Linkspam migrating south for the winter (8th November, 2010)

• It’s official, over 5% of Ubuntu Members are women!
• Stephen Fry declares the Stephen-Fry-says-women-don’t-enjoy-sex discussion Silliness (pushback at, for example, Ideologically Impure and Pickled Think via tigtog and also Rules for Anchorites).
• Truthout About Kyriarchy: An Open Letter To “Feminist” Writers, Bloggers, and Journalists: Lisa Factora-Borchers explains what she was doing when she introduced Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza’s neologism “kyriarchy” to blogging, and where it’s gone wrong since.
• Questioning Transphobia writers are fundraising: Lisa and I are both struggling to survive. Both of us are unemployed. I don’t have money for food this next fortnight, let alone internet or hormone treatments. Lisa has a staph infection she can’t afford to see a doctor for, and no money for hormones either.
• Forget Cinderella, Find Fred Astaire (changethis.com/manifesto/show/76.01.ForgetCinderella): Why have companies worked so hard at improving the gender balance with such unsatisfactory results? Because the approach taken was to focus their efforts on the wrong part of the problem: women. It’s time to stop asking what’s the matter with women that they aren’t making it to the top? and start asking what’s the matter with our organization if we can’t recruit, retain, and promote the majority of the educated talent in the world today?
• Why it matters: [The women] were complaining how silly it was that we were constantly talking about how great it was that there were more women speakers at this conference than any other year… My first thought was a flash of anger. And then I recalled that not very long ago, I was just like them.
• Rosalind Franklin and DNA: How wronged was she?: Nicholas Wade and Lynne Osman Elkin debated the size of Rosalind Franklin’s contributions at a panel earlier this month.
• The 30th Down Under Feminists Carnival is up.

If you have links of interest, please share them in comments here, or if you’re a delicious user, tag them ‘geekfeminism‘ to bring them to our attention (twitter uses can use #geekfeminism). Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links in comments and on delicious.

Linkspam is idealized into powerlessness (29th October, 2010)

• San Francisco, USA: Women 2.0 PITCH Night, 4th November: Watch the finalists of the Startup Competition pitch live, learn firsthand from successful female startup founders how they grew their ideas into industry-changing businesses, and network with hundreds of Women 2.0 members (entrepreneurs, investors, startuppers, and technologists) at our biggest event of the year!
• Apple’s tightly controlled App Store is selling a transphobic application, see solarbird’s initial discussion and addenda, including complaint avenues.
• New Scientist is running a Flash fiction competition 2010: Forgotten futures. 350 words, including the title, and you grant them a non-exclusive right to republish.
• Also on the subject of fiction, Baen has made the entire Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold , available for free in digital format.
• hradzka discusses the Bechdel Test: mechanical approaches: On those occasions that a conversation does turn to why a work fails the Bechdel Test, there are basically two ways that conversation can go. It can turn into an activist discussion of sexism and society, or it can turn into a discussion of the mechanics of writing. There have been a lot of the former, but there haven’t been all that many of the latter.
• There’s a UK geek calendar released as a fundraiser for The Libel Reform Campaign, largely featuring geek communicators (geeks who are writers, TV hosts, and so on). See their about page for image links: on first look it seems not to have really sexualised any of the geeks, including the women, very much. What do you think?
• People involved in Ubuntu may know Amber Graner and her husband Pete. Unfortunately they lost their house to fire while away at the Ubuntu Developer Summit (their children and pets are all safe and well). Rikki Kite has a fundraiser.

If you have links of interest, please share them in comments here, or if you’re a delicious user, tag them “geekfeminism” to bring them to our attention. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links in comments and on delicious.

Shuttleworth apologises for last year’s comments at LinuxCon

Remember how last September in a keynote speech at LinuxCon, Mark Shuttleworth (Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator For Life of the Ubuntu Linux project) made a series of comments including one about how “us guys” in the Linux community have trouble “explaining to girls what we actually do”? At the time, I posted an open letter to Mark, saying,

I’d like to invite you to think about the message you’re sending to women in the Linux community, and, if you didn’t mean to convey the message that we’re technical illiterates and hard to educate, consider apologising publicly.

There’s a followup post with more information, and in November last year Shuttleworth responded in comment on another post on the subject. However, he did not apologise at that time.

