination of a bunch of months, so it's at least like $500 to $600 that people owe. I actually get excited about seeing all the water bills — it's easier to compare numbers and data now. But it pisses me off a little bit, because who was the one person at the utility that let these bills get to this point? I mean, I have the odd person on the site where the bill is like $12,000 because it's from their elderly parents' house that had a leak or something, or they just let the bills pile up because they were just older and both of them had died and the son inherited the house and couldn't pay the bill himself either because he was low-income.
But I ask all the time, "Who in the water company let this pile up? Did anyone go to check on these customers?" I'm sure there were notices that were sent, but at what point should someone have gotten in the car and driven over to ask, "What's going on with this customer?"
Kendra James is a writer and blogger based in New York City. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The Iron Maidens of the Bronx | | | | By Gillian Jacobs | | |
Violet Killy and Jenny Li were both on the Bronx High School of Science's all-girls robotics team, the Fe Maidens, before they graduated this spring. Fe is the symbol for iron on the periodic table, so the team name is pronounced "Iron Maidens." Damn, I love a good science joke. Bronx Science is a public school well known for its science and math programs, and you have to score highly on a citywide test to get in.
Although there are many girls involved in STEM at the high-school level across the country, robotics competitions tend to be male dominated. This was true for Bronx Science's original robotics team, the Cyborgs, as well. In 2007, the Fe Maidens were formed to increase the number of girls interested in science and engineering. In addition to participating in robotics competitions, the Fe Maidens mentor younger girls in the Bronx and try to spread their love of STEM.
I talked to Violet and Jenny over the phone one weekend in April, and I was very excited to learn that both girls will be attending MIT this fall. They'll be taking that Iron Maiden spirit along with them.
Gillian Jacobs: When did you first have an interest in STEM? Is it the reason you wanted to go to Bronx Science?
Violet Killy: I've always been interested in technology, in science and math. When I was a kid I liked taking apart things and seeing how they worked, VCRs, that kind of stuff, but I hadn't really thought that you could get involved in this sort of thing until you went to college. When I came to Bronx Science, it was a good opportunity to get more involved in science and math, but when I saw these robotics teams it was eye-opening. I think it was the first time I had seen kids my age really doing this sort of thing in a hands-on way, and I definitely wanted to be a part of that.
Jenny Li: I always grew up loving to solve puzzles, and I always played with Legos, but I never really realized what I wanted to do until I entered Bronx Science. I joined the robotics team my sophomore year, and I joined the programming department, so that was really the first time I had hands-on experience of writing code, seeing that code go into a robot, and seeing it come to life. That was really that point where I realized I wanted to pursue computer science, and it made my past love for science and engineering come true. I've been able to pursue that my entire high-school career and, hopefully, one day I'll keep on doing it as a job.
GJ: A common theme that has emerged for me when talking to girls who are interested in STEM is when it becomes practical and applied, that's when people's interest really starts to grow. Can you talk about why you think that makes it so much more exciting?
JL: Part of why Violet and I, and I think the entire robotics team, love outreach and getting the chance to bring robotics to younger children as a hands-on experience, is because you get to see your work result in a product that is working and is in front of your eyes and it's moving, so it's something that you realize it could make a difference if you keep on pursuing it.
GJ: Before you guys came to Bronx Science, did you feel like you were one of the only girls in your grade interested in STEM?
VK: Interest is definitely always there, across the board, but especially once you get toward the middle-school age, I think that's where it starts to diverge. Especially once you get to 11, 12, 13, where the social aspects start to come in. That's when girls don't necessarily have other girls to see doing these things, so boys tend to be more confident in pursuing them.
GJ: Do you also think that's because the games and toys that are geared toward STEM are usually marketed toward boys, so even the toys you're playing with from a young age make it seem like it's a male profession?
VK: Yeah. Even from a real young age, toys are separated by gender. You've got princesses, and Barbies, and that sort of thing, versus trucks and tools. I think there's this mind-set that these are more masculine jobs, more masculine professions, and that's really instilled from an early age. We see that a lot with what we do.
