The Linkspammer’s Guide to the Galaxy (19 August 2014)

• Never Give Up, Never Surrender: Cosplay After 40 | Phaedra Cook at All That’s Cosplay: “There are certain types of people who would like me to have a sense of shame about my hobby, but that’s not going to happen. Cosplay has been beneficial and it is my little way of combating ageism.” (August 6)
• Race Swap | On the Media podcast #31 Accessibility note: audio only. “Mikki Kendall is a writer who deals with an extraordinary amount of trolling and vitriol online. Mikki is a black woman in real life, and she created an experiment to see how her online life would change if she were a white man.” (July 17)
• The Increasingly Poor Economics of Penning Problematic Stories | Kameron Hurley: “It was in this moment that I realized the true economics of what’s going to drive the storytelling change. See, it used to be the only media you could consume was the racist, sexist, homophobic sort.… But these days? Well, there’s a LOT of media out there, a lot of entertainment, and there are, increasingly, more diverse stories and choices we can make.” (August 9)
• Get Out Your Bingo Card | John Scalzi at Whatever and Thoughts On the Hugo Awards, 2014 | John Scalzi at Whatever: “WE ARE GOING TO MAKE THE HUGO SLATE A REFERENDUM ON THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE FICTION (loses) THE HUGOS DON’T MATTER ANYWAY”. (August 17)
• What Happens to #Ferguson Affects Ferguson | Zeynep Tufekci at Medium: “Ferguson is about many things, starting first with race and policing in America… It’s a clear example why net neutrality is a human rights issue; a free speech issue; and an issue of the voiceless being heard, on their own terms. I saw this play out in multiple countries — my home country of Turkey included — but last night, it became even more heartbreakingly apparent in the United States as well.” (August 14)
• 40 Percent Of Female Engineers Are Leaving The Field. This Might Be Why. | Rebecca Adams at Huffington Post: “While all of the efforts channeled towards getting girls to study science, technology, engineering and math have certainly increased graduation rates in these programs, they haven’t seemed to counter one particular setback for women in engineering: Once they make it into the field, they often leave.” (August 12)

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, Delicious 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.

When a link and a spam love each other very much (26 March 2014)

A couple of quick announcements to start us off:

• applications to attend AdaCamp Portland (June 21–22, ally skills track June 23) are open
• the call for submissions to another issue of Model View Culture is out: the Abuse issue. “This issue explores themes of harassment, microaggression, boundary violation, assault, discrimination and other forms of abuse in the tech community”.

Onto the spam you’re waiting for:

•  Cloaking device | shonias at Hoyden about Town (March 23): “The moment I arrived [at Cisco Live!], unbeknownst to me, my cloaking device had been deployed. I stood waiting to register, and when a position was free, the bloke on it gestured to the man who had arrived after me. I just wasn’t there.”
• Silicon’s Valley’s Brutal Ageism | Noam Scheiber at New Republic (March 23): “‘Young people are just smarter,’ Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told an audience at Stanford back in 2007. As I write, the website of ServiceNow, a large Santa Clara–based I.T. services company, features the following advisory in large letters atop its ‘careers’ page: ‘We Want People Who Have Their Best Work Ahead of Them, Not Behind Them.’ And that’s just what gets said in public.”
• Iconic Girls in Pop Culture: Miyazaki’s Female Characters | Raizel Liebler at The Learned Fangirl (March 21): “…one of the elements I most appreciate is the focus on girls in that frequently awkward age between eight and twelve – too old to be little and cute, but too young to be a teen – with the freedoms and heartbreak of teenagehood.”
• Game designer cracks through myths about women in the games industry | Megan Farokhmanesh at Polygon (March 21): “[Game designer Elizabeth] Sampat… covered myths such as there are no women to hire, or female candidates not fitting company culture, suggested that companies use recruiters to draw in new candidates. Recruiters should stop looking for a dedication to gaming, she said, and find candidates with curiosity and current interest.”
• Why I’m Excited About !!Con | Sumana Harihareswara at Cogito, Ergo, Sumana (March 20): “Some get-togethers turn into dominance displays… Whenever possible, Hacker School culture assumes abundance rather than scarcity; attempts to rank projects or people would defile our ecology. And now we have a conference, !!Con, with that same philosophy.” !!Con is May 17–18 in New York City.
• Not buying sexism: How inclusive games show hope for gaming culture | Katherine Cross at Feministing (March 20): “…at least in the world of roleplaying gaming, the idea that sex and sexism sell is taking another hit from the opposite direction: we now have proof that games that resist sexist caricatures and that prominently feature women as strong and fully human characters can actually succeed where games more mired in outdated thinking have failed.”
• Male Superheroes in Female Superhero Poses | Brian Cronin at The Line It Is Drawn (March 21): A big collection of comics fanart with the male superheroes in the awkward and submissive poses and setups given to female superheroes.
• A Day of Honors for Women in the Video Game Industry | Laura Parker at New York Times ArtsBeat (March 20): “Female video game designers, producers and directors were honored at Microsoft’s Women in Gaming Awards here on Thursday in an event that has grown substantially in short order.”
• Self-Citation Gender Gap | Rina Shaikh-Lesko at The Scientist Magazine (March 18):
  “A study commissioned by The Chronicle of Higher Education shows that women in academia are much less likely than men to cite their own research. Because citation counts are now critical to many decisions about hiring and promotions, citations are becoming one more area where women are falling behind their male colleagues.” (The Chronicle‘s coverage is paywalled.)
• Mean Little Girls: Thoughts On Indie Game Journal | Becky Chambers at The Mary Sue (March 22): Chambers reflects on a game featuring a girl protagonist and childhood bullying in a problematic but interesting way.

