Hi everyone,

Not the most consistent ethical position in this week’s Feminist Friday.

Another piece on women in tech, but the message – that being a woman with a job shouldn’t have to mean being the most inspirational person in your field – translates everywhere.

You shouldn’t have to be pretty or nice or really anything besides interested in tech to go into this industry. […] I’m left with this nagging feeling that the only women we value are the ones who can be everything at once. That we’re only worthy if we can destroy the curve in the algorithms class and write beautiful lines of code while painting our nails. Otherwise, if we’re just okay programmers, or if we’re socially awkward, we don’t matter.

https://medium.com/@amyngyn/i-need-terrible-female-engineers-1023a2e973dd

OKAY NOW LET’S HAVE WALL TO WALL INSPIRATIONAL WORK LADIES

Not often that I feature lawyers here, but I always love to read that big corporations are not unassailable.

She’s filed class-action lawsuits on behalf of truck drivers, waiters, delivery men, cable installers, call center workers, and exotic dancers. FedEx and Starbucks are among companies that have paid out millions of dollars for misclassifying workers and misallocating workers’ tips, respectively, as a result of suits she’s filed.

http://fusion.net/story/118401/meet-the-lawyer-taking-on-uber-and-the-on-demand-economy/

Lydia Davis is learning Norwegian from an extremely difficult novel while also translating that novel. If you have not read her fiction, you would enjoy it! I did not realise quite how impressive a linguist she is:

“Yes, ‘young’ and ‘old’, I knew that was what ‘ung’ and ‘gammel’ meant. I could tell what followed was a whole list of opposites of the same order. So I could easily figure out the other words: ‘rich’ and ‘poor,’ ‘sickness’ and ‘health’. You see how you are suddenly able to unlock so many words, just by studying the pattern? Take the words beginning with ‘Hv.’ I guessed they were used in questions: ‘hva’ meaning ‘what’, ‘hvorfor’ meaning ‘why’. But it took me a long time to figure out ‘hvis’ was ‘if.’ I had to start by assuming it was a word of the same class and then test all the different possibilities.”

So when you find a pattern, do you check with other sources to see if you’re right?

“No, no, never! Then it wouldn’t be the same. I want to figure it out myself. I think of learning a language as a riddle.”

http://lithub.com/lydia-davis-at-the-end-of-the-world/

Here are some Lydia Davis stories, maybe don’t read these if you are feeling emotionally fragile:

http://conjunctions.com/archives/c24-ld.htm

Have a super weekend,

Alex.