A specific example: we do this outreach initiative at a local community center teaching middle-school girls the basics of how to build robots out of Legos. The first day we had this program, we asked the group of girls what they thought an engineer was, just to start the conversation. One of the girls said it was a man who builds things. It's offhand, they don't really think about it, but it's a mind-set that's instilled from such a young age that this is really a man's job, and that's really what we're trying to turn around.
GJ: Are Legos the introduction to robotics engineering?
VK: The league that we're part of is called FIRST. It stands for "For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology." We are in the older group; that's the larger robots competing in the larger game. The Lego robotics is the middle-school level that leads into that smaller-scale same concept. The organization promotes that as the stepping-stone, and then we take that and use it as an introductory tool for girls at other schools to get them interested in something they do on their level.
GJ: Can you talk more about the competitions you participate in?
JL: FIRST has three different levels of competition. For high-school students, there is the Robotics Competition, and it's six weeks long. During a kickoff day, we watch a video that is geared toward this year's theme. For example, this year we have something called "Strongholds," and it's a capture-the-flag game where we build a robot geared to cross defenses of multiple types and then shoot balls toward a tower.
Every single year, we get that video, and then in those six weeks we build a complete robot, and after those six weeks we have weeks of regional competitions, where we go to certain venues and teams from all over the world come and compete to see who wins and goes to nationals.
GJ: I've heard people say that even when they see girls at competitions, there seems to be a gender divide. You don't see a lot of girls in pit crews. Is that something that differentiates your team?
VK: A lot of times when you're in the pits, it's sort of like you see in race cars. Like, the robot pulls out, and they have to work on it really fast, that sort of thing. Often the teams that are in the pits, despite being coed teams, typically are very male-heavy. I know we've had girls from different teams who have reached out to us and asked us how we get girls to be interested and confident.
GJ: It was so exciting to see pictures of you guys with drills on your website. Even something as simple as that, it seems like unless you're coming from an all-female team, once you get to the pit-crew level at a competition, you don't see as many girls hands-on with tools.
VK: It goes back to the confidence you don't see as much. Especially when you're, say, on a team that's majority boys and you're one of the only girls, if not the only girl, on the team, that can definitely be intimidating.
A lot of times the boys seem much more confident about what they know. Even if the girls know as much, they don't assert themselves as much, or it doesn't come as naturally to do that. Many of the girls I've talked to find that they're getting relegated to more of the public relations or the writing, which is also important, but just not what they're interested in.
GJ: What advice do you give girls when they ask you questions about how to get more involved?
VK: The answer really is to be more assertive, but that's not an easy thing to do. It's honestly not being afraid to fail. I think girls are much more quick to second-guess themselves. Just knowing that that's what engineering and science do, it's kind of what they are, it is failing and making mistakes, and seeing problems and mistakes as opportunities. Things are going to go wrong, especially at this level, at the high-school level where you try to build a robot. It's cool.
GJ: That's a lesson that it took me a really long time to learn, so I'm excited to hear that you guys have already figured that out! It'll serve you in really good stead. Can you talk about the different teams, like the drive team, etcetera, for people who don't really know a lot about the FIRST competitions? How does it break down?
VK: There are different seasons throughout the year. First is the build season. Teams do this differently. On our team we break down the tasks into departments, so we have a construction department for the physical side of the robotics, the metal, the frame, the drive, the drive chassis — everything that's the physical components. We've got the electrical. They do all of the wiring. And we have programming. They code the robot and bring it to life with Java. Finally, we've got public relations, where they work on the outreach and act as the voice of the team.
We split off into different work groups. Each of them have a head to lead their department, and then I'm the captain of the team, so I watch over the heads and keep track of what they're doing and make sure everything's working efficiently.
Then, when you get to competition season, that's when your robot's on the field. You've got three people and a coach that go on the field and drive the robot and talk strategy with other teams.
GJ: Do you have any characters from film or TV or books or comics that were early inspirations for you?
JL: I grew up as a tomboy, so I'm very into the Marvel cinematic universes, comic books, and I keep up with superheroes. My favorite superhero is Ironman, and the idea of him being a very talented, skilled computer scientist, but also just being a maker. That really encouraged me, even though he's not a female, to pursue that field and see if I can one day be somewhere like him.
