Tag Archives: Linkspam

Several small snowflake-type papercraft pieces made from gold wrapping paper

Some posts from the last year on inclusion

A sort of topic-specific collection of links from about the last year, broadly talking about inclusion in communities, online and off, especially in geek(y) spaces.

What kind of discourses and conversations do we want to encourage and have?

  • Nalo Hopkinson’s WisCon 2016 Guest of Honor speech: “There are many people who do good in this field, who perform small and large actions of kindness and welcome every day. I’d like to encourage more of that.” In this speech Hopkinson announced the Lemonade Award.
  • “Looking back on a decade in online fandom social justice: unexpurgated version”, by sqbr: “And just because I’m avoiding someone socially doesn’t mean I should ignore what they have to say, and won’t end up facing complex ethical choices involving them. My approach right now is to discuss it with people I trust. Figuring out who those people are, and learning to make myself vulnerable in front of them, has been part of the journey.”
  • “On conversations”, by Katherine Daniels: “I would love for these people who have had so many opportunities already given to them to think about what they are taking away from our collective conversations by continuing to dominate them, and to maybe take a step back and suggest someone else for that opportunity to speak instead.”
  • “Towards a More Welcoming War” by Mary Anne Mohanraj (originally published in WisCon Chronicles 9: Intersections and Alliances, Aqueduct Press, 2015): “This is where I start thinking about what makes an effective community intervention. This is where I wish I knew some people well enough to pick up a phone.”
  • “The chemistry of discourse”, by Abi Sutherland: “What we really need for free speech is a varied ecosystem of different moderators, different regimes, different conversations. How do those spaces relate to one another when Twitter, Reddit, and the chans flatten the subcultural walls between them?”
  • “Hot Allostatic Load”, by porpentine, in The New Inquiry: “This is about disposability from a trans feminine perspective, through the lens of an artistic career. It’s about being human trash….Call-out Culture as Ritual Disposability”
  • “The Ethics of Mob Justice”, by Sady Doyle, in In These Times: “But, again, there’s no eliminating the existence of Internet shaming, even if you wanted to—and if you did, you’d eliminate a lot of healthy dialogue and teachable moments right along with it. At best, progressive people who recognize the necessity of some healthy shame can only alter the forms shaming takes.”

How do we reduce online harassment?

  • “Paths: a YA comic about online harassment”, by Mikki Kendall: “‘It’s not that big of a deal. She’ll get over it.’ ‘Even if she does, that doesn’t make this okay. What’s wrong with you?'”
  • “On a technicality”, by Eevee: “There’s a human tendency to measure peace as though it were the inverse of volume: the louder people get, the less peaceful it is. We then try to optimize for the least arguing.”
  • “Moderating Harassment in Twitter with Blockbots”, by ethnographer R. Stuart Geiger, on the Berkeley Institute for Data Science site: “In the paper, I analyze blockbot projects as counterpublics…I found a substantial amount of collective sensemaking in these groups, which can be seen in the intense debates that sometimes take place over defining standards of blockworthyness…..I also think it is important distinguish between the right to speak and the right to be heard, particularly in privately owned social networking sites.”
  • “The Real Name Fallacy”, by J. Nathan Matias, on The Coral Project site: “People often say that online behavior would improve if every comment system forced people to use their real names….Yet the balance of experimental evidence over the past thirty years suggests that this is not the case. Not only would removing anonymity fail to consistently improve online community behavior – forcing real names in online communities could also increase discrimination and worsen harassment….designers need to commit to testing the outcomes of efforts at preventing and responding to social problems.”

What does it take to make your community more inclusive?

