 Good evening, and hello to everyone here at Debcon 18 This is the next speech from Catherine Sutter about in the 1968 mom built a computer woman's route to technique Please give a warm welcome to Catherine. Hello This is not the type of talk I normally do so I will put my applied social theory lens on it I Go by Catherine Kathy and on IRC. I am D. Lib. I Do applied social theory I've brought behavioral science background My bachelor's degree was focusing in human development actually was interested in neurochemistry and nutrition But and public health, but when I went into I decided that the political and policy questions were greater than the scientific questions I'd like to introduce an idea of legitimate peripheral participation and that that Shapes a community differently instead of thinking of newcomers coming in from the bottom and Becoming and going up towards the top of higher power We think of a community is coming from of newcomers coming from the edges and then judge How well do we bring those newcomers in how open and permeable are the boundaries? And do we give meaningful roles to new contributors and That is the lens I will use to describe this story of my mother and difficulties and barriers she had to enter a career in tech So I never really thought of my mother is very successful But I also get irritated with mom jokes And I'd like to say I think some of these she might be unusual, but it's too bad I think there are many women and many other people's stories that have similar kinds of barriers So I'll try to use her as an example Notice in this picture of a Computer a plastic computer. You could build yourself. They had trouble Marketing it so they're trying to tell people. No, really. It's fun. It's not just really complicated sets of things You have to put together and so they put a father with a daughter and the picture in the front But now if we had had a son there, you would think the father was training the son But with the daughter, it's more fun and enjoyable. He's it's interesting that there's a little girl on there My mother's life. I'd like to start the story with my grandfather. He worked for Presto Presto He was a fine woodworker and he created the molds for their foundry their production of steel Cookware in his off hours. He's a very creative person He decided that the complicated clamps on the pressure cookers made them in it who complicated And so he invented this way of putting a lid on and turning it and My grandmother said that this is the reason why these handles never fit women's hands. He carved it for his own hand My mother was trained by her mother in the Depression era to be very very frugal. She learned she was very Interested they were all DIY they're pioneers in the US very hands-on kinds of folks and lived in a small pioneer town in Wisconsin and she learned this kind of practical geometry In sewing with her mother and she was very interested in fabrics and quality But she was the second child and they had no boy So my grandfather said no let the Gretchen come into the shop and work with me I gave an example of the kind of machinery of that era Don't have a picture of his shop But she did things like because he was disappointed that this new pressure cooker that he invented became belonged to Preston instead of himself He just formed his own company and he hired my mother to work after school for many years So they for example, she would do the mathematics of a dial To that would show if you want to cook beef in your pressure cooker How many minutes will it take and so she did all the math at the dining room table to figure out how to do that? shape In a college crafting in a college drafting class that she took in a community college after high school She did well and so her family gave sent her to art school And she always said if I had been a boy, they would have realized I was really an engineer She wasn't she her aesthetic sense wasn't so great But she was very beautiful at the time She there were some technical jobs open for women. She became a sewing machine repair person and the story I normally heard about that was Kathy she didn't have much of a clothing sense but she said just remember never wear a red dress to a job interview and then she would tell the story of how she wore red dress to this job interview and the boss took her to a conference and Only booked one room in the motel and so she left Because and then she said the fault was that she didn't know you're not supposed to wear a red dress to a job interview When she married my father and went to Germany for the US Army She had a great love and that was her foth 332 sewing machine very absorbed in it this picture of the inner workings of it. This is her passion I've seen her she taught me on this not this exact machine but this model all my life and she didn't really teach me about clothes or Making clothes, but she taught me about the mechanics of the machine and how to use it Elvis Presley was on the base at that time. She really wasn't very impressed with him But she really loved the best German engineered sewing machine. She had ever seen. Oh That's me in the little picture with my mom as a single mother She found a job as a department store Detective meaning she was a secret shopper and she complained that the managers were watching the women in the Dressing rooms and make and making rude jokes about them through the two-way mirrors and she was fired She became a waitress Later she had a job with a vending machine maintenance company. She would travel around And she found out through some kind of social event that the men were making Extremely more money than she was doing the same work. Maybe less and She asked why? they made more money and Cater matt told her it was because they had families to support But she had three children in a one room apart in a one bedroom apartment that she could not tell them about Or she would not be allowed to have the job a single woman with three children She was not a very happy person, but she found things to keep herself busy and feeling like she was working somewhere into the future She in the 