VK: I was raised by actors, and so a lot of the people I heard about that I was inspired by were women who really excelled in those fields, in acting and art. Comedy is a good example. Comedians were typically men, so people like Carol Burnett, Roseanne Barr, Whoopi Goldberg. Women I heard about who were not necessarily the norm, women who were putting themselves out there and confident. Those were the ones I really grew up around, like Rosie O'Donnell, Ellen DeGeneres, they were the ones I found myself very inspired by when I was younger.
GJ: You can only imagine if there were a female equivalent of Ironman, what an impact that could have on young girls.
VK: Yeah, definitely.
GJ: Let's write it.
JL: The Fe Maiden.
Gillian Jacobs is an actor (Netflix original series Love) and director (the documentary The Queen of Code on fivethirtyeight.com). | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | How to Report Social-Media Harassment: A Practical Guide | | | | By Casey Johnston | | | |
The musician Mia Matsumiya has documented a lot of the online harassment she's suffered on Instagram at @perv_magnet. Her bio expresses her mission succinctly: "4'9" violinist & perv magnet. I've archived 1,000+ messages from creeps, weirdos & fetishists over the past 10 years. I've decided to post them all." An alarming amount of the abuse comes through Facebook messages, invisible to anyone but her. "Anyone ever tell you how sexy you are and how bad they wanna let you face fuck them," begins one unsolicited message from a random person that ends with a smiley face. She also posts submissions from others, one of which reads: "Hey asian whore want to get raped? I know where you live."
Matsumiya has reported her harassment to the police, but it's unclear whether she's reported the repeated abuse to the social networks themselves (as of press time, she hadn't responded to requests for comment). But Facebook knew its structure was to blame: last fall, the company changed its messaging features to remove the dreaded "Other" folder, where any user could contact you. Now, users must send requests to contact someone before they can message them, Facebook tells us, though there's still a "filtered requests" tab buried two levels deep on the desktop version of Facebook that provides a home for potentially hateful noise. Though extreme, what Matsumiya is experiencing isn't rare — a full quarter of women ages 18 to 24 report being sexually harassed online, and 26 percent report being stalked.
If you're experiencing abuse in this or one of its many, many other forms, this article's for you: it is a practical guide to understanding how to report harassment and abuse online, and what to expect from various social networks when you do.
They, unfairly, expect you to do a lot, and it sucks that so much of the burden of protecting yourself falls on you, the person being harassed. Per Matsumiya's account above, sometimes the very structure of the app you're using unnecessarily enables abuse. But many social-media services have started beefing up their trust-and-safety teams and expanding their understanding of all the ways a person can be harassed on their platforms.
Throughout this piece, we cite examples of the abusive behaviors that drive people away from using social media, many of which were reported but turned down for action. This is not to say that these examples are necessarily against any service's terms of use, but rather to illustrate how much can fall in the gap between these different definitions of acceptable behavior.
The way you'll have to deal with harassment will vary across different platforms, but there are a few best practices that can help keep your case strong.
IN GENERAL
● Screenshot, screenshot, screenshot. A lot of attacks online come from burner accounts that may be reported and suspended before you can report them yourself, and attacks may also take the form of content that is posted and then deleted, such that it may show up in an alert very briefly and then disappear once the damage is done. Keeping your own record of what is happening not only helps quantify things and keep them straight but also may help you or the platforms establish patterns across accounts or services.
● Report accounts, not just content, where applicable. If a user is being relentless or conducting an attack against you, it's often appropriate to report both the content they're posting as well as the account they're using.
● Escalate to law enforcement if you're in danger. Unfortunately, most platforms can't respond substantively to harassment that quickly; sometimes they may only take a few hours, but most don't guarantee a response time. If your situation is urgent, know that it's within the purview of law enforcement to respond to a direct threat (unfortunately, many of them may not understand what's going on; you may not be able to count on them to know what Twitter is, but you should at least try to get a report filed). Online harassers don't often substantiate their threats, but it's not worth the risk to assume they won't, or that since it's "just online" it should not be taken seriously.
