UPDATE: My campaign was successful! You can buy fingers & tongues as a paperback or e-book.

Below are the pros and cons I noted yesterday evening.

Format of e-mail updates for backers

Indiegogo

Kickstarter

Only the text in the blue box is the actual update from Indiegogo. Whereas most of the mail in a Kickstarter message is the update text.

Dashboard

The screenshot below is for an unlaunched Indiegogo campaign, but you should get an idea of what stats are on offer for campaign owners. (My Kickstarter campaign isn’t live yet – I don’t have access to the dashboard.)

Indiegogo dashboard

Click to see my Kickstarter campaign

A new kind of erotica

I think I might have invented a new genre of erotica. I ran a successful crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter to print my book, fingers & tongues.

I thought long and hard about how to make the design work for the book’s intent. Using my experience as a UX consultant, I made user-centred decisions on the typography, editing, book design and the use of imagery.

You can now buy fingers & tongues as a paperback or e-book.

Erotica vs. pornography

People know erotica as written stories with some sex scenes. Pornography tends to be known as a visual medium; it’s filmed from the male perspective and any women are only there to enable his pleasure.

I think we need to go back to the original definitions.

The Oxford English Dictionary, the definitive record of the English language, says:

pornography, n. “The explicit description or exhibition of sexual subjects or activity in literature, painting, films, etc., in a manner intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic feelings; printed or visual material containing this.”

erotica, n. “Matters of love; erotic literature or art (freq. as a heading in catalogues).”

Source: OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2014. Web.

I like the OED’s definition of porn. I think that we should define porn by its intent, not its content.

Politics, feminism and misogyny are relevant but mustn’t be included in the definition or porn if we are to have a rational conversation about it. (Read my Storified discussion with radical feminists on the definition of porn for an irrational conversation.)

Who would want my book

If you find mainstream porn useful but offensive, and erotica exciting but frustrating, maybe my porny erotica is the answer. :-)

My short stories are sex stories (erotica) with the intent of porn (to arouse). They are light on story and dialogue, and heavy on sex. Once the sex starts, it continues uninterrupted.

I think that erotica is something you read, whereas porn is something you use.

My erotica is erotica you use. I call it erotica as a tool. I wrote them for both men and women to enjoy. (Showing women as powerful – rather than objectifying them – in sexual material must be a Good Thing.)

Like any tool, porny erotica must have “users” and can be well or poorly designed, right?

Editing for erotica

My book will be professionally edited before it is printed. The stories will be printed in a light, pocket-sized book, with large inner margins for easy reading.

I am also making an eBook version but I believe that it’s easier to read a small book one-handed (turning pages with a thumb) than holding a tablet and trying to swipe with one hand.

When briefing the editor, my main concern is flow. I don’t want anything in the writing or choice of words to break the reader out of their fantasy.

When readers are themselves in full flow, the book has to be there alongside them, helping them along; a misplaced apostrophe or a clumsy phrase will be like a bump in the road, jolting the reader back to cold reality.

That means the punctuation and sentence structure needs to be right, but also the flow of the story itself.

Don’t make me think

Read the following excerpt. Is there anything that made you pause for a second and go “wait, what?”.

“What do you think?” Tom was looking at him intently.

Ben coughed, struggling to remain calm, glad of the folded newspaper on his lap. “It’s a good story. What do you intend doing with it?”

“I’m not sure. Try to publish it, I suppose.” He stood up to get another Bishop’s Finger from the cabinet. “So you don’t think it’s a bit crass going for the male fantasy of two women together?”

Was it the name of the beer?

Is there anything in the excerpt below that forces you to retrace your steps?

She noticed Lauren walking up towards the house long before her neighbour noticed Elizabeth sitting on the steps. No lights were on in the house and when Lauren finally turned to walk up the path Elizabeth sat still watching her eyes on the ground before her apparently lost in thought.

Was it the lack of commas in the second sentence?

Choice of words

A paragraph might be well edited but can still be let down by a cheesy choice of words.

For example “he boggled at her ample bosom” or “he approached the one-eyed monster”.

I know, right?

Build excitement

Even with widow and orphan control, a paragraph can still be split over two pages.

In the example below, the split paragraph directly follows the introduction and starts to describe intimate contact.

A page break after the introduction would instead add to the tension, given the words in the last sentence “I can already feel myself become excited as I realise what they could do.”

Go with the flow

Convention dictates that new stories in a book of short stories should start on a right-hand page.

However, I’m not a conventional person and my readers aren’t going to want to turn a page just as things start getting interesting.

The first example shows a conventional layout.

Instead, I will start this story on the left-hand page so that the reader has more time to get into the story before they have to turn the page.

Gimmie pictures… erm, no, on second thoughts!

There must be a great temptation by erotica authors to entice readers with pictures and photos. However, I think that the power of a written literary form is that the reader’s own imagination is added to what is described on paper.

For example, in my story The Train (excerpted above), I don’t state the gender of the person telling the story. I know what I imagined when I wrote The Train, but the omission means that both male and female readers can place themselves in the story. A “helpful” picture would constrain the story.

There’s then the issue of what people find attractive or unappealing.

If I put a photo of a sensual couple on the cover, I’ve already narrowed expectation to the scenarios described and the physical types (e.g., white, slim, brunette). Maybe my readers have other preferences.

By keeping physical descriptions sparse, and by not providing any pictures, my readers can supply their own descriptions to the blank canvases of my characters: flexibility in simplicity.

Was this book written for me?

I’m not a trained graphic designer but I did work hard on a typographic style that would appeal to both men and women.

Too feminine?

Too masculine?

A happy collaboration:

I refer to the book as fingers & tongues because the lowercase letters conveys the right amount of informality.

The result

Usually, erotica is written by women and has a female-dominated audience. Mainstream porn is made for men.

There also seems to be a disconnect between what we know to be true (women enjoy sex too) and what is acceptable to say in public (women enjoy sex too). We still have a long way to go to address women’s perceived role in society (wife, mother, cook, cleaner, madonna, whore).

However, I believe that I have been successful in crafting a book of erotic stories that appeal equally to men and women.

See my book’s pitch on Kickstarter.

You can now buy fingers & tongues as a paperback or e-book.

To young men and women

Women AND men are the subject of unfair gender socialisation and sexism. I can see that a post directed to young women is needed to counter-balance John’s post directed to young men. However, his post is very important because of the extra difference in biology: men have to make MORE of an effort because they have to also temper natural sex urges. Not doing so can result in physically and psychologically harming women.

The beginning of #YesAllWomen

After Elliot Rodger went on his murderous rampage, a woman started the #YesAllWomen hashtag on Twitter. (Elliot Rodger wanted to punish the world because no girl wanted to have sex with him. He was 22, a virgin and ashamed of it. Sex was the source of power. Elliot Rodger felt powerless, therefore not a man.) The intent of the hashtag was for women to use it to share their experiences of sexism, sexual harassment and violence.

The first week was really awesome, heart-breaking, inspiring and tragic. It got a lot of press coverage and about one million tweets in the first week.

What happened next

In the following weeks, a lot of anti-feminist men and women joined in, JUST to pick arguments with women using the hashtag (saying they deserved the rape, were ugly, were a feminazi, were exaggerating or lying). They also co-opted the hashtag and used it with disparaging comments about women (such as, “3/10 get raped? Let’s make it 100% #YesAllWomen”). Many men have created anonymous accounts JUST to harass women using the #YesAllWomen hashtag.

I have dipped in and out of the hashtag for the last 6 weeks. I support women who are being attacked for recounting their experiences, and I try to counter anti-female comments (women are bad as dogs, women are only good for sex, women are stupid, women always lie, women only want men for their money, women have cheated men out of jobs, women don’t have it any worse than men, sex is something that men do to women and finally, “shut up and stop whining”).

How can we change things?

I have read the tweets of hundreds of men and women in the context of my own experience and my psychology degree. I have come to a conclusion: if we are to make significant changes in gender bias, we need to start talking to our children differently.

For the rest of us, we can make small dents but it’s too late.

