MAYDAY, MAYDAY, WHERE ARE THE LADY CODERS?

The project was completely laid out. All the pngs were size then ready for uploading. Sitemap was created. Funds ready to be distributed. All support images and information were ready for the right coder…the right bad ass back slash. bracket genius.

It was really important to us to hire a woman coder preferably a woman of color. This ended up being quite a challenge. We reached out to local coding organizations in which we didn’t receive any replies. We also sent out feelers through our community and received a few responses. Most people were not confident about taking on the job. The only people who were confident about taking on the job were white male coders. They were highly professional a pleasure to talk to and I got the sense that the project would have been done smoothly and timely.

Being that we are all about collaboration, empowerment, balance and sustainability we felt that it was important that this job circulated money to women. This proved to be quite the challenge. We finally thought we found our star, but she thought sending screenshots of progress equated to creating a functioning site…le sigh.

The last few months resulted in us becoming so frustrated that we just created our own site in house and kept our funds to ourselves. Now on the surface this may seem like a total win. It’s not tho, for the following reasons: 1. it took our time away from making other things 2. It also removed money from the pockets of other women that it could sustain. Being that we are trying to create strong roots through the community, share and collaborate, in many ways this was a fail. We hope to do better in our future projects.

We see ourselves on both sides of this project, the customer and the commissioned and hope that we can be better at both. Perhaps we are writing this as a call or a beacon to rethink the way that we are approaching things and as a reminder not to be so overcome with insecurities about our abilities to serve one another by deliver fantastic work and getting paid for it.

Welcome to the Mz. Icar website. This is just the framework but the beams are in place and we look forward to filling up the space.