On Reveal, we share how the government failed to stop the opioid epidemic. A Washington Post/60 Minutes partnership with Reveal tells the story of how a DEA insider and his team of lawyers and investigators tried to stop drug distribution companies from flooding America with truckloads of pain pills. His effort was met with backlash from his own agency, the drug industry and Congress. We also hear the intimate chronicle of one wife’s discovery of her husband’s video diaries after his death from a fentanyl overdose. Finally, Reveal host Al Letson talks with Jan Rader, the fire chief in Huntington, West Virginia, about her fight to preserve life in the face of a crushing epidemic. Rader was profiled in the Oscar-nominated documentary “Heroin(e).”
To explore more reporting, visit revealnews.org or find us at fb.com/ThisIsReveal, on Twitter
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This short film was produced by the Glassbreaker Films team at The Center for Investigative Reporting. Glassbreaker Films is an all-female group of filmmakers working to promote gender parity in investigative journalism and documentary filmmaking.
Competing threats to the bayous of Louisiana are leaving some Donald Trump supporters torn between the president’s various policies. The shrimping industry, which accounts for 15,000 jobs in the state, has seen a drastic decline in sales due to international imports. And while Trump’s “America first” promises have given shrimpers hope, he has also made devastating cuts in environmental funding that would drastically damage the fragile bayous. Between 1932 and 2010, southern Louisiana has lost, on average, a football field of land to coastal erosion every hour. And it’s estimated that by 2100, rising sea levels across the country will force 13 million people to move away from their homes on American coasts.
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In 2010, Brad McGahey was sentenced to a year in prison for buying a stolen horse trailer. But when he went before a judge, he was told he was going to carry out his sentence by working instead, through a program called CAAIR, or Christian Alcoholics & Addicts in Recovery.
McGahey wasn’t addicted to anything at the time of his sentencing. Hundreds of men are sent to CAAIR in lieu of a prison sentence each year. The program promises recovery from addiction for participants, but most of their time is spent working at a chicken processing plant, where they pull guts and feathers from slaughtered chickens and prepare them for distribution to companies such as Walmart, KFC and PetSmart.
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It feels strange to review Glassbreakers now. We first covered it two years ago after it came out of a Closed Beta. After going public for a while as a free-to-play game, it disappeared! Polyarc, the makers of Moss, took it back onto their forge and worked on it like cute little battle-hardened mice. And now, lo and behold! Two years later, the Moss-world-inspired RTS/MOBA hybrid VR game is back…
I’m so thrilled and honored - Glassbreakers chose me as their "Glassbreaker of the Day"!!
In case you aren’t familiar with Glassbreakers, it's an amazing website and you should definitely check it out. It helps connect folks from underrepresented groups in technology with each other. I've already met so many inspiring lady engineers through Glassbreakers, so I can't recommend it highly enough. They also provide diversity solutions to companies, which is awesome.
Anyway, check out my interview and let me know what you think!
A few weeks ago I attended an event for women in software engineering at Glassbreakers, a startup aiming to build a network of women in the technology industry based on shared experiences and peer mentorship. The event was fairly typical of a tech networking event in San Francisco: held in a startup’s beautiful, open-floor-plan office, with free alcohol and mingling before the main event, which was a panel on mobile development. I’m usually surprised and thrilled to walk into any technical event where most of the people in the room are women, and overall I think what Glassbreakers is doing is awesome. But as the panelists introduced themselves and the Q&A began, I felt an increasing exasperation at the ways in which we fail ourselves when we talk about women in the tech industry.
Events like this have noble goals - to connect women facing similar struggles, build a community around those experiences, and create a space for us to rise together through an industry where we are consistently the odd ones out. However, in their execution they rarely seem to spark industry-changing decisions or conversations. Here are a few thoughts on why this happens and why over time this is so incredibly frustrating.
1. We Don't Care Enough About Intersectionality
The movement around women in tech, at least in my limited San Francisco based experience, is dominated by young, white women who work at startups or tech titans like Twitter and Google.
