On this week’s show, Yan Fan talks about the need for SpeakHer, the database of female experts in Japan, and what it says about society that something as simple as a list of women is not only necessary, but newsworthy.
Show Notes
Yan Fan talks about the need for SpeakHer, the database of female experts in Japan, and what it says about society that something as simple as a list of women is not only necessary, but newsworthy.
Ollie recommends Chiba’s “Soup’s On! River Cruise buffet,” and explains how exactly WHAT the soup is on, depends on the day’s river conditions.
Bobby looks into the benefits of a new ANTI-TECH movement in the industry and gets a free tinfoil hat.
Topics discussed on this episode range from:
- All of the ways you can enjoy Japanese pro sports.
- When the clock ran out on Bobby’s modeling face
- Yan’s coding bootcamp in Tokyo, Code Chrysalis
- How long it takes to become a developer
- The current demand for training/hiring coders
- Japanese companies’ practice of hiring people who still need to be trained for the job they were hired for and other kinds of managerial incompetence
- Why Yan wants more companies to make the move to hiring or training in-house IT services
- The traditional Japanese discipline known as “system integration”
- Developments with Ollie’s accidental deception of his Japanese roommate
- Positive and negative news in the world of gender equality in Japan
- The excuse Japan uses for not hiring female speakers
- What issues Yan has encountered in compiling the SpeakHer database
- Gender conditioning around confidence as a speaker, or as an expert
- How and why Yan and her collaborators felt the need to start this project
- How a lack of representation harms projects in the tech industry as well as others
- What it’s like to be a foreign female in the Japanese tech industry
- How SpeakHer is getting women to reassess how they value themselves
- How, without young white sloppy dude representation, the world would not have the comedy of Ollie Horn
- The Japanese response to the release of SpeakHer
- The difficulty of recognizing patterns when you’re immersed in them
- Why you shouldn’t let Ollie order all the food at an Izakaya
- One of the selfish reasons the guys were happy to see the release of SpeakHer
Topics discussed on the extras range from:
- How to approach speakers on the SpeakHer Database
- How Japan is slowly adjusting to the current discourse around things like sexual harassment and gender equality
- How that discourse has evolved
- Where racism in Japan is not as bad as America, and where it's worse
- The way current social issues overseas are getting more attention/more translation in Japan and how independent sources in social media are helping with that
- The Japanese woman who gave Yan's team the idea for SpeakHer in Japan
- Yan's thoughts on the lambda model of professional training which doesn't get paid until you do
- The Silicon Valley dream of becoming rich as a coder, and how realistic it is
- Yan's school acquaintance who just became a billionaire, but like... it's in stock, so he's not THAT cool
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What is Japan By River Cruise?
Stand-up comedians Bobby Judo and Ollie Horn purport to report on the Japanese river cruise industry each week.