1960s. There are many of these electronics mail order courses offered in the newspapers and She signed up for one of these and she studied it in her spare time after working full-time as of her cater mat. I Remember it was 68 or 69 because at that time I remember her waking us up To watch this vision of a man stepping on the moon and how excited she was We had very little money. Sometimes there was not enough money for dinner to have a good meal but for fun we would go on Saturdays to a Flea market and she would give us each 50 cents or a dollar We could buy anything we wanted and what she would buy with me were these appliances a toaster of an oven that looked like this one and this photographic equipment And she would fix them and that would be our entertainment and things to do for fun during the week One night I woke up in the middle of the night and I went out to the dining room And I was tired and now my mother's very tired person, right? She works very hard and she had all these plastic pieces all over the table red and white and all these lines and these Pieces of tape and labels and it's like mom. What are you doing? I was just coming to get a glass of water and she said look Kathy. It's a computer What's that? You can help me here help me sort this and this and she gave me the instruction manual and I looked at it And I was too tired and I went back to bed But she worked on that for a long time and she was very excited that she made it work So remember at the time the computers looked like this But she had one on her own kitchen table so other ways in which she was technical Silent Spring by Rachel Carson this book is about the Pesticides and environmental hazards that we were all very very frightened by when it was came out and we all read that vitamin C and the common cold by Linus Pauling talking about this idea of these molecules called amino acids and other vitamins meaning they were absolutely required for life and how you shouldn't eat Foods that lose these things for vitamins and then how to eat it Adele Davis was her favorite author probably all her life and Linus Pauling finally Still working full-time now as a housekeeper as a maid doing house cleaning the US government started funding this thing called community colleges and I remember She The slide rule became the thing that made her happy She would just tried to teach me how to use the slide rule and she was so excited about it and the Algebra and and the note careful note she would take she wanted to go for a nutrition degree But she had to she couldn't use that much time So she got a two-year degree as a chemical technician She applied for a job with that chemical technician degree at RCA radio corporation of America And they said that at the time they had many applicants like her But the reason she stood out is they had never before met anyone to finish a home electronics course Home electronics course this correspondence where you make something electronic and then send it mail it To the company and they grade it and mail it you the next assignment and then grade you a test all done by mail And so people would start these things and never finish them and she finished them and they said that's the reason she they gave her the that That they gave her that job so I found this photo of the folks that she worked with because these are the folks in the older facility before the Somerville facility was built and About three years before and they looked like what I remember because at the time I was in high school and They looked like that and she talked about them So she was given a special she had some ideas about how to fit the electronics on a silicon chip into a smaller Form factor. This is what they were working on She had ideas that they found interesting and they gave her permission to do special projects Where she had access to the entire laboratory? This is stepping on the toes of the more senior women who have been there a long time and in order to gain their trust She wasn't really into it, but at lunchtime they did crocheting So she would She told me that what she did was she Let them teach her how to crochet and then she went home and stayed up around the clock For much of a week to impress them with how fast she put out this crochet blanket That was better than what they had taught her to do and she gained their trust She also told me the story of how I don't know if it was these women But women of these this generation and for all I know it might have been some of these women who would take their very fine motor skills and their experience but with fiber work and had been wrapping Wires for the computer systems for NASA and this was an inspiring story for her And she would make fun of these old ladies that were more impressed by crochet But she was very proud of how well she had done at it So the thing that she was working on you'll notice in this slide It's talking about the layers in the silicon chips and the way the circuits are attached to each other In this particular chip what they were trying to do is make it smaller and they were finding What how she explained to me what they were doing is that they would were trying to get the curves She was working on how to make the curves Connect more tightly and eventually they found a different crystal structure that made that easier Which is interesting because she married a world-renowned material physicist at the time and they would talk about things like Crystal structures. I Believe this may have been the very chip that she was working on It's because it I found a research report that was declassified out of RCA from 1974 It looks vaguely like the pictures. I remember when I was a child although I wouldn't go by that She said that she imaged a picture of me as a baby on one of the layers, but I don't think it's findable And apparently it was very unusual for the time. This was her dream job She was the happiest I had ever seen her in my life She bonded with my thought my stepfather over their shared technical interests This is a computer. I believe is the one that they built In the kitchen table and made sure that we were not