Photo credit: Dana Sibera

Val Henson

... is a MAN.

I'm relieved really... It was pretty hard keeping up the pretense of being a female Linux kernel hacker, since everyone knows they don't exist. Every time someone asked me what I did, and I said, "I'm a Linux kernel developer," I couldn't really blame them when they eyed me suspisciously and said, "Really? Well, what exactly did you write?" When a co-worker asked me if I was invited to be on the the 2004 USENIX ATC program committee because of "affirmative action for girls," my heart went out to him because he knew something was wrong, he just didn't know what. (Apparently Ottawa Linux Symposium, FREENIX, and StorageSS also practice affirmative action for girls.) When another co-worker grabbed my left hand and said, "Oh, I was just looking for a wedding ring, because sometimes pregnant women are crazy," I wanted to tell him that my erratic behavior was the result of suppressing my masculine competence. And I totally, totally sympathize with all the guys over at digg who couldn't believe that women used Linux.

Anyway, it'll be really nice now not to have my contributions questioned because I'm a woman. Hopefully those comments on my Wikipedia article about how I only got the article because I'm pretty will be removed soon - but sadly, so will the article, because I'm only notable because I'm a "woman in a men-dominated [sic] world." But then again, maybe my published papers, maintainership of the Gemini sub-architecture of Linux, maintainership of several network drivers, work on ZFS, organization of the first Linux file systems workshop, co-invention of chunkfs, extensive work for the cause of women in computing, and other accomplishments will suddenly be considered real and important again. One can hope!

My old (masquerading as a woman) homepage is here.

Contact me

val dot henson at gmail dot com