Gender socialisation

From the moment we’re born, we are told, taught and trained what is expected of us because of our gender. The first compliment “ooh, what a pretty girl” (to a baby dressed in pink) or “what a strong boy!” (to a baby dressed in blue) is the first of constant gender socialisation messages. Girls get skirts and dresses (impractical for playing), boys get trousers. Girls get toys of dolls, kitchen sets, make-up kits, jewellery kits. Boys get toys of guns, soldiers, cars, construction, puzzles.

As we grow up, we are bombarded DAILY with messaging that girls are pretty and that boys and strong – from what people say, adverts, posters, films, TV, the people we see around us.

We also reaffirm and pass these gender roles to others. The resulting gender roles are NOT innate, they are conditioned. And we are ALL complicit in perpetuating them.

Girls make themselves pretty for boys (although they don’t realise that’s what they are doing) and boys feel entitled to what the girls are “offering”.

We have commoditised women’s bodies. We have cheapened women by encouraging and then exploiting their sexuality and their nakedness in adverts, on posters, in TV and in films. The goods are willingly displayed but then we’re surprised when men want to handle the goods.

Girls are valued for their sexual attractiveness

Girls are taught from a very young age that they are valued on their looks. They are expected, encouraged and reminded to pluck, shave, wax (even though it hurts, takes time and costs money), wear make-up (costs a lot of money), show cleavage, wear skirts (some secondary schools with uniforms forbid girls to wear trousers) and show skin. They are praised, VALIDATED and rewarded for their looks.

Girls as young as 10 on Instagram are making selfies using sexualised poses they have seen on TV. They don’t know what it means but they do know that such as thing is valued in society. At 10, they have already found and chosen their role models of what it means to be a successful woman.

It’s too late to say to someone wearing provocative clothes to “be modest” – the damage is already done. And you’re still competing with ongoing daily messaging that being immodest is greatly valued.

Is it our choice?

As teenagers and adults, women might think that they freely make these decisions about plucking their eyebrows, say, or wearing make-up. But, because the relentless conditioning started from before they could even speak, they have had actual little choice in the matter.

This is also true of Muslim women who cover their hair or wear burqas – they do so because they WANT to. The same forces that make women want to cover their bodies with burqas are THE SAME forces that make Western women want to make women show their bodies.

We must take responsibility of what we have done – and are doing – to girls.

Unfair to boys too

Similarly, boys are conditioned to conform to their designated gender roles (be strong, don’t cry, be brave, be the initiator of sex, don’t be vain).

Yes, men AND women have been conditioned with gender roles (gender is cultural, by the way). However, the unfairness doesn’t result in equivalent harm: every day, women are being attacked, raped and murdered just because of their gender.

Impact on women

The impact of women’s gender role is that they are seen as sexual prey, as intellectually limited (lower pay for same job), not mathematical or scientific (passed over for less qualified men). They are also denied combat roles and are considered the better parent for custody by default (both unfair to men).

The next generation

This is why we need to talk to the next generation differently. We must tell BOTH girls and boys that they are strong, clever, handsome, brave. We must not dress only girls in pink and only boys in blue. We mustn’t give people the visual cue to alter their behaviour.

We must give the girls and boys toys that will help them grow as people who can contribute fully to society, regardless of their gender. And don’t limit them by saying what they should or shouldn’t do because of their gender.

As adults, we’ve all been contaminated by conditioning. We can’t tell men “not to rape” or women not to dress indecently because it’s too late. Women are conditioned throughout their lives to make themselves attractive to men. You can’t compete with decades of conditioning.

Hello Ruby

Linda Liukas’ book Hello Ruby – to teach programming concepts for children – is an example of the kind of thing I think we need to be doing. The main character is a young girl. (Note that Linda didn’t pitch her book as feminist.)

Red Pill, MRA and PUA

I commented earlier about Red Pill ideology. There is also Mens Right Activism (MRA) and Pick-Up Artistry (PUA).

PUA teaches young men skills to get women to “put out” – women are only seen as providers of sex, they have no further use. These men don’t want a relationship; they think that love is for “niceguys” (whom they disparage). They seem to be completely unaware that sex can be a collaboration and not just something that a man does to a woman, after he has manipulated her into it.

The Internet (for all its awesomeness) has made it easy for young men to find these anti-women communities. The forums are full of posts that confirm their way of thinking. The online communities act as echo chambers; the same misinformation goes round and round, reaffirming itself in the reader’s mind.

Join the battle

If there is a battle to be fought (and I think that there is), joining these forums to counter the misinformation would be one thing we could do. However, you would need thick skin, nerves of steel and the patience of a saint. If not, the population of socially-immature, angry young men is just going to grow. And then they will grow up to be dysfunctional boyfriends, husbands and fathers.

If you’d like to join the battle on Twitter, I am using my @PootDibou account for #YesAllWomen discussions.

I have documented some of my Twitter debates on Storify:

• My #YesAllWomen tweets followed by an argument
• Not understanding #YesAllWomen – on wearing make-up
• #YesAllWomen “holy shit” then “bullshit” – haters and deniers
• #YesAllWomen is sexist – whether women being wary of men to keep safe is sexist.

Naomi:
It’s so important for citizens to act as journalists in a time when the Police State is cracking down on us.

What I am mean by that is, we’re so bombarded with propaganda and spin.

It is so crucial, for every single one of you, to not leave it to the gate-keepers, not leave it to the journalists or editors but to take yourselves as journalists and editors so seriously.

And value truth and accuracy. And check data. Check your facts. Don’t take anything by anyone’s assertion. Don’t take it on faith. Check it for yourself and really respect evidence and facts.

Because otherwise we live in China. We live in a Police State.

YouTube: youtu.be/5z7nteHMPJ8

Context

@ 27:23

Karen: If you look at the National Organization for Women and their extended, long, long history of advocacy against shared parenting legislation. Shared parenting being a …

Naomi: What’s their position now, today?

Karen: Their position now, today, is that they still oppose it.

Naomi: They oppose shared parenting?

Karen: They oppose any legislation that would impose a rebuttable presumption of shared parenting.

Antigone: Is shared parenting what it sounds like?

Karen: Shared parenting after divorce would be 50:50, 60:40 [indistinct] your time right.

Naomi: Are you sure that’s not in the case of the guy being abusive or violent?

Karen: No, what they’re saying is that they will not support any legislation that would make the starting point in a divorce be that, if neither parent is unfit and both parents want it, shared parenting is the starting point.

Naomi: I have to see that citation because that does not sound right to me.

@ 30:48

Antigone: In college, which was like a decade ago, I read an official statement from NOW that said: all father’s rights groups are pederasts.

Naomi. Oh my god.

Antigone: It was official, from NOW. So guess how many times I listen to NOW?

Naomi: Wait, this was in college? In college? Like, it was an actual source? Because there is a lot of nonsense on the Internet too that attributes to groups of feminism

Antigone: It was online and in an official, public… So I don’t listen to them any more.

@ 31:18

Naomi: The journalist in me is uncomfortable with this because we are saying, “oh, there is all this” positioning, but we don’t have any evidence.

Can someone just Google National Organisation of Women and what’s their position on shared parenting? And do they say that men’s groups are pederasts?

woman in audience stands up: I actually really Googled off that particular page. But they actually said they opposed forced shared parenting.

Karen: None of the legislation would force shared parenting.

woman: I’m just saying what they said.

Naomi: You see, there is a big difference (pointing between Karen and the woman).

[talking over each other]

Karen: No, but they opposed the legislation.

[talking over each other]

Karen: They opposed the legislation by portraying it as something that would be forced.

Naomi, pointing to the woman: She just has the citation.

Can I just say something about accuracy and sourcing? And I’m saying this from the heart and it’s in respect to you (turning to Karen). Okay?

It’s so important for citizens to act as journalists in a time when the Police State is cracking down on us.

etc.

Click to see my Kickstarter campaign

Summary

I ran my first Kickstarter campaign 30 Apr-21 May in 2014 to raise funds to print a book of my erotica.

This was the first time I’ve marketed anything. I decided to document my experience. My campaign was successfully funded.