THE SPECIFICS
Twitter
The basics: Twitter's reporting forms are here. Under "Report a violation," there are different options depending on whether you wish to report harassment, impersonation, or privacy violations.
The details: Twitter has been a flash point for discussions about abuse, for good reason. Twitter "makes harassment so visible," said Anita Sarkeesian, the founder of Feminist Frequency. "The same metric we use to judge expression is the same one we use to judge harassment." That is, someone harassing you about a tweet you made is as visible to you as your own tweet.
On the back end, reports get routed to different teams depending on the content — for instance, child porn goes to a different place than someone directing violent threats at you. You can report both accounts and individual tweets, but if an account is repeatedly tweeting at you, it will be simpler to report the account rather than each individual tweet. Twitter used to notify the person you were reporting when you did so. It no longer does this.
When you report someone, Twitter will generate an email to you that becomes a thread with the support team. When Twitter decides whether what you've reported is or is not harassment, it will email you and tell you so. Twitter initially turning down even fairly obvious cases is not unusual, but that doesn't mean that's the end of the exchange. The platform allows users to reply to the support email chain with to challenge decisions and provide additional evidence if possible. Twitter is also unusual in that it allows users to report harassment happening to someone else and communicates just as actively to the person who files those reports.
An annoying thing about this process (which will hopefully change any minute) is that Twitter does not identify what you reported in the emails it generates, which can make things very confusing if you are reporting many people or tweets at once. This makes it difficult to follow up with relevant information.
Anecdote time: Last spring, I tweeted a screenshot of a rude DM sent to me by a random account. The user saw it and immediately marshaled about a dozen sock puppets to tweet repeatedly at me that I deserved to die. As I recall, Twitter found one of the sock-puppet accounts to be in violation and suspended it, but it didn't get the rest and didn't understand how to go after the account running the attack. At the time, Twitter's reporting structure couldn't accommodate this type of attack; now it can.
To learn about dealing with harassment and hate speech on Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, and Tumblr, visit lennyletter.com.
Casey Johnston is an editor at the Wirecutter and a freelance journalist. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Why Investing in Women's-Health Technology Matters | | | | By Madeleine Johnson | | |
What group makes up half the global population? Women. Who makes about 80 percent of health-care decisions for their families? Women do. Women also have different bodies and medical needs than men, and innovation in health-care technology for women requires financial investment.
Yet big investors tend to put money into solutions to problems that they can relate to. And most venture capitalists are male. By one account, only approximately 20 percent of VC firms funding early-stage biotech companies have any women's-health-focused technologies represented in their portfolios at all. The top twenty VC firms most active in health care made upwards of 1,500 investments in the last decade, but only roughly 80 of those were in women's health.
Anula Jayasuriya is one of about 5 percent of venture capitalists who are female, and she is banking on the fact that the broadly defined women's-health-technology market is untapped, and on the reluctance of male financiers to go there. She put together the first-ever women's-health-focused investment fund, called EXXclaim Capital, which has supported early-stage companies making things like pregnancy-tracking apps, streamlined breast pumps that time-stamp bottles, and at-home sperm counters.
In addition to EXXclaim, Jayasuriya counteracts the sometimes-hostile male-dominated climate of venture capital and biotech through her work with Astia, a nonprofit identifying and funding female entrepreneurs and women-led ventures. We discussed the paucity of women in the fields she works in, why there's a built-in bias against women's-health startups, and why women in biotech may win the long game when it comes to career triumphs.
Madeleine Johnson: Can you explain the difference between biotech and tech?
Anula Jayasuriya: I've always thought it was funny that "tech" got hijacked to mean computer science. Life sciences or biotech, including medical devices, is similar to tech, in that they are both based on technology and move very fast, unlike, say, industrial engineering or the energy industry, which are also "tech."
MJ: As a venture capitalist, you invest in technologies focused on "women's health," and you have a somewhat nuanced way to define that; can you explain it?