I am one of these women (minus the startup experience) and although working in the industry while female is difficult it's important to recognize that I'm sitting on the easy side of the privilege spectrum. The women on the Glassbreakers panel on mobile development were also all white women working at startups or large tech companies with less than ten years industry experience. If we want to be taken seriously when we talk about the necessity of diversity in technology we need to practice what we preach. We need to represent software engineers of color, women over the age of thirty, trans* women, and women that don’t fall in any of these boxes as necessary and indispensable to our endeavors. How are we supposed to learn from their struggles and their triumphs when we don't ask them to be on panels, speak at conferences or join companies? When we push wealthy white women to the top of the industry and call it success we make gender discrimination in tech worse. The issue can be safely ignored by those who can now say: "Look, she made it, so you can too!"
2. We Celebrate Fear Instead Of Our Accomplishments
Fear dominates a lot of conversations about women in technology. We confess how afraid we were to start programming, how hard we still find it, how much you will struggle, how much you will need other people's help, and how hostile the industry is. It's fine, important even, to be afraid and to acknowledge that fear. But fear without action, and fear in an echo chamber is dangerous. It leads us to focusing on what scares us rather than what we can do to overcome it or despite it. It's fine to be afraid. I'm afraid so much of the time it’s unbelievable. But it's the things we do despite being afraid that make us awesome engineers.
We should also think carefully about the message we send to girls considering careers in CS when we stand up in a room full of engineers and talk about how technology and working in this industry is difficult. You don't get brownie points for having faced the most sexism on the job so let's stop trading horror stories like badges of honor. Without context these stories can easily turn women off coding entirely. And among each other it’s too easy to minimize one another's experiences by playing the one-up game.
It's important to acknowledge that what we do is hard, and that it's ok to be afraid. But we spend so much time talking about how afraid we are and so little time on our actual accomplishments. Past a certain point I feel exhausted discussing how hard the IT industry is - instead, tell me about that robot you built, or that web-app you wrote, or that company you launched. Goodness knows I could use the inspiration to keep me going through the crappy bits of the everyday.
3. We Confuse Friendship And Respect
There is a stereotype of the female geek that many women in tech conform to at some point or another in their lives - cute but not trying too hard, she loves video games and indie bands and most importantly she's one of the boys. She is unfailingly likable, effortlessly cool, and smart (but only in a vague, nonthreatening sort of way). The pressure to conform to this image of female nerdom seems to be particularly prevalent in startup culture where youth and hence immaturity rules. During the question and answer portion of the panel a woman stood up and said she didn't think her all-male team liked her very much - she was having a hard time connecting with them, and it was leading to things that affected her ability to do her job like being left out of impromptu hallway meetings. One panelist's recommendation was to address it head on with the team, asking to be invited to the meetings over and over until they relented. Another was to ask the men on the team for help with her work so they would like her more (rooted in psychology research but disempowering nonetheless).
At no point did any panel member tell this woman that she didn't have to be friends with her teammates. To be successful at work you need team members who respect you and your work not necessarily people who will invite you to their LAN parties. Outside of startups this becomes more obvious - when your colleagues are middle aged men with kids you care less about trying to get everyone out to the bar on Friday night. The notion that you have to be friends with, or even well liked by your teammates to be a useful, respected engineer is an insidious one. Energy spent wondering why boys on the team don't invite you to play foosball is energy not spent becoming a better programmer or meeting people who are more mature than to write women off as coworkers.
4. We Think It’s Our Job To Fix It
Gender inequality in the tech industry isn't going to go away once we lean in hard enough, suck up to our male colleagues and dress the part. There are structural injustices embedded in tech culture that are not our obligation to fix. It's not our fault that people see a female name on a resume and perceive her as less competent. It's not our fault that women are systematically paid less than their male counterparts. It's not our fault that men are hired for technical positions more than women on the cultural assumption that men are more suited to the part. And it's certainly not our fault that women are harassed and assaulted and subtly made to feel less than human on a day to day basis.
So why is fixing the tech gender gap our problem? I'm so tired of being given advice on how to survive the assholes, and the not being taken seriously, and the lack of role models. Where are the panels on not being an asshole in tech? Where are the seminars on not harassing people at conferences? When will we start holding trainings on recognizing your own biases in the workplace? It's hard to explain just how exhausted I feel by the whole thing. And attending events where the advice is make friends, ask men for help and one day maybe someone will deem you important enough to move into management and slightly further away from the bullshit is so, so disappointing.