  • “Want more inclusivity at your conference? Add childcare.” by Mel Chua and then “Beyond ‘Childcare Available’: 4 Tips for Making Events Parent-Friendly”, by Camille Acey: “I’ve pulled together a few ideas to help move ‘Childcare Available’ from just a word on a page to an actual living breathing service that empowers people with children to learn/grow alongside their peers, engage in projects they care about, and frankly just have a little break from the rigors of childcare.”
  • Project Hearing: “Project Hearing is a website that consolidates information about technology tools, websites, and applications that deaf and hard of hearing people can use to move around in the hearing world.”
  • “Conference access, and related topics”, by Emily Short: “This is an area where different forms of accessibility are often going at right angles.”
  • “SciPy 2016 Retrospective”, by Camille Scott: “SciPy, by my account, is a curious microcosm of the academic open source community as a whole.”
  • “Notes from Abstractions”, by Coral Sheldon-Hess: “Pittsburgh’s Code & Supply just held a huge (1500 people) conference over the last three days, and of course I’d signed up to attend months ago, because 1) local 2) affordable 3) tech conference 4) with a code of conduct they seemed serious about. Plus, “Abstractions” is a really cool name for a tech conference.”
  • “The letter I just sent to Odyssey Con”, by Sigrid Ellis: “None of us can know the future, of course. And I always hope for the best, from everyone. But I would hate for Odyssey Con to find itself in the midst of another controversy with these men at the center.” (This is Ellis’s post from April 7, 2016, a year before all three of Odyssey Con’s Guests of Honor chose not to attend Odyssey Con because of the very issue Ellis discussed.)
  • “The realities of organizing a community tech conference: an ill-advised rant”, by Rebecca Miller-Webster: “…there’s a lot of unpaid labor that happens at conferences, especially community conferences, that no one seems to talk about. The unpaid labor of conference organizers. Not only do people not talk about it, but in the narrative around conferences as work, these participants are almost always the bad guys.”
  • “Emotional Labor and Diversity in Community Management”, by Jeremy Preacher, originally a speech in the Community Management Summit at Game Developers Conference 2016: “The thing with emotional labor is that it’s generally invisible — both to the people benefiting from the work, and to the people doing it. People who are good at it tend to do it unconsciously — it’s one of the things we’re talking about when we say a community manager has ‘good instincts’.”….What all of these strategies do, what thinking about the emotional labor cost of participation adds up to, is make space for your lurkers to join in.”
  • “White Corporate Feminism”, by Sarah Sharp: “Even though Grace Hopper was hosted in Atlanta that year, a city that is 56% African American, there weren’t that many women of color attending.”
  • “You say hello”, by wundergeek on “Go Make Me a Sandwich (how not to sell games to women)”: “Of course, this is made harder by the fact that I hate losing. And there will be people who will celebrate, people who call this a victory, which only intensifies my feelings of defeat. My feelings of weakness. I feel like I’m giving up, and it kills me because I’m competitive! I’m contrary! Telling me not to do a thing is enough to make me want to do the thing. I don’t give up on things and I hate losing. But in this situation, I have to accept that there is no winning play. No win condition. I’m one person at war with an entire culture, and there just aren’t enough people who give a damn, and I’m not willing to continue sacrificing my health and well-being on the altar of moral obligation. If this fight is so important, then let someone else fight it for a while.”
  • “No One Should Feel Alone”, by Natalie Luhrs: “In addition to listening and believing–which is 101 level work, honestly–there are other things we can do: we can hold space for people to speak their truth and we can hold everyone to account, regardless of their social or professional position in our community. We can look out for newcomers–writers and fans alike–and make them welcome and follow through on our promise that we will have their backs. We can try to help people form connections with each other, so they are not isolated and alone.”
  • “Equality Credentials”, by Sara Ahmed: “Feminist work in addressing institutional failure can be used as evidence of institutional success. The very labour of feminist critique can end up supporting what is being critiqued. The tools you introduce to address a problem can be used as indicators that a problem has been addressed.”
  • “Shock and Care: an essay about art, politics and responsibility”, by Harry Giles (Content note: includes discussion of sex, violence and self-injury in an artistic context): “So, in a political situation in which care is both exceptionally necessary and exceptionally underprovided, acts of care begin to look politically radical. To care is to act against the grain of social and economic orthodoxy: to advocate care is, in the present moment, to advocate a kind of political rupture. But by its nature, care must be a rupture which involves taking account of, centring, and, most importantly, taking responsibility for those for whom you are caring. Is providing care thus a valuable avenue of artistic exploration? Is the art of care a form of radical political art? Is care, in a society which devalues care, itself shocking?”