part of it Parts of the computer all over the table all over the place for quite a while. I Had a TRS 102 that I played with but I thought I'd pick up this picture. It just reminded me of the kind of magazines around the house so then It turns out that her job bumped my military and corporate CEO kind of Stepfather's tax bracket higher than her income brought in So she quit the job But so I didn't think of that as a success and She was very unhappy, but this is a picture of my mother happy I don't remember what program she was learning, but she was excited because she was writing programming She was learning programming and she was happy about it. And this is a computer. She was using at the time I didn't actually I had already gone off to University of Illinois At that time, but when I would come back home, this was a closet off of the kitchen where she did her work This was in Chicago at this time. I didn't grow up there, but at this time during college They were he was working for Standard Oil of Indiana So my summary so what are the take-home lessons here I think that all of these these not really happy aspects of the story can be summarized but as a lack of Pathways or access to legitimate peripheral participation in tech She did these things that showed her capacity her knowledge her Enthusiasm, but at each step because she was female these little hurdles kept getting thrown at her that were big enough to derail her So poor access to meaningful work on the edges Inappropriately tracked into traditional women's roles But also persistence and cleverness and finding new entry points into technology. I'm sorry This isn't a happier story for me to tell I Really appreciate you guys listening and I this is the end of this part of the talk. There's a time check. Is there any room for? Five minutes. I think an interesting thing to talk about would be how does a newcomer who doesn't look like the people in the center of the group? become given Roles that allow them become more central Hi, thank you very much for the talk. It was really very interesting So personally I can totally relate to the to the topic because I have finished for international affairs and diplomacy so which means that I have a background in social sciences and Recently, I've been learning Python as I see that the That the future kind of off the market of the place that I'm living is requiring a lot of people that has technical skills So, how do you think that those two things things can? Merge together and can create in the end something that it's very nice and can be useful Are you asking for career advice? No, I am asking how can you combine those two things? and Can make it like so people cannot just be technical or just be in the social field Yeah, but they can somehow merge those two things together and can Come up with something nice because I heard in the beginning of the presentations that you were in the That you were in the science Part, but then thought to go and more in the social the social aspect So more it's like why do you had to do this? Right this exchange. I think that's a great question. It's often a gendered question So one of the things that you can sit down I mean if you want to stand there, it's fine, but Okay, here's one of my bugaboos one of the things that annoys me is that Social policy is being set by technically-minded people right now who tend to be young men How people should get along with each other tends to be women's work That's no big deal. We have plenty of women who can work on it But because technically-minded men have are so needed right now. I had a such a high demand get constant praise by your skills and abilities and knowledge and I find this more so among engineers than around scientists scientists are more ten in general the scientific field tends to be more excited by questions and Engineers my my stereotype are more interested in the answers, right? So one of the problems I see is not knowing where your own blind spots are You look for a technical solution on something when the goal hasn't been set up correctly so How do you bring in for in this example someone the women's work, you know what other and re and human resources How much power do they have? So I know that's not a complete answer to your question, but I think it's it's part of the problem Yeah, I'm being told I have one minute. Anybody want to say anything else? Okay so I've been thinking about this how to come from the edge to the center and In Debbie specifically like we do a lot of effort to acknowledge contributions from Contributors in different areas. So artists Lawyers or and we have the known upload uploading DDS and I'm afraid that when we accept acknowledge contributions contributors in those areas and we attack them as I Need to breathe No, when when we When Let's say a new Developer enters the community as a non-employed in DD for instance. It it's hard Then to break the to cross the line and become an uploading DD So when you enter the community by the edge with a small contribution translating or So where is the meaningful path? An example when I was reading about this theory of participation On the periphery and making it legitimate an example was used as a butcher shop and an old butcher shop The head butcher would be in the middle But the assistant butchers would be somewhere nearby doing more menial tasks, but they always had Visual access and could see the more advanced positions And so over time and with opportunity and with need they could step into those roles Yeah, but then it's It's really hard. I think when we have separate roles and then for the migration Like if we as a communist you are not With a good eye on that like to give opportunity for those people that we already said oh you you are this kind of contributor and you are and then it's on Tuesday. I'm forgetting the time I will be Facilitating a conversation between any team members who would like to arrive to talk about how teams can help each other in terms Of how they govern their groups and it include questions of how bringing in new peppers if people want to yeah Thank you very much everybody