• prepare campaign page on Prefundia
• cultivate followers on Twitter
• contact people I know
• contact people I don’t know
• blog about my Kickstarter experience
• get book and story reviews

You can now buy fingers & tongues as a paperback or e-book.

Plan on Prefundia

I planned my campaign page on Prefundia. Knowing that my campaign was under the public gaze focussed me. My campaign text went through MANY iterations before it felt right.

If someone likes a project they see on Prefundia, they can sign up to be notified when the campaign is launched.

I posted the Prefundia page to Facebook to get feedback and to introduce my project to my contacts.

Ask people for a £1 pledge

In the week before the launch of my campaign, I contacted most of my friends, family and acquaintances for support.

I contacted everyone with a personal message using the medium I usually used to communicate with them.

I asked for a £1 pledge only, explaining that a campaign that had backers would look popular and attract more attention.

• Facebook (125 people)
• LinkedIn (98)
• Twitter (85)
• e-mail (23)

I included a link to my Prefundia page. I created a step-by-step guide to making a pledge for those who had never used Kickstarter before.

I kept a note of people who expressed an interest or who said they weren’t interested. I also kept a note of who retweeted me.

I also posted campaign-related photos on Instagram during my campaign (I have a lot of toy photography followers).

Twitter

I personalised tweets to people I knew in the salutation so that they would know they were getting a personal message.

I cultivated followers – people who might be interested in my book – on Twitter on my second account. These were sex writers and reviewers, and sex toy bloggers.

I found them by searching for certain words (erotica, porn) and followed them. After a few days, I unfollowed anyone who hadn’t followed back using ManageFlitter. I had read about this technique in one of the crowdfunding posts I’d read.

I tweeted 309 people who followed me but that with whom I had had no prior contact. @SexInWords was one of these followers. He tweeted about my campaign for the three weeks it ran.

Launch day

After launching the campaign on Kickstarter I contacted everyone I’d contacted before who had expressed an interest in the campaign or who hadn’t replied.

I gave them a link to my campaign page, again asking for a £1 pledge. For my Twitter contacts, I made a page on my blog with my my request for support and a link to the how-to guide.

Thank everyone

I acknowledged every reply in the medium I’d contacted people. I also profusely thanked anyone who expressed an interest in my project or who said they would back my campaign.

A week into the campaign, I contacted those people who said they would pledge but who hadn’t yet.

Contacting bloggers

I researched and contacted about 50 related bloggers (erotica, sex shop, masturbation or feminist porn) and contacted them by Twitter or e-mail.

I found this very hard – contacting people out of the blue. My message must not have been compelling because my activities only resulted in two retweets and no backers.

Reviewers

Two of the people following me on Twitter had blogs – one to review erotica and other to review sex toys and books. I asked both for a review. They both did it at short notice while the campaign was running.

The reviews provided me with material I could post in an update and, later, in my back cover text.

Editors

During the campaign, I was contacted by two people – one via Twitter and one via a Kickstarter blog post – offering to edit my book.

I eventually had four potential editors. I chose two editors based on their work on my shortest short story after the campaign was funded.

Promotion services

New to marketing, I tried different paid promotion services.

Fiverr.com – I paid for tweets by sex-related accounts with thousands of followers. I wrote the tweet to include a bitly link to my Prefundia page. Bitly gives some useful stats. I got some retweets and link views but no backers this way.

I also used Fiverr to get a review of my stories and to write headlines. The headlines were especially good value for money and resulted in “Smart erotica with women and men as sexual collaborators.” I used the reviews and headlines in my campaign page.

Backercamp – (originally gofounder.com) I paid $9.99+ for tweets during my campaign. I sent them a graphic to use and headlines. They sent out some well-composed tweets.

Kicktraq – for the last 4 days of my campaign, I paid for a banner ad on Kicktraq.

They also linked to the book review on Christina Harding’s review blog. I don’t think I got any backers with either of these.

CoPromote – with the several hundred followers I’d cultivated on Twitter, I used that account to get tweets send by other people using CoPromote. I found out about this service via WordPress.

It’s a system where people send out tweets for each other. You get credits for each tweet you share by other people. You can then use these credits to ask for your own tweets to be promoted by other people.

The stats for one of my CoPromote campaigns is below.

The CoPromote campaign was seen by a lot of Twitter accounts but it’s likely that many of these weren’t real people. I checked the followers of some of the people who shared my tweets and saw that they were automated accounts.

What was effective?

Contacting people I know was the most effective. This is part of the advice I read in crowdfunding campaigns. I found it hard to ask people for help. However, it was made easier by only asking for £1.

Even though I only asked for £1 pledge, many of my contacts pledged more and asked for the book in rewards. Three of my contacts felt so strongly about the principle of my book that they backed at the £125 level (rename a character). A backer I didn’t know also pledged at this level. He had found out about the campaign when one of my contacts posted about the project on Facebook. This was a source of other backers I didn’t know.

Number of pledges by discovery method

The percentage of pledges by how people heard about the campaign.

Facebook message – 42%
Twitter – prior engagement – 16%
via contact’s FB wall post – 11%
via Kickstarter – 10%
e-mailed – 8%
LinkedIn – 5%
unknown – 5%
via my blog post – 1%
via Instagram – 1%
via retweet – 1%
Twitter – no prior engagement – 0%

Success rate by promotion activity

e-mailed – 30.4%
Facebook message – 29.6%
Twitter – prior engagement – 16%
LinkedIn – 4%
via Instagram – 0%
Twitter – no prior engagement – 0%

Percentage funding by promotion activity

LinkedIn – 38%
e-mailed – 18%
via my blog post – 16%
via Instagram – 12%
via Kickstarter – 9%
via contact’s FB wall post – 4%
via retweet – 2%
Facebook message – 2%
unknown – 2%
Twitter – no prior engagement – 0.3%
Twitter – prior engagement – 0.1%

For comparison

Via Kickstarter

Some people backed my campaign after finding out about in on Kickstarter:

• browsing
• Newly Listed campaigns
• what a friend has backed
• London campaigns
• Fiction campaigns
• I backed their campaign

After the campaign

After a campaign has ended the campaign page can’t be edited. I prepared the changes in advance by copying over the text to a word processor, recording changes.

An hour before the campaign ended, I changed the Kickstarter page to its permanent post-campaign version. I referred to the document I had prepared, using the Show Changes feature so that I could make the same edits to the campaign page itself.

I created a replacement graphic to use when the campaign had reached its funding goal. This appears at the top of my campaign page. This main campaign image is also used as the campaign thumbnail in Kickstarter search results.

I added a new linked “click here” graphic at the top of the campaign page. I’d seen what Commodity Goods had done on their ended campaign page. I saved their image to a scrapbook and made a similar image near the end my campaign.

This image clicks through to a page on my web site which is a Launchrock form. It will later be an order form for the book.

Launchrock

I created a Launchrock sign-up form.

Launchrock is a service for people who are about to launch their site or product. It creates a widget to embed on a customised sign-up form your own web site.

Launchrock provides some stats on page views and maintains the list of people who sign up.

I’ve had a few sign-ups through Launchrock. It’s definitely worth doing again.

What I will do different next time

I won’t contact followers I don’t know on LinkedIn and Twitter. It is very time-consuming with zero success.

I will use Thunderclap.

I will get reviews before the campaign launches.

I will figure out how to approach relevant bloggers.