So, I’m glad to be able to report that the other day, in the comment thread on a post about “tribalism” on his own blog, he offered an apology after prompting by Máirín Duffy and Carla Schroder:

I apologize unreservedly to all offended by my poor choice of language on that or other occasions.

Better late than never! I know that several Ubuntu women I’ve spoken to are pleased and relieved that Shuttleworth finally apologised, even if it’s not a textbook apology. So, thank you, Mark. I hope you’ll continue listening to the women in your community, and think about the effects of your words in future.

Quick hit: Win her a Netbook!

The Ubuntu Women team ran a competition a few months ago to gather stories documenting how women adopted the Ubuntu distribution as their computer operating system of choice. Based on the success of that competition, they (for full disclosure, this includes me) have another competition going.

It is a photo competition that is timed to coincide with World Play Day. The task being for parents (and guardians) to take photographs of their girls using and embracing Ubuntu. Ubuntu Women can then use these photos for inspiring girls to be excited by technology.

Click the image to go to the competition website.

Cathy Malmrose of ZaReason: Linux Entrepreneur

I recently was looking for an ethically sourced Linux laptop and came across ZaReason. CEO Cathy Malmrose‘s candid answers to my questions were the deciding factor in my decision to buy ZaReason. I saw her name in my inbox and recognized it from the Un-Scary Screwdriver piece she wrote a few months back:

Since I had been staring down a pile of excess, but still quite usable hardware, I asked my dad, “Hey, can you wait a few weeks and your granddaughter will build you a desktop that will be ideal for video editing?”

Since we GeekFeminism folk are foursquare for awesome women, FLOSS, cool hardware, and empowering girls and women of all ages with science and technology, Cathy Malmrose deserves a link roundup of her very own.

“How would you describe your customer base?” “Intelligent people.” I love being pandered to! :-)

Malmrose is also CEO of Partimus, “a nonprofit organization that provides repurposed computers running free software to students and schools who need them,” and a former schoolteacher.

On my side, I have seen inventory go unused, depreciating every day that it sits on our shelves. Laptops that are used for shows, demo models and other lightly used systems can be donated to people who could put them to good use.

Several economic and societal factors are coming together to make this an excellent time to launch the Partimus branch that can be the go-to donation center for hardware vendors who want to keep their inventory tight like we do…. The end result will be to not only donate systems to good new “adoptive” homes, but to encourage others to do the same unofficially in their own social circles.

In an interview with the Southern California Linux Expo, Malmrose talks at length about how her kids got her into FLOSS, the welcome and respect she feels in the open source community (more than in the business world), and women in STEM. A tiny excerpt:

Question: What methods do you use to encourage other women to get involved in technology?

Cathy: Talking about it in an open, friendly way, the same way I tell a friend about a great restaurant, a cool museum, a competent babysitter, or a fun science camp. My friends don’t have to try Linux, but they sure would enjoy it if they did. There is a certain fear factor involved in computing, possibly because it seems so magical, but there are two ways to approach something you don’t understand — with fear or with awe. When I talk about Open Source, I focus on easing the fear and projecting the awe.

In a profile feature at Linux.com, Malmrose explains how one specific welcoming community helped her go from novice to leader:

She also discovered another important aspect: community. It began with her first trip to the Alameda County Computer Resource Center, an organization that refurbishes older computer systems to give away to those less fortunate.

“I brought my own laptop and stayed in the background, too shy to do any good. I had 20+ years being shown the ‘no girls allowed’ sign on this particular tree fort. The owner, James Burgett, was explicitly approachable, and I liked him on sight. I knew he would cut me all the leeway I needed to integrate into his corner of the tech market.”

Burgett helped Malmrose break out of her shell. Whether it was observing in amazement the way the group could create order out of chaos from all the donations, to popping off the Windows super key to replace with a custom Tux key, Malmrose came into her own. “I found that every time I visited ACCRC, the people on duty were accepting and kind. They were always busy, always moving, and the rhythm surprised me.”

ACCRC played a vital role in the formation of ZaReason. “We saw James addressing the low end, shipping now more than 17,000 FOSS systems. We like the newest, fastest hardware, and we saw few reasonably priced options for the high end.”

She also writes about women in FLOSS in her article “An International Look at Women in Open Source” from the Women in Open Source issue of the Open Source Business Resource.

Malmrose has video interviews up explaining how her family moved to Linux and “how her small company came to be number 3 in the sales of computers running GNU-Linux”.