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, Delicious 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.

Magical linkspam sparkles (26th May, 2011)

• Grants to attend AppSec USA 2011: For the first time, the OWASP Foundation is gathering sponsors for a program to increase the participation of women in the field of application security. The grants are for undergraduate women at four-year colleges.
• The white privilege of white anti-racists: Another white privilege Tim Wise and other white anti-racists carry is the ability to emotionally express their views about racism without having that expression dismissed as angry or too emotional. (via The Angry Black Woman)
• Following on naturally, the following popped up on delicious: White Privilege Diary Series #1 – White Feminist Privilege in Organizations
• There’s been some blog commentary on whether and when assholes are necessary to free/open source software development:
  • Rusty Russell: “If you didn’t run code written by assholes, your machine wouldn’t boot”
  • Jacob Kaplan-Moss: I refuse to tolerate assholes
  • Valerie Aurora: On the necessity of assholes
  • Russell Coker: Are Assholes Essential to a Free Software Project?
• Student finds Universe’s missing mass: Amelia Fraser-McKelvie, working within a team at the Monash School of Physics, conducted a targeted X-ray search for the matter and within just three months found it – or at least some of it.
• An evo-psych critique: Evolutionary psychology for the masses: But since humans are so fascinated by scientific explanations of their own behavior, and so impatient with uncertainty and doubt, there’s not much incentive for the field to clean itself up.
• Sue Gardner Talks Women in in Tech: Wikimedia’s executive director: I don't believe that the Wikipedia community is in any serious way sexist. The same is not true of the Silicon Valley media.
• Puerarchy: what gets focused on in the culture is defined by boys and young men. From this interview with Paula Smith (via cesperanza).
• Translation of General Misogyny to Uncomfortable Truth and From Snarky Truth to Reasoned Explanation: What we ultimately want is Formal equality: a world in which race, gender, ethnicity, orientation and religious beliefs do not affect the opportunities and treatment of any individual. Unfortunately, the only people who think we live in such a world (or work in an industry that enjoys Formal equality) are a certain class of people who have enjoyed privileges their entire lives.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious, freelish.us or pinboard.in 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.

IT careers for the older geek woman

This is an Ask a Geek Feminist question.

Okay, I’m an older geek woman (turned 39 this year) who’s done some time on helldesk, and is currently studying for a BSc in Computer Science and Games Technology (double major). I started the degree because I’ve been applying for jobs pretty steadily, and I’ve been sent along to interviews on a fairly regular basis where I’m able to answer the questions, and I figure I come across as competent, but I never actually get the job, and neither do I hear back about why I didn’t get it. I’ve started to work on the default assumption that I’m disadvantaged in the IT market by being too female, too old, and suffering from “Not Pretty Enough” (I am not and never have been a pretty little thing; any attractiveness I have comes from my mind). I also have chronic depression, which means I really don’t want to be in a situation where I’m constantly attempting to push gravy uphill with a fork in regards to getting my abilities recognised.