Promotion timeline

6 Feb	Facebook	any suggestions of campaign rewards for a book of erotica?	No Likes 3 Comments (2p)
28 Feb	Facebook Twitter	waiting for approval for my Prefundia page	2 Likes 6 Comments (3p)
1 Mar	Facebook	link to a live Kickstarter for an erotica book – I attempted to start a discussion of erotica vs. porn.	No Likes No Comments
3 Mar	Prefundia pre-campaign page is approved and goes live
3 Mar	Facebook Twitter	any feedback on my Prefundia page?	1 Like No Comments
6 Mar	Twitter	5 tweets documenting preparing my campaign #pkick	No Retweets No Favourites
7 Mar	Twitter	Kickstarter has been approved my campaign after one day #pkick	No Favourites No Retweets
8 Mar	Twitter	started researching blogs to approach to promote my book #pkick	1 Favourite No Retweets
9 Mar	Twitter	how not to do a Kickstarter campaign – link #pkick	1 Favourite 1 Retweet
11 Mar	Twitter	beginning to record my stories for my campaign video #pkick	1 Favourite No Retweets
11 Mar	Twitter	sad having to create images of text – image #pkick	1 Favourite No Retweets
12 Mar	Twitter	I made my first ever video, a campaign video #pkick	No Favourites No Retweets
12 Mar	Facebook	I made my first ever video, a campaign video	2 Likes No Comments
12 Mar	Twitter	I love the first and last 10 secs of my campaign video #pkick	No Favourites No Retweets
17 Mar	Twitter	contacting guys who sent me feedback on my erotica 20 years ago #pkick	No Favourites No Retweets
25 Mar	Twitter	asking @TristanTaomino whether her show would like to use a story in voices	No Favourites No Retweets
27 Mar	Twitter	struggling to write my campaign page, I wrote about my feminist porn	No Favourites No Retweets
27 Mar	Facebook	My feminist porn blog post	2 Likes No Comments
27 Mar	Twitter	followup to @emilydubberly of Cliterati	No Favourites No Retweets
28 Mar	Twitter	my feminist porn essay got me two Prefundia followers	No Favourites No Retweets
28 Mar	Facebook	improvements – before & after pre-campaign page	No Likes No Comments
1 Apr	Facebook	170 views that day to my Prefundia page	No Likes No Comments
2 Apr	Twitter	4 CoPromoters tweet links to my blog post about feminist porn	2 Retweets
2 Apr	Facebook	headlines from ralphie2 on fiverr.com – any faves?	1 Like Comments (4p)
2 Apr	Twitter	I ask @EllenPage for a retweet	No Favourites No Retweets
3 Apr	Twitter	two paid tweets by someone from fiverr.com with LGBT followers	1 Favourite No Retweets
6 Apr	Twitter	“My feminist porn,” an essay by @paolability exploring the use of written erotica as a tool – link	2 Favourites
8 Apr	Twitter	1 CoPromoted tweet to my feminist porn blog post	No Retweets No Favourites
Apr	Twitter	excited in the run-up to my first crowdfunding campaign, to publish erotica	No Favourites No Retweets
26 Apr	Facebook	would you only want to pledge £1 if you could do it anonymously?	3 Likes 14 Comments (5p)
26-27 Apr	Twitter	I ask 190 of @paolability‘s followers to back my campaign at £1 when my it launches – Prefundia bitly link	28 Favourites 3 Retweets
27 Apr	Twitter	I ask 64 of @PootDibou’s followers to back my campaign at £1 when my it launches – Prefundia bitly link	6 Favourites 4 Retweets
27 Apr	Twitter	I tweet @SexInWords a retweetable tweet with link to my feminist porn post	2 Favourites 1 Retweet
27 Apr	Facebook	I’ve contacted loads of Twitter followers, with some success	2 Likes No Comments
27 Apr	Facebook	What I have learned so far blog post	4 Likes 2 Comments
29 Apr	Facebook	Why Kickstarter? blog post	1 Like 8 Comments (3p)
29 Apr	Twitter	I tweet @CrowdCrux a link to my pre-campaign blog post	No Favourites No Retweets
29 Apr	Twitter	link to blog post about why I chose Kickstarter over Indiegogo	No Favourites No Retweets
30 Apr	Kickstarter campaign launches @ 5pm BST
30 Apr	Facebook	link to the fingers & tongues live Kickstarter page	1 Likes 1 Share 2 Comments (2p)
30 Apr	Twitter	I follow-up with 25 contacts, new followers and anyone else who expressed an interest previously + 12 Kickstarter accounts – campaign link	1 Favourite 2 Retweets
1 May	Twitter	link to blog post about choosing Kickstarter to @crowdfundbacker	No Favourites No Retweets
2 May	Facebook	do you have any feedback on these new pledge levels?	No Likes 5 Comments (3p)
2 May	Twitter	I follow-up with 47 @PootDibou followers and 2 Kickstarter accounts – campaign link	9 Favourites 6 Retweets
2 May	Tumblr Instagram Twitter		15 Likes 4 Comments
2 May	Tumblr Instagram		15 Likes 2 Comments
2 May	Kickstarter	campaign update #1 – 35% funded within 24hrs	1 Like No Comments
2 May	Facebook	link to campaign update #1	5 Likes 1 Share No Comments
3 May	Tumblr Instagram Twitter		10 Likes No Comments
3 May	Kickstarter	campaign update #2 – on book design	1 Like No Comments
4 May	Facebook	link to campaign update #2	2 Likes 2 Shares No Comments
4 Apr	Twitter	I engage with 2 people who recently tweeted fingers and tongues	No Favourites No Retweets
6 May	Tumblr Instagram		12 Likes No Comments
7 May	Facebook	link to Kickstarter campaign page	2 Likes 1 Share No Comments
7 May	Facebook	my mum asked me what my book was about…	11 Likes 12 Comments (6p)
7 May	Kickstarter	campaign update #3 – 57% funded at end of week 1	No Likes No Comments
7 May	Facebook	link to campaign update #3	6 Likes 5 Comments (2p)
8 May	Tumblr Instagram		15 Likes No Comments
9 May	Facebook	link to BBC news story in feminist porn	1 Like No Comments
9 May	Facebook	link to a college essay on feminist porn	No Likes No Comments
9 May	Facebook	link to my guide to Indiegogo – for people who want to back anonymously	1 Like No Comments
9 May	Facebook	about the next backer being #69	2 Likes No Comments
10 May	Facebook	about a radical feminist I met when discussing feminist porn on Twitter	1 Like No Comments
11 May	Facebook	link to my Kickstarter campaign page	1 Like No Comments
11 May	Facebook	link to my Storify about feminist porn	1 Like No Comments
13 May	Facebook	mentioned my campaign in a status update	2 Likes No Comments
13 May	Kickstarter	campaign update #4 – 70% at the end of two weeks	1 Like No Comments
14 May	Facebook	link to Kickstarter campaign page	No Likes No Comments
16 May	Facebook	the money raised so far can cover reward fulfilment	3 Likes 1 Comment
16 May	Facebook	asking for suggestions of wording for Kicktraq banner	No Likes 8 Comments (3p)
17 May	Facebook	link to my Kickstarter page	No Likes No Comments
18 May	Kickstarter	campaign update #5 – 91% funded	No Likes No Comments
18 May	Facebook	link to campaign update #5	4 Likes No Comments
19 May	Facebook	link to Kickstarter campaign page	2 Likes 3 Shares 14 Comments (2p)
19 May	Kickstarter	campaign update #7 – book review	No Likes No Comments
19 May	Facebook	link to campaign update #7	4 Likes 1 Share No Comments
20 May	Kickstarter	campaign update #8 – £29 to go, 24hrs left	No Likes No Comments
20 May	Facebook	link to article about a successful Kickstarter	No Likes No Comments
20 May	Facebook	link to Kicktraq sponsors page where I had an ad	1 Like No Comments
20 May	Facebook	The usability of erotica blog post	No Likes 1 Share 2 Comments (2p)
21 May	Facebook	asking for feedback on my Launchrock page	No Likes No Comments
21 May	Facebook	link to second review	No Likes No Comments
21 May	Kickstarter	campaign update #9 – funded, with 21 hours to go	2 Likes 2 Comments
21 May	Kickstarter	campaign update #10 – second review	No Likes No Comments
21 May	Kickstarter campaign ends @ 5pm BST
21 May	Kickstarter	campaign update #11 – success!	1 Like No Comments
21 May	Facebook	successful campaign – thank you!	21 Likes 7 Comments (3p)

You can now buy fingers & tongues as a paperback or e-book.

Related posts

• blog: My feminist porn – why erotica?
• blog: What I have learned so far – pre-campaign research and activities
• blog: Why Kickstarter? – pros and cons of Kickstarter vs. Indiegogo
• blog: The usability of erotica – user-centred design applied to erotica
• Storify: How I promoted my erotica book on Twitter

I gave my second speech at Windsor Speakers Toastmasters in January 2014. It was for Project 2 “Organise your speech” from the Competent Communication Manual.