Total Eclipse of the Linkspam (22 March 2016)

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.

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.

The Author of the Linkspams…My Brother (1 March 2016)

  • Even Mothra, Queen of the Kaiju, Has To Lean In Sometimes | Harlot (February 21): “Mothra stands (figuratively) as a symbol of the way women need to perform better, smarter, and faster than our male-counterparts (literally) to even just be part of the conversation.”
  • What Can Be Done To Address Harassment In Science? | Forbes (January 29): “Why does it make sense to identify such discrimination and harassment as scientific misconduct? Because research grants are awarded to achieve the dual goals of building new knowledge and training new scientists. Scientists who abuse training relationships to harm trainees, vulnerable members of the research community, are doing harm to the project of science. More broadly, beyond training relationships, scientists who in the course of their funded research activities engage in discrimination and harassment targeting other members of the scientific community are damaging relationships within the knowledge-building community — and, by extension, undercutting their field’s ability to build reliable knowledge.”
  • Refugee Girls Got To Dress Up As What They Want To Be When They Grow Up | Buzzfeed (February 3): “The International Rescue Committee recently sent photographer Meredith Hutchison to meet with young girls in two refugee camps in Jordan and ask them about their hopes and dreams. The project, called Vision Not Victim, saw the girls draw pictures of what they want to be when they grew up, now that they have escaped war. Each girl then participated in a photo shoot based on the drawings to pose as their grown-up selves. They were even given copies of the photos to show their families and keep with them as a reminder of their goals.”
  • The chemistry of discourse | Making Light (February 27): “What we really need for free speech is a varied ecosystem of different moderators, different regimes, different conversations. How do those spaces relate to one another when Twitter, Reddit, and the chans flatten the subcultural walls between them?”

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.

I’ll Make Him A Linkspam He Can’t Refuse (24 February 2016)

  • Only 88 tech startups are run by black women | Sara Ashley O’Brien at CNN Money (17 February): “There are a paltry number of black women running tech startups. And there’s an incredible dearth of money flowing to the few who are.
    That’s according to #ProjectDiane, a new study that examines the state of black female entrepreneurship. While big tech firms have pledged to be more transparent about their diversity stats — releasing annual reports to benchmark their progress — that same transparency is still rare in the venture capital world.”
  • What Shipping Richonne Taught Me About Racism | The Black Feminist Geek (22 February): “Last night on The Walking Dead, Rick and Michonne finally got together […] the suggestion of a Rick/Michonne power couple has been met with confusion and incredulity, not to mention outright animosity at times. And during all these years of shipping Richonne, I’ve learned an awful lot about racism as it manifests itself in fandom.”
  • Wikimedia timeline of recent events | Molly White (22 February):”The Wikimedia Foundation has recently suffered from lack of communication with the editing community, poor transparency, and sudden loss of staff members. Some of these issues center around the recent Wikimedia Discovery efforts, some seem to stem from senior leadership. Unrest and discontent has been visible both within the editing community and the Wikimedia Foundation itself. This timeline […] will be updated as more events unfold or come to light.”
  • The Signpost: Shit I cannot believe we had to fucking write this month | Emily Temple-Wood at Wikipedia (17 February): “Welcome to this new column, which highlights awesome articles and other content created or expanded to fight systemic bias in the previous month! This first column will highlight content created in the first two months of 2016, because why the fuck not. People wrote some great stuff: This month in systemic bias, we had to write a whole bunch of shit that should have been written forever ago and generally made the world a better place. Go read these articles and learn about some badass people.”
  • Does The Design Industry Need A Women-Only Platform To Promote Equality? | Diana Budds at Co.Design (3 February): “Tech and finance are frequently cited as the most notorious culprits, but virtually every industry suffers from gender inequality. Design is no exception. A recent poll from O’Reilly found that women in the design industry earned $14,000 less on average than their male counterparts, and the U.S. Census found that female architects earned about 20% less than male architects. To combat the problem, Malmö, Sweden–based Terese Alstin established No Sir, an e-commerce platform built to promote the work of female designers.”
  • Ruby, Codes of Conduct, and Integrity | Betsy Haibel (17 February): “Whenever an event or a community adopts a CoC, there’s tension between the need to respect existing work and the need to build something organic. Strong codes of conduct codify community norms; a copypastaed CoC that doesn’t reflect community leaders’ actual values will inevitably be poorly and/or unevenly enforced, which makes communities less safe.”
  • Mark Oshiro’s post about the “persistent and pervasive racial and sexual abuse/harassment [he] was the victim of at ConQuesT” [warning for discussion of racism, sexual harassment, abuse]
    • Facebook post by Mark Does Stuff (21 February): “Over the past nine months or so, the events of my weekend at ConQuesT 46 have haunted me, and recent events inspired me to finally talk about my experience.”
    • Expect More From Your Regional ConCom | K Tempest Bradford (21 February): “There are so many conversations going on right now sparked by Mark Oshiro’s report[1] detailing what happened to him at last year’s ConQuesT convention that it’s hard to just focus in on one aspect to talk about[2]. There is one thing I want to jump in and speak about right away, which is what should be expected of con staff and ConComs.”

