Get It, Girls

Sarah Allen led the team of programmers that developed Flash video player. Now she is the CEO of Blazing Cloud, creating software and design for mobile devices.

On All Things Considered, Sarah talks about how she fell in love with coding, why she is encouraging more women to work in the field, and how some firms hire a woman as a “window dressing.”

My fave thing Sarah said is that coding is a great career for working parents: 

Allen says, being a programmer has been a great career for her as a mom. Allen is married and has a 15-year-old son. “The women that I went to college with who are lawyers or doctors had a much harder time raising a family. They have to be there at certain times. I had an incredible amount of freedom, especially because I worked as a coder when I was a new mom and then I can work whenever I want, wherever I want,” she says.

Awesome. Amanda Hess comments on Lena’s interview with Playboy and the reasons Lena would prefer the heat she takes for her body to the judgments and commentary that more model-y bodies receive.

“If she were Victoria’s Secret hot, she’d have to deal with another type of body policing. The constant attention over her dimensions would be coded as praise, but it would remain dehumanizing. The same men who take to message boards to complain about Dunham’s nudity would still be angry, but their aggression would be channeled into commentary on how they’d like to have sex with her. She would be asking for it for “flaunting” her body on TV. Her nudity would be viewed as pornographic, not artistic.”

I hope lots of women feel what I feel when they see Lena confidently romping around HBO with her curvy, human body: 1) some shock at the image on the TV screen that we aren’t used to; 2) elation and giggles at the freedom of it all; 3) pride in this woman who matches up media images to our own mirrors; and 4) one awesome measure of “duh. that’s how it’s supposed to be.”

This woman floors me. She writes about her journey to find and expose the good in human beings as a form of revenge for the brutal murder of her husband, Danny Pearl.

“So I embarked on this journey in search of light. It couldn’t be a divine light—it had to be human, as I believe only people can undo what people have created. And I chose to focus on women. Why women? Will all due respect to the other half of humanity, I have found that women are the most courageous, tough and determined agents of change around—that’s just the way it is on every continent.”

Regulatory chiefs are often market experts or academics. But Ms. White spent nearly a decade as United States attorney in New York, the first woman named to this post. Among her prominent cases, she oversaw the prosecution of the mafia boss John Gotti as well as the people responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. She is now working the other side, defending Wall Street firms and executives as a partner at Debevoise & Plimpton.

Yeah, girl.