Transcript

When I meet people for the first time, I usually see a question in their eyes: why is your hair blue?

If they’re brave enough to ask me the question, they’re usually disappointed with the answer?

Why is your hair blue?

Because that’s the colour I dye it.

I answer the question they asked, not the question they intended: why have you made your hair BLUE?

To know the answer to that question, you have to know what happened to me four years ago.

However, the story of my blue hair starts forty years ago.

Why is your hair blue?

Because if I didn’t dye it, it’d be white, and who wants white hair? (Once said to a man with white hair.)

I inherited thick dark hair from my Indian father. But it started going white when I was a child.

By the time I got to university, it was about 5% white. I put pink dye on it, which had no effect on my dark hair but, in the sunlight, the white transformed into bright flashes of colour.

By the time I was forty, my hair was about half white and I was dying it a plum colour. And it was a plum until about four years ago.

Why is your hair blue?

It’s my favourite colour.

I love turquoise, which is a greeny blue. I have had other phases in clothes of green, pink and purple, but my love for turquoise has never diminished.

When I was at university, female students were told to wear white blouses and dark skirts underneath their graduation robes. I didn’t think it was right that I should look like a schoolgirl after having spent three years at university. So I went out and bought a bright turquoise dress.

When I had a fountain pen, I wrote in turquoise ink.

And when I had my wedding ring commissioned, I had real turquoise put inside it.

I think that my love of turquoise is very basic; I think it’s hard-wired into my brain. It seems to be pre-conscious. I’ll find myself drawn to a piece of art or some jewellery and only later realise that it is turquoise.

Why is your hair blue?

I think I’m turning into my online avatar, Poot Dibou.

I discovered Second Life in 2007. Second Life is an online virtual world where people meet to chat, dance, play and create.

In Second Life, I spend 95% of the time chatting and the rest on my avatar, Poot Dibou.

Poot originally started off with some things from me, five foot two and plum hair. Otherwise, she started off in a turquoise outfit.

Over time, I amassed a large collection of outfits for Poot. Outfits in Second Life mean clothes, wings and hair. In a couple of mouse clicks I could even tint Poot’s hair to match her clothes.

I began to see Poot as a blank canvas for self-expression.

Why is your hair blue?

It’s actually not my hair, it’s a wig.

Four years ago, I knowingly had cancer for five weeks. Five weeks was the time between my diagnosis and the results after my lumpectomy when I was told that they had taken the whole tumour out and that the cancer hadn’t spread. I actually didn’t have cancer anymore.

But there’s a belt-and-braces approach to cancer treatment and I took everything that was on offer, which was chemotherapy, radiotherapy and hormone therapy.

I decided to treat my impending hair loss as an opportunity for adventure.

I searched online and I found an eBay seller from Hong Kong who sold wigs for costumes and fancy dress. I made a short-list of wigs that I liked and posted them to my blog, where I was keeping my friends and family updated with my progress.

My short-list included a Lara Croft wig from Tomb Raider, colourful spikey wigs from Japanese role-playing games and (I love this phrase) an Oompa Loompa wig from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Surprise! I bought a blue wig. $18 from Hong Kong including shipping, which is a bargain!

And here it is!

Why is your hair blue?

It’s my chemotherapy wig.

I was really surprised that people thought that this (holds up wig) was my real hair. What, a middle-aged woman would dye her hair blue?!

I was even more surprised that my neighbours in Sunningdale, including an 84 year-old, thought that it suited me.

When my hair grew back, it grew back – initially – pure white and so soft that I thought I could charge people to touch it.

Just over three years ago, I was on a bus and a young in her twenties offered me her seat. As she got off, I said to her “why did you offer me your seat?” She looked up and said “your white hair.”

I didn’t want to look older so I rushed out and bought some hair dye – navy this time, not realising that it was permanent. It took six months for the colour to fade.

But, inspired by Poot, I started to experiment with colour: pink, purple, green but always with turquoise.

So, finally: why is your hair blue?

Because when my prematurely white hair grew back after chemotherapy, I decided to dye it my favourite colour.

The theme: women inspiring women

The brief: talk personally and frankly about yourself, about your education and experiences of being in the technology industry.

My name is Paola Kathuria. I was one of the first web developers in the UK.

You’re entitled to success.

You’re entitled to happiness.

However, I think that this kind of message has lost its meaning.

I’m going to share experiences from my education and career so that you can better understand the context when people like me tell young people like you to follow your dreams.

But first, I’m going to share some of the replies I received when I asked people online what advice they would give you.

From a user experience researcher:

Network & find a mentor.

From a project manager:

Do things that scare you.

And from a male troll:

[…]

Sexism is like death by a thousand cuts.

This “joke” about a woman’s place being in the kitchen is one of many small jabs you will experience in your life.

Each jab is designed to dent your confidence.

Each jab is a reminder of the restrictive role expected of girls: make yourself pretty, fall in love and get married.

Babies are even colour-coded so that people know whether to say “what a pretty girl” or “what a strong boy!”.

This kind of messaging continues throughout our lives – in clothes, in toys, on TV, in music, in adverts and in the language we use.

We have all been trained.

However, we are also the trainers.

This is who I am in Emoji.

• turquoise
• science fiction
• film music
• video games
• business improvement
• toy photography
• flowers
• musicals

Who are you in Emoji? :-)

Here is some more advice.

This from a female games developer:

Don’t let anyone stop you from speaking your truth.

And from another female programmer:

Know that you’re supposed to be there.

I’m half Italian and half Indian. I started off as a hybrid – it made me open-minded. Being an open-minded hybrid has been a theme that has continued throughout my life.

I got into science fiction when my brother gave me his books when I was 13.

I went to a girls school. We didn’t have computers in schools in the 1970s. My Indian father encouraged me to do maths and science.

Most girls at my school left at 15. Only 6 girls out of my year went to university.

One who wanted to do medicine was discouraged by the careers advisor who said it was too hard.

The careers advisor was a woman.

I took ‘A’ levels in Biology, Physics and Maths.

I was really bad at Physics. I didn’t speak up in class when I didn’t understand something which meant I got left behind.

My shyness and low self-esteem at the time stopped me from asking my teacher for help. I’m sure she would have helped me catch up if I had asked.

I went to the Physics open day at York University.

I didn’t feel I had anything in common with the people there. It didn’t feel right.

I had accepted a place at Leeds University for Biophysics & Maths.

I secretly wrote to Leeds and got my offer swapped to Psychology before I arrived. I wanted to know what made people tick.

My parents and physics teacher weren’t pleased. My dad said that psychology is what people do when they can’t get into medicine.

My parents wanted me to do physics so they could boast about me to their friends. However, I realised that I wouldn’t be happy if I lived their aspirations rather than my own.

Doing psychology was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. It’s always been useful.

For one of my final year options, I chose programming. They taught us BASIC.

I remember looking at this on the board in a class and wailing quietly to myself.

To someone with a maths background, this looks like an equation. But it’s not. The difficulty I had in “getting it” wasn’t because I was stupid but because the language itself is badly designed.

This is an assignment statement. The equals sign doesn’t mean equivalence. It means “becomes”.

A is a variable (think of it as a named container). Find out what value is in A. Add one to it. Over-write the value currently held in A.

It’s not intuitive because we read left-to-right. The result should be on the right, not the left.

I wanted to do a PhD in applied computing to psychology. However, you can’t apply for a PhD with a 2ii.

I got a 2ii in my psychology degree because I didn’t know I was smart. I thought I was mediocre. It never occurred to me to work hard at my degree. I thought that good degrees were what other people got.

I got a place on a Masters course, for people who had a first degree in anything other than computing.

Because of my head start in programming, I ended up helping my fellow students in projects. I became better at explaining and better at programming as a result.

On the Masters, I learnt COBOL, Pascal, Fortran, Prolog, 6502 Assembler and two simulation languages. I developed a simulation of a taxi service.

Stafford was a Polytechnic at the time. The 18-month Masters included 6 months in industry.

It’s one thing to be taught how things should happen, another to experience how it works in reality, when ego and insecurity and office politics are involved.