I’m writing this on my new ZaReason Hoverboard, which arrived running Ubuntu Linux. (It arrived with some bad memory, I did a memtest at their advice and then shipped it back, and I got it back fixed under warranty.) Thanks for your entrepreneurship and your activism, Cathy Malmrose!

Who are your favorite female executives in tech? Tell us in the comments.

Spamjazzling (18th March, 2010)

• The ch!cktionary brings us The Five Types Of Haters Female Bloggers Encounter (And What To Do About Them) (warning: anti-women and other hateful comments are quoted extensively in the post)
• Is your geekdom more fundamental than this girl’s? Girl appears on TV show to identify Star Wars figurines with her mouth
• McSweeney’s Internet Tendency interviews Stephanie Parry, former hardware technician.
• China selects women Astronauts: “China has selected two military air transport pilots as its first female astronauts, the country’s state media reported Wednesday. The only hitch? The women had to be hitched — as in married — to make the cut.”
• Interview with Emma Jane Hogbin: Ubuntu's "The Fridge" website interviews Emma Jane Hogbin on International Women's Day
• Remember when we had fun with “where are all the men bloggers?” In a similar vein, go and enjoy Lauredhel’s coverage of daddy blogger brand building.
• As always, there’s plenty of reading on the feminist merry-go-round, with the Carnival of Feminists #15 and the Carnival of Feminist Parenting #10.

If you have links of interest, please share them in comments here, or if you’re a delicious user, tag them “geekfeminism” to bring them to our attention. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links in comments and on delicious.

Quick Hit: Events for March – IWD2010 and Ada Lovelace

A few relevant things are going on in March which our readers might find interesting.

The first off the rank is International Women’s Day (IWD) which will be on March 8th. From the website:

International Women’s Day (IWD), annually on 8 March, is a global day celebrating the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future. In some places like China, Russia, Vietnam and Bulgaria, IWD is a national holiday. The first IWD was run in 1911.

March 8th this year will be a weekday (Monday), which is useful for things like organised breakfasts and lunches and so forth, so keep your eyes peeled for an event near you. I’d be looking especially to your local Girl Geek Dinner sites as it seems the perfect thing for them to organise an event around, but of course, no guarantees.

Ubuntu Women is currently running a competition which will be drawn on March 8th to celebrate the day. If you’re an Ubuntu user and you’d like a chance to win a prize pack, then consult this email and get your entries in by the 22nd of Feb (Disclosure: Rumours say I am at fault for initiating this competition. I take full credit!)

The other event I want to highlight is Ada Lovelace Day which is March 24th. From the website’s about page:

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science.

The first Ada Lovelace Day was held on 24th march 2009 and was a huge success. It attracted nearly 2000 signatories to the pledge and 2000 more people who signed up on Facebook. Over 1200 people added their post URL to the Ada Lovelace Day 2009 mash-up. The day itself was covered by BBC News Channel, BBC.co.uk, Radio 5 Live, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Metro, Computer Weekly, and VNUnet, as well as hundreds of blogs worldwide.

In 2010 Ada Lovelace Day will again be held on 24th March and the target is to get 3072 people to sign the pledge and blog about their tech heroine.

Why they want 3072 pledges, I don’t know. I cannot seem to find anything on the website to explain it. However, I am also noting a deviation from the phrasing used last year (“but only if 1,000 other people do the same”). I can totally understand the reluctance to go it on your own — I just don’t like that kind of wording. Other personal preferences may apply, of course.

Our degenerate modern linkspamming society (18th December, 2009)