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.

Linkspam Crossing

  • Where’s Rey? | Sweatpants & Coffee (January 19): “Would your son want to play with an action figure of Rey, the central figure in the latest Star Wars film? Would your daughter? It’s too bad they don’t have the choice; Hasbro, among other toymakers, left out the one key female figure in their The Force Awakens game sets. Hasbro says it was to preserve plot secrets, but an industry insider said the choice was deliberate. The insider, who spoke to Sweatpants & Coffee on condition of anonymity, said the decision to exclude Rey was based on marketing assumptions and not for plot reasons.”
  • How The Media Continues To Sell Out Victims Of Abuse | The Establishment (February 17): “[Zoe Quinn’s work] isn’t “profiting”—it’s making the best out of a disaster, eating the locusts that have devoured your crops and telling yourself you can get used to the taste. And whose fault is it? Well, it’s the fault of an angry ex who understands the Internet well and admits to carefully engineering his words to make his screed about what a terrible person his former girlfriend was go viral among people who hate her. But it’s also our fault. My fault. The fault of people like me who make a living writing about things and drawing attention to them and acting like that, in and of itself, makes a difference.”
  • 10 Movies You Should See That Pass The ”DuVernay Test” | Refinery29 (February 3): “Named for Selma director Ava Duvernay, it’s a test to see if a movie presents substantive depictions of people of color. While the Bechdel test has certain boxes that need to be checked off, the DuVernay test is broader. Dargis explained that, in films which pass the test, “African-Americans and other minorities have fully realized lives rather than serve as scenery in white stories.””
  • 2016 Dancecard & On Semi-Recent Events | Samantha Marshall: “Being a marginalized person in tech and a regular conference speaker is really rough. It requires a lot of energy to get on the level of everyone else around you that fits into the stereotypical “middle-class white dude” tech speaker. People don’t take you seriously and will drastically underestimate what you know or can offer that could be useful to them. It requires more energy to arrive at the same place, then you also need energy to face the harassment and exclusionary behavior that will inevitably manifest at events.”
  • Women in STEM and Steven Universe | /r/stevenuniverse (February 18): “It’s good to see a show promoting women going into these fields without portraying them as shy bookish types in high school. These are individuals who are confident in their abilities and display a level of professionalism expected of them without any sort of bias based on gender.”
  • Long Live Zoë Quinn, The Nerd Hero We Deserve | Autostraddle (February 13): “What’s so frustrating—and perhaps why Quinn’s harassment is so resonant with so many women I speak to—is that G-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named is nothing new. It’s simply a new way of doing an old thing, of harassing women. The idea of the “good victim” that Quinn suggests has been around for ages as a way of discrediting those that report abuse.”
  • In Conversation With bell hooks and Emma Watson | Paper (February 18): “Emma Watson’s stirring speech at the United Nations. Emma’s moving words and her work promoting gender equality through the UN’s HeForShe movement provided the first real introduction to the concept for many young women (and men). For her part, the actress says she’s identified as a feminist since she was a kid, but she also credits writer, artist, intellectual, and feminist icon bell hooks, author of Feminism is for Everybody among many other key texts, with inspiring her and helping shape her understanding and beliefs through her essays, books, and videos. And as for bell she says she is equally as inspired by Emma.”
  • How Shari Steele aims to take the Tor Project mainstream | The Daily Dot (February 16): “Steele’s job is to transform Tor’s image in the public eye, build its organization, and convince the world that strong privacy—not the weak kind you get through tweaking your Facebook settings—is a necessity in the 21st century.”
  • The Opposite of Rape Culture is Nurturance Culture | Dating Tips for the Feminist Man: : Attachment theory, neuroscience, etc. “In Ursula K. Leguin’s book Gifts, an entire culture lives by the rule of what they call ‘gifts’ – powers to do harm – possessed by certain of its members. … By the book’s end, the child at its centre has struggled, against all signs in his culture, to realize something profound and fundamental. … He finally asks his sister and closest confident: what if we are using our gifts backwards? To harm instead of to help? What if they were meant to be used the other way around?”
  • 70 years ago, six Philly women became the world’s first digital computer programmers | PhillyVoice (February 11): “Without any real training, they learned what it took to make ENIAC work – and made it a humming success. Their contributions were overlooked for decades.”
  • 14 graphic novels and comics every woman should read | Cosmopolitan (January 26): Webcomics, illustrated, by/for/about women.
  • Overrated Men | Inside Higher Ed (February 12): Study finds bias in how male students view female STEM students.