I got a place at the University of Kent at Canterbury for a DPhil in Applied Computing to Psychology. I had a female computing supervisor and male psychology supervisors.

I wanted to research cognitive psychology, using computers to build mental models. However, in my first year, my psychology supervisor persuaded me to computerise the Police Custody Record. This is the form the police have to fill in when somebody is in custody.

I designed, built and documented it by myself. I learnt TurboPascal to build it.

It was presented at a national police conference on computer-based tools. My psychology supervisor took all the credit.

In my second year, I still wanted to research cognitive psychology. However, my next psychology supervisor persuaded me to research how people used the library search engine.

I found that some people use too few keywords and get a lot of search results, whilst some people use too many and get no results. Hmmm!

I didn’t think that these “research findings” were worthy of a Doctorate.

Before Tim Berners-Lee invented the web browser and HTTP there were 30 million people already online using text-based bulletin boards, text-based chat and e-mail.

In January of my second year, I posted a question to a general chat board: “What word in the English language has the most consecutive consonants?”

I struck up my first ever e-mail correspondence with one of the guys who replied.

It was 1988. In three months we exchanged in e-mail the equivalent of a full-length novel.

I arranged to meet him in Leeds where he worked, on the pretext of going to a psychology conference.

The day before I left for Leeds, my supervisors said they didn’t think I was going to complete my DPhil. I was to leave at the end of the second year and could write up as an MPhil.

I met Frank on a Thursday. By the Sunday, we’d agreed to move in with each other. We’re still married.

I never wrote up my work as an MPhil. I had no pride in my research.

Realising that I could choose not to was a revelation.

Giving yourself permission to do – or not do – something is very powerful.

I got a job as a trainee C programmer at the company Frank worked at.

A guy started the same week in the same position as me. I later found out that he was being paid 25% more than me.

I’m sure that the salary difference was due to gender discrimination. However, there was another factor. He had lied in the interview.

We had been asked in our interviews whether we knew the operating system, Unix.

I had used Unix for two years at university as a user but not as a Unix developer. I therefore downplayed my Unix experience at the interview.

When my male colleague was asked at his interview whether he knew Unix, he said yes.

He was lying. He had never used Unix at all.

That was in 1989.

Here’s what a senior female technical engineer told me last week:

When I asked a sysadmin for help setting up my workstation at my new job, he came over to my desk and did it all for me without explaining what he was doing. This happened in later jobs, too. Maybe they thought they were being helpful, but it kept me ignorant.

To this day, I still don’t feel confident around hardware. :-/

In this job I learnt C, SQL and Curses (for creating text-based interfaces).

I learnt good user-interface design from the bad design, like this, by my colleague, the guy who had lied in his interview.

I realised that colour should be used to group similar items. Different colours for no reason adds unnecessary complexity.

I noticed a lot of mistakes in my colleague’s work. I explained to our manager why it was a problem. I was told to fix my colleague’s mistakes but not to tell him in case it “hurt his feelings”.

I felt humiliated. I felt unappreciated. The experience didn’t do my self-esteem any good.

I left after a year to create a start-up with other good people from that company.

More from @freebsdgirl

I recently attended another Women in Technology event, at a high school for girls.

I wanted to see what the speakers from various companies and organisations said to the girls. I also wanted to see the girls’ reactions.

I was watching their faces during one particularly inspirational talk about the achievements of women in various industries. The speaker told the girls to follow their dream, to aim high, to shoot for the moon.

The girls didn’t look inspired. They looked bored, as if they’d heard it often before and that the words had lost their meaning.

I thought about it afterwards and realised that the girls – and maybe you, too – might be missing some crucial context.

Most people are unhappy in their jobs.

They don’t look forward to going into work. They can’t wait till they can leave the office.

At my last two contracts, many of the designers and developers sat slumped in their chairs. Wearing headphones – cutting themselves off from their team – they’d spend hours on Facebook, watching videos on YouTube, chatting in Skype or shopping online.

Is that why you went to school and university? To find all the ways you can look busy while you wait for the time before you can escape?

No.

Of course not.

There are various reasons why people stay in places they know are wrong for them:

• they feel guilty
• they’re afraid of letting their family down
• they think that leaving is making a fuss (that they’re not worth it)
• they feel embarrassed because they made a mistake
• they believe that it will be just as bad, if not worse, somewhere else

Don’t be that person who doesn’t really want to be in their job. The developer who’s stopped caring about software quality, the user experience designer who doesn’t really care about users, the manager working against the company’s goals.

You are our future designers, developers and managers. For our sake and yours, find a job you enjoy doing, that you will therefore do well, and where you design and build products and services which delight your users.

When you start any job, you’ll have a probation period. That’s full pay but with a very short notice period. This is for the company to find out if you’re right for the job.

You must use this period to find out whether the company and job is right for you.

You will be able to tell in 2-3 weeks if you’re in the wrong place.

Do the people who work there want to be there? Do you feel that you are respected and listened to? In meetings, do people let you speak or do they talk over you? Do people arrive at meetings on time or do people wander in late with no apology? Do people participate in any activities outside work (pub, sports, board games, a work choir)?

If you realise that you’re in the wrong place, use your probation period to gain as much experience and skills as you can. Think about what it is that you don’t like about the job or the company so that you can formulate a question at interviews and avoid a similar situation.

My bug bear is ignoring expert opinion. So I have a question that I ask at interviews:

After a project has ended, how do you know that you have done a good job?

If a client has spent, say, £50,000 with you, how do you know that the money was well spent?

Back to 1991.

When the start-up didn’t succeed, I got a job at South Bank Poly to design and build a contacts database. I learnt HyperCard and FoxBASE, and used a Mac for the first time.

I was given the slowest computer. Each time I made a change to my code, I had to wait 20 minutes for it to compile before I could run it. I was asked to reorganise the filing at one point by my female manager.

I left after a year. It was not a good environment.

I quadrupled my salary the next week when I got a contract as a database developer at JP Morgan, the investment bank. They sent the three-person team on training for Omnis 7, a cross-platform front-end to Sybase.

At the interview, the manager sat back in his chair, his hands behind his head and his legs wide open. He asked me, “do you think you can cut it?”

I knew enough by then to know where this was coming from. I very quickly found out that I was just as accomplished, if not more so sometimes, than my male colleagues.

At the distillers Seagram, I ran the team to design and build a marketing planning system. They wanted to generate line graphs and bar charts from marketing data.

But Omnis 7 didn’t have a graphing capability. I created template Omnis reports with flattened line graphs and flattened bar charts. I wrote code to inject values into these flattened objects to set heights and labels to simulate graphs and charts.

This is a microcosm of the computing industry: constantly having to learn new things. And constantly having to find new ways to apply existing tools to new problems.

In 1995, I co-founded Limitless, one of the first web companies in the UK.

We didn’t have any investment. My two male business partners stayed in their computing contracts until the company could afford to pay them.

When Tesco announced that they were going to launch the UK’s first online wine-ordering system, Sainsbury’s asked if we could beat them. We designed and built an interactive wine-ordering system in a couple of weeks before scripting languages, SSL and state existed.

With Sainsbury’s on our portfolio – and at a time when most companies didn’t have a web site – people started to get in touch.

We used a company called Virtual Office to create the impression we had an office before we had the money to rent one. We bought a business address – 211 Piccadilly. When people called our office number, it was answered by Virtual Office with our company name. They would route calls to me at home.

I took all the calls from potential clients, asking them questions, finding out about them and what they wanted. I set up and attended meetings.

I also wrote proposals. I had a 44% success rate, double the average.

With all of us now full-time and in a new office at Limitless, I had set up a meeting with a flower delivery company who’d contacted us.

Two men from the company attended as well as me and my two male colleagues.

If we got the business, I would run the project: I’d define the requirements, design the user interface, hire graphic designers, do some development and manage the project.

Each time I asked the two male visitors questions, they looked at me blankly. They then turned to my male colleagues and addressed their answer to them.

None of us said anything at the time – but we didn’t take them on as a client.

