We participate as an audience inside auditoriums, sacred buildings and theaters. Audiences observe, take in and expand on messages. Good audience etiquette teaches us not to interrupt.
But messages leading to inequality need to be interrupted. And messages leading to progress in gender equality need full attention. How do we do this?
By giving undivided audience to the qualities supporting equality.
Qualities such as integrity, creativity and courage advance messages of fairness. Moreover, they can resolve past interruptions.
Recently, in Seattle, Washington, 24 women presented their individual Capstone projects using computer programming techniques learned at the Ada Developers Academy. The event took three hours.
As an invitee, I entered the audience knowing what I learned from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that only 21% of the computer programming labor force in year 2015 consisted of women. After listening to the presentations and hearing about Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, scraping and deploying applications, I left the audience feeling as though I understood 12% of what was said, but was confident that more women will be entering the field of computer programming.
Basically, the message of confident femininity is returning to computer programming and I didn’t want to interrupt.
It would have been a terrible interruption if my feelings of computer illiteracy, jealousy or impatience had gotten my attention. Instead, I focused on the qualities of creativity, wisdom and courage, exhibited by the Ada women. It gave me a greater appreciation.
The Ada program is a synergy between the feminine and a tuition-free program comprising of 6 months of full-time classroom training followed by 5 months in a paid industry internship and sponsored by more than 30 companies including Expedia, Microsoft and Zillow.
The Ada program teaches full-stack web development to qualified women and people of non-binary gender. It was instituted a few years ago to interrupt what amounted to the male-dominate field of computer programming, which was not always the case. From as far back as the 19th century, computer programmers showed a fair balance between women and men.
Ada Academy honors Ada Lovelace, a 19th century mathematician and woman with proclivities toward metaphysics.
Circa 1842, Lovelace incorporated into a paper, notes, later recognized as the first published algorithm designed for use on a computer. Afterward, the number of women in computer programming steadily rose right along with men through the mid-20th century.
A celebrated computer programmer, Grace Hopper (1906-1992), helped develop a compiler while working her way up to earn the rank of rear admiral in the United State Navy.
Then, in the 1980s, women’s progress in computer programming was disrupted.
NPR’s, Planet Money, podcast episode 576 aired, “When women stopped coding,” and spoke on one reason why the computer programming industry is male-dominant today.
The reason, when home computers were marketed.
In the 1980s, home computers were not connected to the internet. They were bulky and mainly used to play games, portrayed as a man thing. Companies that sold home computers, advertised by targeting boys and men. Radio Shack and Apple advertisements spoke directly to fictitious guys, Elliot, Jeff, Brian, and Scott. If a woman was involved, she was wearing a bikini in the background.
A woman in a bikini makes me want to gag today, but gagging won’t help the empowerment of confident femininity. Whereas, giving audience to the qualities that advance equality will, not only in computer programming but everywhere.
The very exercise of giving audience to equalizing qualities as shown by the Ada women was carried outside the program. I was able to give audience to the same qualities as expressed by the baristas serving lattes and mothers caring for children and homes.
The exercise showed me that the message of women’s equality and dignity can be given audience to uninterruptedly.
This knowledge resonated with my belief that there must be an infinite source, I call it God, of those very qualities that lead to equality. I, even have access to them in my field of knowledge.
Unfortunately, women’s empowerment gets interrupted with the wink of an eye, because the collective psyche is rooted in the notion that women lack the qualities that reveal equality. But there is no lack with an infinite source.
By giving undivided audience to the spiritual truth that all the qualities leading to fairness are accessible to everyone, or in other words, not gender dependent, the winks get stopped and the correct message is forwarded.
With all this said, I can’t help but give audience to the current news about Apple, the computer company that just introduced Swift Playgrounds, a revolutionary new app for iPad, to teach the next generation how to code. Their gender-neutral advertisements speak to “children” and “students” as able to learn how to program computers.
Quoting from science & religion to God, “The first commandment demonstrates the law of divine Being. “You shall have no other gods before me.”[1] All people have one Mind, one Spirit. One infinite God, good, unifies people and nations, constitutes goodwill, ends wars, and fulfills the Scripture, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”[2] The law of Truth annihilates idolatry and improves social, civil, criminal, political, and religious codes. Spiritual metaphysics equalizes the sexes, annuls curses, and leaves nothing that can sin, suffer, be punished or destroyed.”
[1] Ex. 20:3; Deuteronomy 5:6
[2] Lev. 19:18, Mark 12:31, Luke 10:27, Rom. 13:9
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