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.

WTL (Willingness To Linkspam)

  • Open Source Gendercodes: “”Open Source Gendercodes” is a sci//art project attempting to create an open source sex hormone production platform for gender-hackers and trans people.. Such biotechnologies will enable people to grow companion plants in their homes for hormone therapy.”
  • Slack sent four black female engineers to accept an award and make a statement on diversity | Quartz (February 10): “As Slack’s founder and CEO, Stewart Butterfield has been the face of the enterprise chat app. But when the company won an award for fastest rising startup at TechCrunch’s annual tech awards show Feb. 8, it wasn’t Butterfield who took the stage but four black women: Megan Anctil, Erica Baker, Kiné Camara, and Duretti Hirpa.”
  • I think my biggest “huh” moment… | David J Prokopetz on Tumblr (January 4): “I think my biggest “huh” moment with respect to gender roles is when it was pointed out to me that your typical “geek” is just as hypermasculine as your typical “jock” when you look at it from the right angle.”
  • Why I Just Dropped The Harassment Charges Against The Man Who Started GamerGate | unburnt witch (February 10): “I’m tired. I have been trying to pick up the pieces of my life for almost two years at this point, and I’ve done a lot of healing, a lot of building what I feel like are more workable pushes to improve the lives of people being abused online, and a lot of self-improvement. I’m getting to a place where I’m kind of ok even while the abuse hasn’t slowed down. But every time I have to touch this festering part of my life, it drains the energy out of me. I have less energy to do casework at Crash, less energy to meet with tech partners to tell them how to do better and the ways they’re fucking up, less energy to make my goofy video games about feelings and farts, less energy for my friends and family and loved ones that have been helplessly watching me torn apart by this man for years.”
  • More Than Binary: Inclusive Gender Collection and You | PyCon 2016 in Portland, OR (February): “Many people identify their gender in many ways. So why do we build systems to capture accurate gender information with a dropdown that only lists “male” and “female”? This talk covers why you might want to consider alternative ways of selecting gender for your users, a brief overview of the current best practices, issues addressed by my project Gender Amender, and why more work needs to be done.”
  • Gender Bias in Open Source: Pull Request Acceptance of Women Versus Men | PeerJ (February 9):  An academic article that finds women are more likely to have their pull requests accepted in general but less likely to be accepted if they’re known to be women. Ars Technica has a writeup, but it buries the lede.
  • An Archive of Their Own: A Case Study of Feminist HCI and Values in Design (CHI 2016) | Casey Fiesler (February 9): “For years, I’ve been bringing up the fan fiction site Archive of Our Own (AO3) to folks in the HCI community, as a cool example of two things: (1) an amazingly successful open source project designed and built mostly by women; and (2) thoughtful incorporation of existing community norms into design. […] How did these design decisions come to be, and what makes AO3 so successful? Are there lessons to be learned for how we can build social norms into technology design? And as we unpacked these issues, what we found was that an underlying commitment to core feminist values (like agency, inclusivity, diversity, empowerment) were part of this picture – it turns out that AO3 is an amazing case study of feminist HCI in action.” More information can be found on their Tumblr.
  • The Woman Who Makes Prosthetic Pinkies for Ex-Yakuza Members | VICE Motherboard (February 9): “The woman was Yukako Fukushima, a prosthetics maker, who—aside from making regular prosthetics—has for over a decade made hundreds of fake pinkies for ex-yakuza members wishing to leave gang life behind and find regular jobs. Usually one of Fukushima’s fingers costs 180,000 yen ($1490), but she provides ex-yakuza in difficult financial situations with a discount.”

