Open thread: what’s your dump stat?

[Warning! TVTropes!] A Dump Stat is a gaming concept: a quality in the game that you choose not to allocate any character-building resources to (and thus your character does not possess). Say, your character is a wizard, and has really low strength because you traded it for intelligence (which usually translates to spell-casting power).

Wizard, design by Hojyo Takashi, photo by Origamiancy, CC BY.

This guy’s dump stat is definitely fire resistance.

I think my dump stat is probably all-nighters. Can barely stay awake at all: certainly the amount of work produced is nowhere near worth the cost, which is basically a full-on hangover the next day regardless of use, or lack thereof, of intoxicants. And I don’t find them fun. So, I would definitely have no points in all-nighters.

How about you?

Quick note: let’s try and keep this light ok? Stuff you’re OK with being bad at, rather than stuff that tears you apart. And steer clear of “and I don’t care because [whatever skill] is universally useless anyway!”: you can be sure someone here will be into it.

This is also an open thread for any other topics of interest to you. Comment policy applies.

“Does sex sell?” is an empirical question

This is an Ask a Geek Feminist question for our readers:

We keep hearing the old chestnut “sex sells”, and we hear it most especially when we complain about how some item of geek culture is sexist – video game bosoms or ridiculous outfits on superheroines, for example – as if that was some kind of excuse for objectification.

Does sex sell? Does sexism sell? Where’s the evidence for this? I’ve got moderately good Google-fu but haven’t been easily able to turn up much in the way of useful information or anything more rigorous than blog rants and newspaper opinion pieces. Can anyone answer this one, or point me to some useful resources? Where is the real, empirical evidence for this? Are advertisers and content providers (comic artists, game producers etc.) operating on an outdated or scientifically unjustified model?

I’ve read quite a lot of your basic feminist literature. I’d like some science, or at least some vaguely scientific numbers. Can anyone help?

What do you think?

GF classifieds: wiki edition

As you may know, we have a wiki as well as a blog. In fact the wiki is more than a year older than the blog—we have a little history page up now—and it only has a few (3 to 5 at any given time) regular editors. There’s also a lot of attention paid to the Incidents relative to the rest of the wiki. That’s not a bad thing, but the rest of the wiki could use some love too.

Hence, every so often we’ll point out areas of the wiki you could help out with. At any given time, this list will be hugely incomplete, so you can also go over there and do what suits you.

If you need a hand, drop in on the Community portal and ask for help.

Tech industry! There was a lot of work on this a few years ago, and some of it needs to be brought up to date/expanded:

• List of women keynote presenters at technical conferences: been to a tech (or CS) conference where a woman gave the keynote/plenary? Check that she’s listed on this page.
• List of women executives at tech companies: there’s probably a lot of additional names from the last few years that could go here.

Resources for allies! The resources for men page is a collection of blog posts, mostly. Seen any good feminist blog posts aimed at allies recently, and that speaks to geeks? It almost certainly isn’t there yet because, again, it’s been a few years. Please add it.

Getting articles ready for feature article status! Getting a featured article on our wiki is nothing like the arduous Wikipedia process: we simply want articles about a geek woman or group of geek women doing awesome stuff! They should be several paragraphs long, reasonably copyedited, in the correct categories, and have a picture. Fixing up our proposed feature articles to bring them up to scratch would be a good task if you know your way around Mediawiki wikis a bit.

We could particularly use a hand with the article on Anita Borg, because it will be the next feature article. And if you’re involved in the Organization for Transformative Works and you can fix the OTW article up with a few more paragraphs, you’ll almost certainly be the feature article after that.

GF wiki editors or readers, what would you like to see more work on?

Does the sexism in CS ever get better?

This is an Ask a Geek Feminist question for our readers:

Dear Geek Feminists:
I have a little story for you, and then a group of related questions. About two years ago, I was miserable, isolated, and overwhelmed in my undergraduate computer science (CS) program at a male-dominated polytechnic institute. I went to my advisor, an accomplished woman professor who had taught and studied computer science at quite a few schools, and asked her if she had any advice about dealing with sexism in our discipline.

“It never gets better. Either you learn to deal with it, or you leave,” she said. I was crushed by this, and I believe her fatalistic assessment contributed to my failing out of that school in that semester.

