Men, have you read any books about feminism or the patriarchy? They must be a full-length book at least 100 pages. Audio books are fine but they must be 1+ hour.
Would folks be interested if I ran an angry feminist reading group? Allies definitely welcome. I want to read Entitled with some folks but thought it might be a good community building exercise to do it over Zoom.
It’s Pixel’s (our smolest cat) birthday today! She celebrated by taking a nap by herself in the middle of our king-sized bed. #cats #catsofmastodon #tuxedocat #caturday
“There’s often a sense that women in the tech world make a big deal out of small events. But the myriad ways in which they are told their presence is illegitimate, that tells them that they don’t belong, is a constant pressure pushing them towards leaving technology (and game journalism, and the public sphere). In particular, when women in technology also have public voices, as with Anita Sarkeesian or Brianna Wu or Kathy Sierra, the pressure can be — is often intended to be — crushing.” - I guess 2025 is the year that I found my voice.
Because of my new nonprofit, I’ve been digging into local food chains and food insecurity and it’s been an interesting area for me to learn about because I love food and nerding out about it but also because I look at a through an engineering lens and most of the people that work in the industry are not engineers. I thought folks here might be interested too so I’ll write as I explore but I’m also thinking of writing something later.
I just learned today that UW quietly graduated one of the harassers, Pratyush Patel, who had committed serious academic misconduct in addition to harassing women. Specifically he has a pattern of emotionally manipulating and abusing women to get them to write his code and papers. It’s unclear that anything in his thesis was either his idea or his work and yet UW has decided to give him a PhD, on a thesis committee led by my advisor, Arvind Krishnamurthy. This is deeply disappointing and disgusting as no one should be able to profit off of the emotional abuse of women but also because it devalues all other PhD degrees from UW, including mine. In contrast, many of the women have dropped out of academia/decided to not get their PhDs because of sexual harassment and bullying, so we can see who the university is valuing and not. The HR investigator was given significant evidence of his abuse in the form of text messages, emails and interviews, including from other universities, and chose not to include it in the report as it was “out of scope”. Despite the fact that he clearly targeted women and used them to perpetrate significant academic fraud.
Somewhat overlooked in the Epstein emails are his communications with Larry Summers, former president of Harvard and still faculty there, about how to sleep with a woman that he was mentoring. They called her “peril” as in yellow peril because she’s Chinese. He writes that he commented on her clothes and asked her out to drinks but she declined. He writes: “She must be very confused or maybe wants to cut me off but wants professional connection a lot and so holds to it,” SO HE KNEW HIS BEHAVIOR WAS INAPPROPRIATE AND KEPT DOING IT ANYWAY. This is just all so typical of academia. Also these emails were exchanged in 2019 in case you were thinking that this was just behavior of the past.
Reminder to anyone possibly visiting soon, keep an eye on water glasses at my house because we have a fluffy cat that only drinks like this. #cats #catsofmastodon