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.

Liberty, equality, linkspam (9 February 2016)

  • the problem of language | b. binaohan on Medium (February 8): “All of this, at the end, has me thinking about instruction, leaky pipelines, and diversity in tech. In a lot of ways, I represent a perfect example of the convergence of socio-economic factors that make pipes leaky. Based on my age and interests, I *could’ve* been one of those “I taught myself how to code as a teen and spent two years in college then dropped out to make lots of money” types. But I was poor, trans, gay, not-white-enough, and life got in the way”
  • Meet Marvel’s Newest Comic Series About a Badass Superhero You Already Love | PopSugar (February 8): “”I have an 11-year-old daughter. She is a huge comics nerd,” said Cain. “There are a ton of girls her age who read comics. But the industry loses a lot of them in middle school. Maybe because they’re generally mortified. Or maybe they catch on that there’s not as much for them as they thought there was.” Hopefully Mockingbird is just what they need to retain their love of comics.”
  • FilterScout | Civic Workbench: “FilterScout is a browser extension allows User to set rules for content display, muting unwanted content on the Web, including social media websites. Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, newspapers, blogs can be filtered.”… “We’re mitigating one vector for abuse so that people can continue to engage with communities and (we hope) build communities where abuse isn’t normal.”
  • Library publishing and diversity values | College and Research Libraries News (February): “What are the consequences of this lack of diversity in publishing, librarianship, and faculty? We know already that privilege can bias access to material, which is part of why the open access movement exists, to alleviate the barriers that cost can create for researchers. However, one possible consequence is a feedback loop in scholarship that privileges and publishes the majority voice, which is often white and male.”
  • An R update | Adventures in Data (February 2): “what I need is the confidence that the system will work not just forme, who knows some of the R Foundation and Core folks in a passing way, but for people who don’t. That we actually have a way of handling these kinds of problems in the future, that is scalable and generalisable and not based on who you know.”
  • When life gives you lemons, make science | Adventures in Data (February 5): “If you’re going to harass people for science bear in mind that they may science your harassment. Happy browsing to all. And remember, kids: nobody likes total strangers offering their very important opinion about how you are totally wrong. So, please: don’t be that stranger.”

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.

Linkspam On. Linkspam Off. (5 February 2016)