Whenever I asked my male colleagues technical questions, I’d always get an answer with the same level of assured confidence. However, I’d often find out later that the information was wrong. So I began to follow-up each question with: “do you know for a fact or are you guessing?”

We need to learn this neat trick, to come across as confident even when we doubt ourselves.

Don’t give people an excuse to doubt you. Because if you do, they will.

Psychologists Dunning and Kruger examined people’s self-assessment of
 logical reasoning skills, grammatical skills and humour.

They found that the unskilled tended to rate their ability much higher than their actual ability, while the highly skilled tended to rate their ability lower than their actual ability.

Did you get that? People who aren’t skilled at a task, think they’re much better than they really are. People who are very skilled think that they are worse at it than they really are.

After being shown their test scores, people were asked to estimate their own ability again: the competent group accurately estimated theirs, while the incompetent group still overestimated theirs.

That means, if you think you’re not smart, you very well may be smart!

Because to think you’re not smart means you can imagine beyond what you know. You can see questions that you don’t have the answers to. You recognise that some people know more than you.

This awareness means that you’re smart. People who aren’t smart think they’re the smartest because they are oblivious to what else is knowable.

This represents 18 years working in my own companies, Limitless for five years, then Limitless Innovations.

I wrote winning proposals, hired and managed staff, ran projects, designed user interfaces, created content management systems, wrote hundreds of thousands lines of code and hundreds of pages of documentation.

I was able to maintain high quality and look after clients. In 15 years, we never had to go looking for business. Companies came looking for – and stayed with – us.

I had cancer four years ago. My hair turned blue.

After treatment, I returned to contracting for a couple of years. I wanted to see what it was like out there.

I have also sold over £15,000 of my own jewellery in an online shop I designed and built from scratch myself.

This year I ran a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund a book of short stories.

I’d originally written them 20 years ago for an online forum with a quarter of a million readers.

I learnt Audacity (to record/edit voice), iMovie (to make my campaign video), InDesign to create the book PDFs, and Sigil to make the ebooks.

Today is just the third time I’ve chosen to stand up and talk in front of people in a public place.

I avidly avoided public speaking until a year ago because I was so bad at it.

For example, for two years running, my ideas for online services were picked by the BBC for their Innovation Labs – ten short-listed companies in a hotel for a week to work up our ideas with mentors, pitching to commissioners at the end of the week.

I was so bad at public speaking that I didn’t even stand up – let alone talk – during the pitch, even though we were pitching my ideas.

I just sat at the front, advancing the slides by pressing a button.

I joined Toastmasters, a public speaking club a year ago July. It’s a structured setting where you learn public speaking by watching and doing.

My first Toastmaster’s speech was surprisingly good. I realised that I had been my biggest critic and my worst enemy.

In believing that I was a bad public speaker, I created the fear and nerves that made me a bad public speaker.

By deciding to join Toastmasters, I had turned away from the door marked “I can’t do it” and I stepped through the door marked “I will learn to do it.”

I was immediately better.

You – too – have a voice.

Use it.

There’s nothing special about my being here that you can’t do for yourself.

The hardest bit is realising and deciding that you can do it.

Because I … want to see you fly.

I gave my seventh speech at Windsor Speakers Toastmasters in March 2015. It was for Project 7 “Research Your Topic” from the Competent Communication Manual.

Listen to my speech with slides on YouTube.

Or, if you prefer, the slides and narration follow.

Have you ever heard people say:

“we shouldn’t label people”

“we should take people at face value”

“stereotypes are harmful”

Image sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-p-stadtlander/right-and-wrong-good-and-_b_5504133.html
http://imgarcade.com/1/labeling-people/
http://www.ditchthelabel.org/

Fellow Toastmasters (and very welcome guests), I’m going to tell you how interpreting this…

photo tells us that stereotypes are actually inevitable.

Some of you might have seen this photo last week.

It was seen and discussed by millions of people who couldn’t agree on whether the dress was black and blue or white and gold.

Perception is not passive.

We automatically factor in the light source when deciding what colour something is.

Daylight and light from fluorescent bulbs is blueish.

Whilst light from incandescent bulbs is yellow.

However, objects appear the same colour under different light conditions.

That’s the same photo from before. The only difference is its context.

Here is same dress shown on sale.

It’s black and blue, right?

When we don’t have enough information to determine the light source, the colour we see depends on the assumed light source.

If we assume a yellow light source, the dress is black and blue.

If we assume a blue light source, the dress is white and gold.

I’m going to demonstrate some more perceptual gymnastics now.

Image source: Claire Hummel / @shoomlah

Are the blocks A and B the same or different shades of grey?

Are these skewed blocks the same or different colour?

Now, do you see the blocks A and B as the same grey or different?

They are the same.

I haven’t changed them from the previous slide.

This is the Checker Shadow Illusion by Edward Adelson.

We see block B as lighter than A because various visual cues tell us that B is in shadow.

We adjust our perception of block B accordingly.

Here, I’ve colorised each shade of grey to show how this illusion is constructed.

Do the blocks A and B look the same colour to you now?

That’s because these blurred rings are no longer interpreted as a shadow.

By 4 months, babies can group dogs together and can recognise that cats are different from dogs.

This is an extraordinary accomplishment if you note that, at 4 months babies don’t even know the words “cat” or “dog”.

And also if you bear in mind that dogs and cat look very similar.

The developmental psychologist, Piaget, described children as “Little Scientists”.

They perceive the world by forming hypotheses and testing them.

As we are exposed to more and more variations, we split, expand or refine our categories.

Categories, groupings, labels, stereotypes – they are all the same thing. Necessary short-cuts.

I will demonstrate.

Image source: mindbrain.ucdavis.edu/labs/Oakes/research

What is this?

Okay, so you can recognise it from a distance.

But can you accurately draw both sides of a 2p coin from memory?

These all look different. And yet we know that these are all 2p coins because they look similar to other 2p coins we’ve encountered.

What if, each time you encountered a 2p coin, you had to figure out what is was from scratch? You couldn’t rely on the context, its size, colour, weight, patterns.

Now apply that to all coins. You have to work out what each coin is from scratch, every time.

Now apply that to all money.

Now apply that to all chairs, doors, tables, pubs, restaurants, nurses, policemen.

Every object. Every animal. Every person.

Every. Single. Thing.

If we have a word for it, it’s already a general category.

For example, the word “tree” doesn’t include the description of every variation of every tree – small, large, green, red, in winter, in blossom.

However, we can use the word “tree” and people still know what we mean.

Without categories this is what the world would look like. Noise.

Without categories, we’d have to explore the world with all of our senses to figure what was around us – for every thing, every time.

Stereotypes are the by-product of automatically grouping things into categories.

Without the ability to make and perceive categories, we could not survive.

I will gradually remove the noise from this photo.

When do you see what it is?

#1

#2

#3

#4

#5

#6

#7

#8

#9

#10

#11

#12

#13

#14

In conclusion:

• so you can’t accurately draw a 2p coin from memory
• you see the dress as white and gold rather than black and blue

Those aren’t failures.

They are all signs of extraordinary success as a species.

Give yourself a round of applause. You deserve it. You are all extraordinary.

Within a few minutes of watching the programme, I started to get annoyed. My husband only managed 10 minutes of it before he had to leave the room.

I waited till the end to see if my hunch was right. Yes, the main researchers, the Producer and the Director were all male.*

* Disclaimer: I don’t hate men. I don’t think that sexism only happens to girls and women. I don’t think that sexism is only perpetrated by men.

For context, I have degrees in psychology and computing. I co-founded one of the first web companies in the UK (and it’s still in business). I am equally comfortable running requirements workshops, designing user interfaces, designing databases or programming.

What’s great about Girls Can Code

The title.

Eileen Burbidge, co-founder of Passion Capital.

What’s not great about Girls Can Code

1) “No need to show off!”

This part of the narration was what finally compelled me to blog about this programme.

The narration in context:

Next stop on our tour of opening the girls’ minds is to show them the money.

Alex and I have come to meet a true inspiration. Eileen Burbidge, co-founder of Passion Capital, one of the newest and coolest investment companies in tech.

[…]

Eileen is at the very heart of UK tech. In the summer, she was made the Government’s tech envoy.

