Linkspam I dreaming or is this real life? (11 March 2016)

• Writer’s Round Table: Disney Princesses – A New Hope or Propagating Stereotypes? | The GWW: “Recently, the Washington Post published an article discussing the linguistics of Disney’s animated “princess” movies, focusing on the types of verbiage used by and the amount of time given to the female characters in the films. Their findings were, to me, unsurprising, but they do shine a light on a long-running issue that encompasses far more than just linguistics.”
• This simple policy will shift social norms in the right direction for Canadian Women in STEM | Canadian Science Policy Conference: “A simple policy to require gender balance in prestigious plenaries, keynotes and speaker series would help enormously. In Canada, such policies are broadly lacking across nearly all organizational levels: from departments, to faculties, to the higher education institution, oversight bodies and professional societies. Such a policy, broadly applied, has the power to shift entrenched social-cultural norms rapidly in the right direction.”
• Women-only spaces are a hack | Julia Evans: “Imagine you have a program, and it has a pretty serious issue. It needs some deep architectural changes to fix it, but you can alleviate some of the symptoms by just changing a few lines of code. You don’t yet know the best way to resolve the larger problem, but you need to do something, so you start with a hack. This is why we have women-only spaces.”
• Impostor Syndrome – an analogy and pep talk | Mary Robinette Kowal: “So next time you feel the Imposter Syndrome hitting, recognize that it’s a symptom of the fact that you levelled up without noticing. It’s a crappy feature and the UI is totally borked, but you are can handle it. Impostor Syndrome means that you are winning.”
• On Conversations | beerops: “I would love to see more conference organizers reaching out to groups and individuals who haven’t gotten a chance to tell their stories yet, rather than inviting the same repeat speakers back year after year. Even if these dudes are great speakers, those are still speaking slots that they are making unavailable for other people in order to tell their own stories again, when there are so many people who haven’t had a chance to tell a single story at all.”

We link to a variety of sources, some of which are personal blogs.  If you visit other sites linked herein, we ask that you respect the commenting policy and individual culture of those sites.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on Pinboard, or Diigo; or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.