  • Fathers: maybe stop mentioning your daughters to earn credibility on women’s issues | Medium: “We have to take our time and earn trust. We have to show up to those women’s meetings — and listen. We have to volunteer to do the busy work it takes to make diversity initiatives run. We’ve got to apologize when we mess up. We have to make our workplaces more hospitable to all kinds of people. We have to hire marginalized people. And we’ve got to read, read, read all we can to make sure we know what we are talking about and never stop because we probably still don’t. Our daughters are awesome. But at work, lets make things better for everyone.”
  • Dear White Women in Tech: Here’s a Thought — Follow Your Own Advice by Riley H | Model View Culture: “Instead of being useful to us, all I see is that white women are quite happy to talk at all-white panels and call it diversity in tech and gaming. You’re happy to use the means afforded to you for being white to play a good game and make a good face while doing nothing meaningful for women of color. You’re screaming and shouting all day about your own shallow versions of feminism while the women of color you claim to represent are trying to simultaneously hold their heads up to stay above water, and down to avoid choking on smoke.”
  • How startups can create a culture of inclusiveness | The Globe and Mail: “As a young female in a leadership position at a successful tech startup, who also happens to be visibly religious, I know a thing or two about representing minorities in the workplace. After years of hearing and reading about the lack of diversity in startups and personally encountering what seem like isolated incidents, I’ve noticed a very real pattern of exclusivity. Here are a few things I’ve learned during my career at several Toronto startups on building a workplace culture that is collaborative, inclusive, and one that can help accelerate the growth of your company.”
  • This 2014 Sci-Fi Novel Eerily Anticipated the Zika Virus | Slate: “There is a better science fiction analog to the Zika crisis: The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, by Meg Elison, which was published in 2014 In Children of Men, abortion and birth control are rendered moot; in The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, birth control and a woman’s right to bodily autonomy are central to the plot.”
  • Let’s Talk About The Other Atheist Movement | Godlessness in Theory: “Over the last twenty-four hours, with media fixated on Dawkins’ absence from one upcoming convention, atheists have been gathered at another in Houston. The Secular Social Justice conference, sponsored jointly by half a dozen orgs, highlights ‘the lived experiences, cultural context, shared struggle and social history of secular humanist people of color’. Sessions address the humanist history of hip hop, the new atheism’s imperialist mission and the lack of secular scaffolds for communities of colour in the working class US, whether for black single mothers or recently released incarcerees. Perhaps we could talk about this?”
  • Computer Science, Meet Humanities: in New Majors, Opposites Attract | Chronicle of Higher Education: “She chose Stanford University, where she became one of the first students in a new major there called CS+Music, part of a pilot program informally known as CS+X.Its goal is to put students in a middle ground, between computer science and any of 14 disciplines in the humanities, including history, art, and classics. And it reduces the number of required hours that students would normally take in a double major in those subjects.”

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.

Stand by your linkspam (1 February 2016)

  • Down and out in statistical computing | Adventures in Data (February 1): “So: unintentionally offensive variable name leads to a patch and the indication that it is much more than one person finding it offensive, leads to the President of the R Foundation dismissing the concerns as “shit-disturbing” and punishing the people who surfaced said concern.”
  • The week I made Forbes’ 30 Under 30 Science List | Sarah Guthals on Medium (January 10): “When being nominated or recognized for my efforts, it’s not that I’m the best, or the one that should get the recognition, but I am one of the people that should be recognized, and that recognition could allow me to highlight all of the other people and efforts that have contributed to me being able to continue making my efforts towards helping others.”
  • How to stop the sexual harassment of women in science: reboot the system | The Conversation (January 28): “we don’t need to wait for journalists and politicians to shine a spotlight on more individual cases of harassment. It’s time individual researchers, science managers, departments and institutions made the commitment to reboot science and wipe out harassment.”
  • The “Women in Tech” movement is full of victim blaming bullshit | Life Tips (January 14): “It is time to focus the work on holding the men in charge accountable- not just trying to do things to “help women”.”
  • Names and Harvard | Adventures in Renaming (January 26): “If Harvard can be so on the ball with preferred names, why can’t anyone else? Why can’t PayPal let me decide what name I want to show on Paypal.Me rather than plastering my full name? Why can’t I have my debit card show the name I’d rather overly-friendly cashiers call me? And why is Facebook still being fussy over names? Just one quick note to the administrators (maybe not even that), and done. Easy.”
  • Plug In With The DIY Tech Superstar Of Adafruit Industries: BUST Interview | Bust Magazine (January 21): “While still a student, she built an mp3 player from scratch “for fun.” And after her classmates took notice, Fried began selling her own DIY kits. Today, Adafruit occupies a 15,000 square-foot manufacturing facility in N.Y.C., and Fried hosts weekly web hangouts where she answers tech questions and interacts with makers of all skill levels.”
  • Lady Science | Slate (January 25): “sexism isn’t a women’s problem, it’s a problem for everyone. Also it helps if men speak up, because men who might be a part of the problem will tend to listen to other men more than women. Ironic, but once this idea gets traction with them that problem itself might diminish.”

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.