AJ: I'm defining it holistically, to include both women as the users or end recipients of the care — what they want and need, and how they are different — as well as when women are caretakers, caregivers, and decision-makers on behalf of others. I think of it as three concentric circles. The little circle is OB/GYN and reproductive health. The second circle is common chronic diseases where women are different from men in terms of their symptoms, response to treatment, and outcomes. Cardiac disease is the best known in that category, but there are many others. And the third circle is places where women make decisions on behalf of both the elderly that they take care of and on behalf of children.
"Women and health" might be another term, or "sex- and gender-targeted medicine," so that we don't leave out men either but point to the importance of targeting to biological differences.
MJ: And is women's health a successful thing to invest in?
AJ: I'm seeing women's health, the way I define it, as an overlooked fantastic business investment opportunity. There are a lot of people who look at it, especially in the developing world, through a nonprofit lens, more from a social-justice perspective based on the ethics of providing care to people. I agree with that, by the way. But I believe very passionately that women's health is a huge market opportunity, because it's new and it is growing under everybody's nose, but only somewhere between 4 and 6 percent of venture capitalists are women.
MJ: Why does that matter?
AJ: When you make an investment, everybody will tell you up and down that it's highly vetted, it's rational, and they go through all of these procedures. But at the end of the day, it's about a connection that is made, both the investment team's resonance with the problem and how compelling a potential investor thinks a problem is. I think there is an unconscious bias against women that goes on in the process, and that is enhanced if there are no women present.
The problem with anything to do with women's health is that it is political and controversial, and, just like women's bodies, it is complicated. I'm trying very hard to separate out professional equality, social justice, and a naked financial imperative. I look at all three in parallel, but the investment fund is not a so-called impact fund, it is a huge business opportunity.
I think that as long as this real business opportunity isn't seen, then women's health is going to remain a cause, or window dressing. It has to make money and be a vibrant market before device-makers, pharmaceutical companies, and all the people in the ecosystem will support entrepreneurship and innovation.
MJ: What objections do people have to investing in women's-health-related companies?
AJ: Male investors will say, "I don't want to touch 'bikini medicine.'" One problem is that they can't relate to the issues. A second is that, even if they can understand them, they don't think they are so important. Like: "Why is menstrual pain an issue? You have it every month and you live with it, so it can't be that bad." The third problem is that they think it is controversial or scary.
Also, some will say it is a niche. I really don't know how to react to that, because then I say, "You might be only thinking of OB/GYN, which is not that small anyway."
It's like personalized medicine. In the '90s a lot of pharma companies really resisted personalized medicine because they were happy giving medicine to a lot of people for whom it didn't work. As long as it didn't harm them, if it was only ineffective, they sold more drugs. The only thing that pushed them was a financial incentive. They aren't in the business of being benevolent, they're in the business to make returns for their shareholders.
MJ: How would a Lenny reader benefit in thinking about women's health as its own larger category, beyond simply health care for parts of the body usually covered by a bikini?
AJ: I think the biggest benefit is the awareness that women's and men's health in many cases are different. They can ask doctors and nurses how they might be different. They will, I hope, look things up on the web and educate themselves. I think building their own reference base on an individual level is very important, and I think the more that women speak up and ask for things to be different, the better. The pull of the patient hasn't been felt because the patient has not always been empowered and has not always had the knowledge.
MJ: Can you tell me more about your theory on career longevity for women?
AJ: It is observational and limited to biotech for now, but what I see is that men are on a track with external milestones in the industry. If by the time they are 50 years old they haven't really risen to a certain point in their career, then they are never going to progress further.
But I see that women, who might not a take a promotion or who might work less when they have children in their 30s, can enter the C-suite and become a CEO or chief financial officer or chief scientific officer, top executive management, for the first time in their late 50s or early 60s. I think it is relatively rare for men to do that. In life sciences, accrual of knowledge is also important, unlike in tech, and I think that benefits women. I think knowing this would give a lot of women a lot of hope and conviction to go ask for promotions and not see themselves as written off.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Madeleine Johnson is a biotech business writer at GenomeWeb.com. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The email newsletter where there's no such thing as too much information.
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