No need to show off!

If you don’t know what’s wrong with saying “no need to show off!” just AFTER listing a woman’s accomplishments in a male-dominated industry in a documentary about encouraging young women into the industry, then SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH YOU.

2) They’re not “girls”

The five people whose journey into tech was being documented ARE NOT GIRLS.

They are over 18. They are young women.

By referring them to “girls” deliberately, and throughout the programme, their standing in society is undermined.

3) “all [social media] apps were started by men”

Not true. Ning, Eventbrite, Polyvore, BlogHer, Meebo, Digital Fan Clubs. There’s probably more. Sack your (two male) researchers.

By saying that only men built all the social media apps, they’re reinforcing the misinformation that building digital business isn’t for women.

4) “selfie queens”

“They might find they’ve gone from selfie queens to digital queens”

“Can our selfie queens go from digital zeroes to start-up heroes?”

Patronising. They’re already using tech to take and share selfies.

More importantly, one of the key factors in gender stereotyping is valuing girls and women by their looks. Interest in make-up and fashion is manufactured – it’s not innate. In the rest of the animal kingdom, it’s the male of the species that has colourful displays.

I honestly think that the main reason girls and women have low confidence is because their worth is judged by OTHER people on, literally, surface attributes.

Referring to these young women as “selfie queens” perpetrates every sexism that girls are obsessed with their looks without recognising WHY that might be the case.

5) Example apps reinforce gender stereotypes

Imagined conversation in the production meeting:

A: “What are girls interested in?”

B: “Shopping, make-up, boys and fashion”

A: “Great, we’ll show them apps about make-up and fashion!”

First they are taken to a company that has created an app for digital make-up.

Then they’re taken to an agency tasked with bridging the gap between fashion and technology.

Instead, ask yourself WHY don’t women feel welcome in the computing world? Might it be because the message they’ve had from the moment they’re born is that they are valued on their looks? Why reinforce the very stereotype that’s keeping them out of tech? *facepalm*

Conclusion

I’m embarrassed by the documentary “Girls Can Code”.

I’m embarrassed for the BBC.

I’m embarrassed for Eileen Burbidge.

I’m embarrassed for all the people who appeared on the programme who might have had twinges of “umm, is this right?” whilst grappling with the need to encourage more young women into computing.

In the end, I think that this programme will do more harm than good. It reinforces gender stereotypes and undermines women, whilst asking “hmm, I wonder why there aren’t more girls in tech”.

To the researchers, Producer and Director of “Girls Can Code”. Sorry, boys, but You’re Part of the Problem.

Update: I storified the reaction to this blog post and similar comments on the TV programme.

As a result, I was invited to film a short review for BBC1 Points of View. My review was under two minutes with clips. I couldn’t cover all the points I wanted. Below are all the notes I prepared for filming.

Review notes for Girls Can Code

I was super excited to see a short series called “Girls Can Code” on BBC3 in the TV schedule.

I’ve worked in the computing industry for over 25 years and I wanted to see how the low percentage of women in technology would be addressed.

After a few minutes of watching the programme, I started to get annoyed.

Can Girls Code? If you’d watched this series, your answer would be a resounding no.

Let’s turn it around.

Can boys bake cakes? Can boys sew?

I give you The Great British Bake-Off and The Great British Sewing Bee. In these series, the gender of the male contestants and this year’s Sewing Bee male winner was never made an issue.

Why are there so few women in tech? It’s not because they’re not capable. Remember the bit in the first episode where young schoolgirls were teaching programming?

The real issue is: why aren’t women APPLYING for jobs in technology?

“Girls Can Code” not only didn’t address this question, it reinforced the negative stereotypes that discourage women from entering the digital industry.

What was great about “Girls Can Code”?

The title. If it’d actually been about girls coding.

What wasn’t great was the way the five women were repeatedly undermined.

Firstly, by referring to young adults as “girls”, they were infantilised, their status diminished.

Consider this clip from the second episode:

Narration: “Will they knuckle down to the challenge or will they turn their backs on the chance of a lifetime?”
Shot of Neelam who shrugs and says “Right now, I just want to go home.”

However, Neelam’s defeatist statement was taken from the first episode in an entirely different context:

After being told by a potential investor that her idea was “not lucrative” and that “it wouldn’t make any money”…

… Neelam does a piece to camera, obviously dejected.

“Sorry, I don’t know why I’m crying. I took it a bit personally. But I feel like I’m more determined and I’m just going to try harder.”

It’s THEN that Neelam said “Right now, I just want to go home.”

By taking Neelam’s statement out of context, the OPPOSITE of what she actually said was conveyed, implying that she had no ambition.

“Apart from occasionally opening an app, they are pretty clueless.” O RLY?

Context:

“What all the girls need is a basic knowledge about the world of tech, which is tricky, because when it comes to the mechanics of tech, the girls are somewhere between naive and know nothing. Apart from occasionally opening an app, they are pretty clueless.”

Erm, no! They are heavy users of Instagram and Snapchat.

One is a gamer and another has a YouTube channel and a fashion blog.

Look! Literally GIRLS who can CODE!

A programme setting out to show that GIRLS can CODE show a short segment of literally GIRLS who CAN CODE. More of them next time, please?

Next:

“Next stop on our tour of opening the girls’ minds is to show them the money.”

“Alex and I have come to meet a true inspiration. Eileen Burbidge, co-founder of Passion Capital, one of the newest and coolest investment companies in tech.”
“Eileen is at the very heart of UK tech. In the summer, she was made the Government’s tech envoy.”

“No need to show off!”

If you don’t know what’s wrong with saying “no need to show off!” just AFTER listing a woman’s accomplishments in a male-dominated industry in a TV programme intended to encourage young women into the industry, then SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH YOU.

[A]ll of the social media apps were started by men.

Bzzt. Wrong. Not all social media apps were started by men.

“They might find they’ve gone from selfie queens to digital queens”

“Can our selfie queens go from digital zeroes to start-up heroes?”

Remember, this was said of women who regularly use Instagram and Snapchat, one who is a gamer, and another who has YouTube channel and blogs.

Referring to these young women as “selfie queens” perpetrates everyday sexism that girls are obsessed with their looks without recognising WHY that might be the case.

The tech applications the five young women are shown reinforce gender stereotypes.

First they are taken to a company that has created an app for digital make-up.

Then they’re taken to an agency tasked with bridging the gap between fashion and technology.

Imagined conversation in the production meeting:

A: “What are girls interested in?”

B: “Shopping, make-up, boys and fashion”

A: “Great, we’ll show them apps about make-up and fashion!”

Why reinforce the very stereotype that is keeping them out of tech?

The embarrassing task of Let’s Hit The Streets!

After a morning at Shazam to see how data, they meet up later for their challenge: to increase the money-making ability of an oompah band.

Their misinterpretation of the task wasn’t corrected.

Instead, it was portrayed as a selling task.

The young women hit the streets, treating the challenge as an Apprentice-style hit-the-streets selling task.

Later, in a post-mortem:

But…

They’re told they missed the point, they didn’t connect the dots. They hadn’t collected or used data. They’re asked what they could have done differently. They suggest dancing. Alex touches her head to the table is despair.

And explains in industry jargon what they did wrong:

Alex summarises:

Erm, hang on, isn’t this Girls Can Code? Not Girls Can Do All-Round Data-Driven Marketing without any teaching or guidance?

Why was Alice Levine filmed in a kitchen? Women – Kitchens … hello!

Why was Rooj filmed from the floor to that we could almost see up her dress?

Conclusion

Sexism is like death by a thousand cuts. There’s no one big thing to fix. We’re all the victims of sexism but we are also the perpetrators.

If we want more girls to go into technology, we have to change the message from the moment they’re born.

In the end, I believe that the motivation behind “Girls Can Code”. However, I think this series will do more harm than good.

Yes, some girls might have been inspired. But how many were put off?

The series reinforced gender stereotypes and undermined women, whilst asking “hmm, I wonder why there aren’t more girls in tech”.

To the two male researchers, the male Producer and male Director of “Girls Can Code”. Sorry, boys, but You’re Part of the Problem.