My question, then, is in several parts.
1) If you’re a woman in CS, does it ever get better? If it got better for you, where and how did that happen?
2) If you’ve learned to deal with it, how?
3) If you left – as I left, as Skud left – would you go back? Did you go back?
4) If being ostracized and viewed as gross and weird for being feminist and female “never gets better,” why stay in CS?

What do you think?

Are geek feminists more accepting of trans women?

This is an Ask a Geek Feminist question for our readers:

Are geek feminists more accepting of trans women than many traditional feminists are? Why or why not? What place does a trans woman have in the geek feminist community?

What do you think?

When does diverse hiring become tokenism?

This is an Ask a Geek Feminist question for our readers:

When people from video game development talk about making game development more inclusive and diverse, it’s often taken for granted that more diverse teams will be better able to bring out a well-rounded game that avoids or at least minimizes stereotypes.

However, I wonder to what extent this is true, and to what extent it represents tokenism. In a sense, this might be a case of developers not wanting to try – i.e. “Let’s just hire a woman or two, and then things will sort themselves out.” Then again, I can also see this being true, i.e. a diverse team *does* bring different perspectives to the table.

So what do you think? Do gender-diverse teams tend to create better/more unique/more inclusive games? How high is the danger of tokenism and/or essentialism here? Can you point us in the direction of real experiences made by gender-diverse development studios in these regards? Is it helpful for a developer to actively seek out female developers in order to create a more diverse team, or does this lead to problems?

See also an AAGF question from 2010 on being on the receiving end of tokenism.

What do you think?

GF classifieds: become a linkspammer

Hi everyone,

You’ve probably noticed that things have been veeeeeery quiet around here for a few months. It’s something of a life change/life crunch time for a lot of the regulars here, so it seems like a good time to bring more contributors on board!

First request for help: we’d love to have some volunteers to help out with reviving our Linkspams! It should be fairly low time commitment, and a good way to bring some juice back to the blog.

If you’re interested, read on.

Lead Linkspammer (up to 2 people)

If possible, we’d like to have one or two Lead Linkspammers (that’s lead as in Leader, not lead as in the element, unless you like the element, in which case, fine). Lead linkspammers may create linkspams themselves (see below) but by Lead what we mean is making sure that linkspams happen regularly.

A Lead Linkspammer would:

• with input from the linkspam team, create a schedule for Linkspammers to put up posts
• help Linkspammers out with technical difficulties if possible
• recruit replacement Linkspammers when needed

A Lead Linkspammer would need:

• the Linkspammer skills below
• familiarity with the WordPress posting interface (you don’t need to have adminned a WordPress blog, we mean having posted to one and being able to explain how you did it to other people), including tagging, and willingness to help the Linkspammers out with their early spams
• willingness to create and maintain schedules, including keeping an eye out for additional Linkspammers when need be, and ability to just make a decision about who is doing what if the team gets too “no, you take Tuesdays!” “no no, I can tell you want Tuesdays, you do Tuesdays!”
• willingness to gently remind Linkspammers of their upcoming spams

We’d like it if the Lead Linkspammer(s) could commit to at least six months as a Lead, and can give at least a couple of weeks notice if they need to move on, so that their replacement can be found and work handed over.

The initial time commitment may come to a few hours a week while you get set up, but ongoing it’s probably one hour or less per week on top of compiling any linkspam posts you commit to in your schedule.

Linkspammer (up to 6 people)

A Linkspammer creates linkspam! You would:

• gather together links submitted by readers (and optionally links you found yourself)
• read over them at least to the point where you can write a short summary
• post the links and short summaries

A Linkspammer would need:

• to identify as a geek feminist or a geek feminist ally, and to generally like this blog
• familiarity with simple HTML: lists, links and emphasis markup (the strong and em tags)
• some editorial judgement: being able to decide if a link is worth sharing or not, and to select 6–10 links for the spam
• ability to at least skim through links and summarise their content in a sentence or two, and warn for common triggers
• ability to keep an eye on all the linkspams, just so that yours has new links in it
• ability to put up with occasional public criticism, and apologise if you agree you made a mistake: sometimes our readers criticise linkspams, although not very often, and unless they violate the comments policy we will generally let the criticisms remain publicly visible.

