It has been a busy week for me- the pre-order pages for Navigating the Path to Industry are up at Amazon and Kobo. There's also a page for the book at the publisher's website- which of course means that I had to set that website up, too. It is pretty basic right now, but there isn't much to put on it right now, so that's OK. I'll spruce it up when it actually makes business sense to invest more time into it.
I also battled with Barnes and Noble's NookPress site, and I think I finally won. They don't allow pre-order pages, though, so I guess I have to wait until September 10 to find out for sure. And I started the processes for getting the book into iBooks and Overdrive. Those are going to take a bit longer.
But enough about me! You came for links, and I have some good ones.
First up, Amanda Marcotte at Slate touches on a topic I've ranted about before: the over-idealization of the home-cooked meal. (Here's one of my rants on the subject.)
Jamelle Bouie, also in Slate, has a good post about the need to teach the bad with the good in American history.
This Pastry Box post from Raquel Vélez perfectly describes my fears about the potential downside of success. No, I'm not afraid of succeeding. I'm afraid of the increased risk for online harassment and abuse if I succeed.
Arthur Chu wrote a good wrap up and smackdown of the latest instances of online harassment and abuse of women in tech, this time in the games industry.
Interestingly, though, it seems the FBI may be taking an interest. I am skeptical until we see some real results, but it would be a huge thing if law enforcement figured out how to respond to these issues.
This post from Zoe Zolbrod about "the times I wasn't raped" is really good.
Andie Fox (of Blue Milk fame) takes a look at some survey results about working mums and working dads in Australia.
One of the upsides of still needing to commute three days per week is that I'm still listening to podcasts. This week I listened to an HBR Ideacast interview with Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic about the dangers of confidence. It was really interesting for a lot of reasons, but I want to pull out a couple of quotes in particular:
"...until we stop making decisions on the basis of confidence rather than competence, we will keep having arrogant, impulsive, narcissistic people in charge."
"First is that much of the literature and the popular writings in this area seem to focus on trying to enhance confidence in women. So in other words, they try to make women more like men. The world will be a much better place if we manage make men more than women, because the problem is not the women lack confidence– but that men have too much of it."
I think we in general are too likely to assume that the current prevailing culture in our institutions is "right" and expect traditionally excluded groups to change to fit in. We'd probably end up with a much happier, healthier society if we instead looked at what the evidence shows about traits that make for good results and tried to get everyone to aim for those.
On a more personal note, the podcast gave me a lot to think about with regards to the "fake it until you make it" advice for confidence. I think perhaps I still need to "fake" the confidence to go ahead and pursue my goals, but not worry about projecting confidence and instead try to project competence. However you do that.
Finally, the palate cleansing happy ending:
CUTE BUNNY!
CUTE KITTY!
I blurbed Tomas's book because I agreed with it so much! I do think that, as he says, this is one of those areas where the push to make women more like men is misguided. The willingness to entertain the idea that you might be wrong, and that other people might have insight worth taking into account, leads to better decisions.
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