Realistically, what would my career path options be?

Commenters, just a caution on this. A lot of people here work in IT, so a lot of people may want to comment. Great! But actual stories of non-traditional entry into IT are going to be much more useful than “well, I graduated at 22 and went into a graduate program, but here’s a theory I just came up with on the fly about what I’d probably try if I was in the questioner’s situation…” Did you yourself enter IT in your thirties or forties (or when older again), particularly as a woman or outsider? If not, have you seen someone else do it? If not, do you know of any studies or resources?

Also, please watch for privilege in your comments. Volunteering IT skills, participating in networking or common-interest groups, developing FLOSS and so on all take privilege of various kinds. If these are part of your recommendations or your own experience you can share them, but don’t imply anything like “well, if you really wanted to work in IT you’d…” or “well, if you were really passionate about IT you’d be…”

Update: please also indicate your geographical location(s) as precisely as you feel comfortable with. The IT job market varies a fair bit around the world and the questioner and other women in her position may want to weigh your advice according to conditions in their local area. (Special note to people in the US: shorthand for your cities like “SF”, “LA” and “NYC” are not always well understood outside the US.)

Girly geekdom for girls… only?

Several of the front page posters here are participating in discussions on the Python diversity email list, a list created by Python community member Aahz to discuss diversity problems in the Python programming language community. The initial aim of the list is creating a diversity statement like that of the Dreamwidth community.

Some of the more problematic discussions on the list come down to “this stuff is hard, and hard to talk about, and people get angry and defensive when things are hard.” I don’t want to discuss the tenor or direction of the discussions there in general in this post though, I want to talk about a specific incident. A poster to the list made reference to being “beaten up by a girl” (in a metaphorical sense, what had actually happened was off-list criticism from a woman, not physical violence). A 101 discussion followed, and while it was pretty clear to most people posting that the framing played right into the idea that being beaten by women, physically or in argument, is emasculating, it took a surprisingly long time until it was pointed out, originally by me, eventually also by Aahz in a separate thread, that “girls” is a problematic term. It seems this was a new idea even to some of the more pro-feminist posters.

Now despite the Python diversity list’s innocence, calling women “girls” even in conversations where men are just “men” is not a new problem. As I pointed out to someone on identi.ca, Wikipedia has a prominently placed discussion of how there are few neutral terms for women, especially more informal ones. And the geek feminism groups have run into it ourselves. We have LinuxChix and Girl Geek Dinners. One syllable terms make for snappy names and the “girl geek” alliteration has zing. Reclaiming problematic terminology has a long history, but one of the appeals is that it’s just plain fun, and it’s happened to some extent with the term “geek” as well.

But how much are we playing into the idea that geek feminism is for young women, that once first year CS is gender balanced we’re done here? I’ve seen concerning things. LinuxChix’s name has on occasion drawn young women who explicitly say they only want to interact with other young women. LinuxChix and Girl Geek meetups are often just as inconveniently timed and placed for primary carers as LUGs and gaming groups. When Julie Gibson interviewed me for Ada Lovelace day, she talked about how LinuxChix turned out not to be for her, she’s too far removed in time from having enough geek hours in her life to learn Linux. An older woman—in her late forties, perhaps, well outside the Australian LinuxChix demographic—at our LinuxChix miniconf in 2008 said that she’s careful to avoid becoming a “face” for women in IT: she thinks no teenage girl wants to grow up to be her. It reminded me of Lauredhel’s post at Hoyden About Town, Monica Dux thinks I’m bad for feminism’s image, about the trend to say it’s great to be a proud feminist, as long as you aren’t a marketing problem for the feminism brand. Is it only great to be a woman geek if you’re exactly what the guys on Slashdot are asking for, 18 and single and heterosexual and able to fix your own computers, thus making time for everyone’s two favourite leisure activities, gaming and sex? Of course not. But I’m worried that we’re talking about ourselves as though it is.

This is hard for me. I’m in my twenties. It’s a lot easier for me to think about what my fifteen year old girl geek self would have wanted from geek feminism than what the sixty year old woman I hope to be will want. But we should. What does geek feminism look like, for women who aren’t girls any more and don’t want to be?