• How the Geek Stereotype Stunts Computer Science: Lisa Grossman, writer of "Of Geeks and Girls", responds to some Hacker News comments: “The entrance fee to a computer science career is membership in geek culture, and that’s way too restrictive. If any other field had a cultural barrier to entry like that, no one would stand for it.”
• Dear Marvel Comics: Rusalka appreciates Marvel Comics’ efforts to spotlight female superheroes in comics. But why are they spotlighted as “girls” or “ladies” rather than “women”?
• Denver University “Cyber Civil Rights” Symposium Recap: Eric Goldman recounts the “Cyber Civil Rights: New Challenges for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in our Networked Age" symposium, with special attention to Danielle Citron's session on harassment of women online and legal solutions to it.
• Thinking Out Loud: Is Social Media the new Pink Collar Ghetto of Tech?: The Learned Fangirl wants to avoid a "separate but equal" tech ghetto for women.
• Nerd Girls: a video documenting the Tufts University’s “Nerd Girls” team, women engineering students building a solar car.
• Management changes at Canonical: Jane Silber, current COO of Canonical Ltd, will take over from Mark Shuttleworth as CEO in March 2010. (Canonical is a company owned by Shuttleworth and is the sponsor of Ubuntu development among other ventures.) There’s been much discussion around the Linuxosphere (Linux.com, Slashdot, LWN), but most of it around Shuttleworth’s decision.
• Charting a course from virtual reality to the White House: CNET News profiles Beth Noveck, Deputy CTO for the Obama administration in the US.
• UbuntuGeek republished a laptoplogic article (original now gone): Is Ubuntu Ready for a Non-tech-savvy Girlfriend? Is making sure to specify “non-tech-savvy” enough to get this article out of the So simple, [a woman you know] could do it? trap, or is it playing into it?

If you have links of interest, please share them in comments here, or if you’re a delicious user, tag them “geekfeminism” to bring them to our attention. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Linkspam, the country where I quite want to be (8th December, 2009)

• Margarita Manterola of the Debian project writes about Software Libre, Pasión de Mujeres, a free software event in Argentina where all of the speakers will be women
• We are all pretty WEIRD: noting that most psychological research is done on Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) subjects, and the implications for science reporting on gender and race.
• CNN reports on A day in the ‘normal’ life of a Nobel Prize winner, focussing on Carol Greider’s single motherhood.
• MMORPG News reports that Aurora Technology’s King of the World MMORPG is going to enforce character genders matching player genders by asking players creating a female character to undergo a “webcam test”. Apparently they hope that this will make female players feel respected. We just bet.
• The Los Angeles Times had an article about Brightkite, describing it as targeting “hot girls”, since “guys will go where the hot chicks are.” Brightkite CEO Jonathon Linner posted an apology to the company blog for upsetting women Brightkite users.
• Scientist Carrie: Geeks, meritocracy, and gender: a response to Skud’s meritocracy post, with some additional thoughts and examples.
• We linked to the GNOME Journal Women in Open Source issue before, but a lot of people are especially liking Cathy Malmrose’s The Un-Scary Screwdriver about her five-year-old daughter and friends installing Ubuntu and building computers.
• Mislav Marohnić listed Things I learned from iPhone and Droid ads, inspired by Skud’s post.
• Tara C. Smith has a roundup of discussion around The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, edited by Richard Dawkins, which only features 3 pieces by women, of 83 total.
• The Globe and Mail reports controversy around a sex scene between two male elves in Dragon Age: Origins, “revealing what some experts call the homophobic underbelly of the gaming community.” See also the discussion thread at Sociological Images.
• Study: Males vs Females in social networks has a gender breakdown of users at various sites, including Twitter, Facebook, Digg and Slashdot.

If you have links of interest, please share them in comments here, or if you’re a delicious user, tag them “geekfeminism” to bring them to our attention. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links in comments and on delicious.

The Mists of Linkspam (26th November, 2009)

• Matt Zimmerman asks Who’s afraid of Ubuntu Women?
• Issue 17 of the GNOME Journal is available, the first with a unified theme: “Women in Open Source”. All articles were contributed by women. (Journal issues don’t seem to have their own archive pages, but in future, articles will be available from the archives, under November 2009.)
• Dungeons and Dragons players, including one woman but not otherwise diverse, give sex advice
• The Tom Gauld print of story archetypes Characters for an Epic Tale shows mostly male archetypes. Female gendered ones include “the girl” and “the three witches”.
• danah boyd recounts a disastrous talk she gave at Web2.0 Expo, in which tweets about her talk were being projected behind her. There were, of course, some sexualised comments, although boyd focuses mainly on what it’s like to have the entire audience know what everyone else thinks of your talk, while you don’t.
• Kim Werker recounts one more sexist joke in a tech-conference speech, and how it has changed her approach to feminism.
• (trigger warning) Second Life is now featuring female avatars with obvious bruising. Controversy ensues.
• Why do girls seem to be apathetic about science in school? (Warning: comment stream is epic fail; reading the article only is recommended.) On a happier note, see also Women’s Adventures in Science.

If you have links of interest, please share them in comments here, or if you’re a delicious user, tag them “geekfeminism” to bring them to our attention. Thanks to everyone who suggested links in comments and on delicious.