We’d like it if the Linkspammer(s) could commit to at least two months (each Spammer will produce about one spam every fortnight, we hope), and can give at least a couple of weeks notice if they need to move on. The Lead Linkspammers will schedule your linkspams in: one will be due every two or three weeks.

The time commitment is probably one to two hours every time you have a linkspam due.

How to join us

Let us know in comments if you’re interested in helping out: make sure to leave an email address and state whether you could be a Lead Linkspammer, a Linkspammer, or both.

We don’t need a whole resume, but a sentence about your previous involvement in geek feminism would be good, eg “I’ve been commenting here for months” or “I write about geek feminism stuff sometimes on my blog” or etc.

Please note: we cannot pay Linkspammers (or any other contributor), you will be working as an unpaid volunteer.

Ask a Geek Feminist, round 6

Welcome to round 6 of Ask a Geek Feminist! How it works:

• if you’ve got a question you think a geek feminist could answer, post a comment in reply to this post. (Comments will not be publicly visible.)
• about a week from now I’ll distribute questions to my co-bloggers and they can make a post with an answer to a question as they like
• about a week after that I’ll choose some of the remaining questions and open them up to our commenters

Your question, if it appears in a post, will be quoted (possibly edited for length) but not attributed to you, unless you ask us to attribute it. Since we’re not making them publicly visible, questions can be about anything you like; however obviously if you stray too far from our comment policy the chances of ever seeing an answer are pretty slim. Check out previous posts answering questions to see how this worked before.

Questions do not have to be about feminism or or obviously feminist topics: they could be about geeky interests including pop culture, about careers, about social life and so on. Given the name of this blog though, feminism might appear in the answer…

If you have a 101 (introductory) questions about feminism we suggest that:

• you’ve looked over Finally Feminism 101’s FAQs and the Geek Feminism wiki’s 101 page to see if you can get an answer there first; and
• you explain why you want a geek feminist, in particular, to answer this question. Do you think there’s a particular geek slant on this we might have or that our readers might like to discuss? The series is intended to produce interesting things for our community to think about and talk about, as well as an answer for the questioner.

If your question boils down to “why are there so few women in science/computer science/mathematics/engineering/physics, and what should we do?”, we’re unlikely to answer, please see this list of resources to turn to.

Questions will be accepted until comments on this post close in about a fortnight. (I don’t want to accept them constantly, because of the work of anonymising them.) If you miss out and find comments have already closed, another round will run within about six months… You can also ask questions non-anonymously in Open threads, although they may not be promoted to the front page.

Quick hit: new feminist Doctor Who blog!

For Doctor Who fans, a new blog has launched, Doctor Her.

Doctor Her is the brainchild of Courtney Stoker, who has also written about Doctor Who for Geek Feminism:

• Steampunk, Tech, and TARDISes: A Cosplay Tale
• Connecting with female characters in geek television

Doctor Her’s first post is Which Companion is the Best Feminist Role Model for my Daughters? The start of an on-going research project.

Wednesday Geek Woman: Marita Cheng, Robogals founder

Cross-posted with minor edits from Hoyden About Town.

Marita Cheng is the Young Australian of the Year winner this year. She’s been involved in volunteering since she was a high school student, and in 2008, early in her undergraduate studies (mechatronic engineering and computer science at the University of Melbourne) she founded Robogals, which is an engineering and computing outreach group, in which women university students run robotics workshops for high school age girls.

Marita, while still in the final year of her undergraduate degree, is also an entrepreneur and has been previously awarded for her work as founder of Robogals, including winning the Anita Borg Change Agent award in 2011.

While I have heard of Robogals (there’s talk of a chapter starting at my university), I hadn’t heard of Marita specifically before she became Young Australian of the Year. One of the fascinating things about starting the Ada Initiative is slowly discovering all the other amazing women who work in technology career outreach and related endeavours. But it’s a little embarrassing, judging from her bio, to have not heard Marita Cheng’s name before last week.

Congratulations Marita.

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This post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Australia License.

Want to highlight a geek woman? Submissions are currently open for Wednesday Geek Woman posts.