Link Us Something Please (8 February 2015)

• Computational Linguistics Reveals How Wikipedia Articles Are Biased Against Women | MIT Technology Review (February 2): “various researchers have kept a close eye on the way the gender bias among editors may be filtering through to the articles in the encyclopedia itself. Today, Claudia Wagner at the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Cologne, Germany, and pals at ETH Zurich, Switzerland and the University of Koblenz-Landau, say they have found evidence of serious bias in Wikipedia entries about women, suggesting that gender bias may be more deep-seated and engrained than previously imagined.”
• Here’s What It’s Like For A Woman To Send a Job Rejection To A Man | Jolene Creighton on Medium (February 2): “Why we rejected him… Simply put, he’s not a science writer. That’s the only consideration that factored into our decision. Looking at his impressive list of publications, there isn’t anything even remotely on science. At least, nothing that I have seen. Admittedly, I didn’t look up every single publication. But either way, if not being a science writer isn’t a good enough reason for you, here are a few other reasons that we could have rejected him.”
• #28DaysOfBlackCosplay: More Than Just A Hashtag | Black Girl Nerds (February 5): “Jamie: Why is cosplay so important to the blerd (black nerd) community?
  Chaka: As Black nerds, it’s important for us to see images of each other. Things are starting to get better, but we still have so few characters of color in our comics, video games, anime, manga and movies. It can be disheartening, never seeing anyone who looks like you in the media you love so much. Being able to physically see Black cosplayers out at cons, literally wearing their fandom on their sleeves is just so intensely satisfying on a level I may not ever be able to accurately describe.”
• How Using ‘They’ as a Singular Pronoun Can Change the World | Feministing (February 3): “using singular they is far more than a way to respect friends who have gender identities outside the binary. Singular they has exciting potential to be part of a radical shift in the dominant gender culture. Changing the culture may seem like a mighty task for one little pronoun. But actually, it wouldn’t be the first time that a pronoun was near the center of a momentous cultural shift.”
• [warning for discussion of abuse and suicide] Twitter CEO Dick Costolo finally admits the obvious: Site has failed users on abuse | Washington Post (February 5): “Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo has never deigned to address rampant harassment on his platform, despite the frequency with which that subject makes the news. But on Wednesday, in the wake of a blockbuster radio piece by the feminist writer Lindy West, Costolo at last admitted to a fatal flaw of his platform that hundreds of critics and troll-battered tweeters have pointed out already: Twitter has become an ideal platform for harassment, in large part because the site has done so little to combat it. “We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years,” Costolo wrote, in a company memo obtained by the Verge. “
• Is the Professor Bossy or Brilliant? Much Depends on Gender | Claire Miller at New York Times (February 6):”Benjamin Schmidt, a Northeastern University history professor, says he built the chart using data from 14 million student reviews on the Rate My Professors site. It allows you to search for any word to see how often it appeared in reviews and how it broke down by gender and department. The chart makes vivid unconscious biases. The implications go well beyond professors and college students, to anyone who gives or receives feedback or performance reviews.”

More articles about that Newsweek story and lead illustration:

• Fighting Sexism In Silicon Valley | TechCrunch (January 30): “As they start or join startups that are looking for funding, I sincerely hope that millennials will apply their unique ethos to their funding strategies and career decisions. I hope they seek out and partner with VCs who share their same values about gender diversity, who are unafraid to invest in woman-led startups, and who have women on staff throughout their ranks. I hope they will embrace the diversity that helps to define their generation.”
• Newsweek, Allies, and Critique | Ellen’s Blog (January 30): “It’s crucial that we critique public statements on this issue. There aren’t many people who are willing to speak up, so the few voices are amplified to an unreasonable degree. This means we lack a broad, nuanced perspective that could propel us forward. If you’re speaking for a group, you should be anxious to hear how their perspective differs. You should also encourage new voices.”
• Ethical Issues in the Online World | Santa Clara University (February 5): “Ironically, though the article itself focuses on the story of one particular startup founded by two women to illustrate the problem of gender discrimination in Silicon Valley, the reader has to scroll down quite a ways before getting to a photo of those two women entrepreneurs. What if those two real women had been on the cover? Their experiences were apparently seen as interesting and representative enough to illustrate the broader issue, but their faces weren’t. Instead, the key image of the piece (which, the cliché goes, is worth a thousand words), gives voice to those who demean such women.”
• Quiet, Ladies. @Wadhwa is Speaking Now | Amelia Greenhall (February 3): “What can Vivek Wadhwa do if he wants to ACTUALLY help women in tech? To start, Wadhwa needs to shut up about women in tech already! (And forever, preferably. Should we start #stopWadhwa2015?) When reporters call him about women in tech, he should suggest that they speak to an actual woman in tech on the topic instead – perhaps any of the women he has invited to come visit him at his office. We women are waiting for the email that says, “Vivek recommended I speak to you instead, because you are more qualified.” Vivek could donate twice the funds raised by the women in tech book to actual tech feminist non-profits. He could credit the women interviewed in the book by asking permission to put their names and links to their work on the book’s website. He could advocate for the creation of a gender studies faculty position at Singularity University. He could talk about something (anything!) that he has actual experience with, other than women in tech. May that day come soon!”

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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.

Quick hit: Wikipedia begins purging feminist editors

It’s never been clearer that neutral point of view is a joke.

The Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) is the highest user-run body on Wikipedia, or “Wikipedia’s supreme court”. Contrary to its public image as a freewheeling, anarchic site where anyone can edit, Wikipedia actually is a bureaucracy to rival the IRS.

ArbCom’s latest decision: banning five editors who in their personal lives are feminists from editing feminism-related articles. Specifically, all five editors had been attempting to rewrite Wikipedia articles with a pro-Gamergate slate to have a more neutral point of view. No editors who’d expressed a pro-Gamergate point of view in their personal lives were banned; five feminists were.

I’ve previously written on my blog about how Wikipedia administrators decided I couldn’t be neutral because I identified at the time as genderqueer. But if this latest twist isn’t Wikipedia throwing down the gauntlet to declare that “neutral point of view” really means “point of view that soothes white, heterosexual, cis, abled men’s egos”, I don’t know what is.

The Guardian has the full story.

Verifiability, truth, and hearsay: feminist point of view on the Geek Feminism wiki

The following quasi-anonymous comment was received and acknowledged on the Geek Feminism Wiki’s article about the Gittip crisis.

If I understand the editing policies here (I just read them), lies or heresay [sic] can be printed as fact, because you don’t take an NPOV, you take a feminist point of view. That implies that feminism involves lies or hearsay otherwise you would recognize that incorrect information (whether it supports a feminist viewpoint or not) doesn’t belong in an article of any merit.

“NPOV” stands for “neutral point of view”, a notion that Wikipedia editors take as a governing principle. NPOV is useful in some contexts, but also can be abused to camouflage specific ideologies — especially those that happen to dominate discourse in a particular place and time. Like “meritocracy“, NPOV is an abstraction that may or may not be realizable, but in practice often serves as neutral clothing for the decidedly non-neutral opinions of those who power structures currently happen to serve.

The inimitable Rick Scott took the time to craft a patient reply, which I’m reproducing in its entirety here (with Rick’s permission) because it deserves to reach a broader audience. I think it’s a good companion to Skud’s “Feminist Point of View” talk from July. It also serves as an illustration in a specific case of the general points we make in the Geek Feminism wiki editorial guidelines.

The remainder of this post is Rick’s words, not mine.

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You have read the editorial guidelines (for which I thank you), but not understood them. Perhaps I can clarify.

NPOV properly applies to opinions and analysis, not facts. We convey the facts as accurately as we can ascertain them—there’s no such thing as “feminist facts” and “non-feminist facts”.

Having gained our best understanding of the facts at hand, we analyse and interpret those facts from a feminist perspective—one which is informed by the substantial research, scholarship, and critique that the field encompasses. For instance, if a woman is harassed by a male colleague, her supervisor may deny that sexism played a role, explaining the incident in other ways: “He’s just a jerk”; “He’s not good with people”; “Are you sure you aren’t imagining it”, etc. A feminist perspective, however, draws on the considerable research documenting gendered patterns of harassment in the workplace, and points out that this incident is likely part of the larger pattern—that the woman’s gender probably played a significant role in how her colleague elected to treat her.

What you actually take issue with is our approach to matters addressed by Wikipedia’s two other core content policies, namely Verifiability and No Original Research. Our editorial guidelines, which you so kindly read, state (emphasis added):

While citations are preferred wherever possible, we do not require them. Much of our wiki is primary source material, sometimes added anonymously in order to avoid backlash against the whistleblower. Original research is welcome.

To take but one example, harassment and abuse often occur in ways which leave no artifact save the accounts of those involved. Turning our back on these accounts would eliminate our ability to document what happened and undermine our work. Moreover, in the face of a society which tries to silence marginalized people and casts them as liars when they talk about their actual lives, we push back against this erasure by respecting their integrity, taking them at their word, and treating the facts, as they describe them, as facts. This may offend some people’s utopian notions of epistemological purity, but in a world where speaking truth while female can invite significant retribution, this is what we have.

On the topics of truth, fact, whom we presume to be telling the truth, and whom we presume to be lying, you may find some of the articles linked from the Innocent until proven guilty page to be illuminating: specifically, Christie Koehler’s post on Community Safety, and Jill Filipovic’s article The ethics of outing your rapist.

Finally, and separately from all of the generalities above: I can affirm that the information described as “heresay” (sic) comes from an impeccable source, and so am content to leave the description of events as they are. Since nobody has deigned to present any evidence to the contrary, I consider the matter closed. — RickScott, 18:01, September 4, 2014 (UTC)

My linkspam brings all the boys to the yard (30 April 2014)

• In memoriam: Wikimedia remembers two women who contributed hugely to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects: Adrianne Wadewitz (died April 8, see also New York Times and Los Angeles Times, and the memorial edit-a-thon in Los Angeles in May) and Cynthia Ashley-Nelson (died April 11)
• Audrey Tang spoke to TEDxTaipei on Programming Languages and RailsGirls Taiwan (程式語言與軌道女孩) on April 27. Slides (primarily in Chinese) and an English language translation of the transcript are up.
• The Anti-Nerd: Fear of a Black Time Traveler | Rafael Martinez at Black Girl Nerds (April 16): “It is something I have noticed. A lack of us being in the Time Traveling profession. I then Googled ‘Black time travelers’ and closest I got was, I kid you not–black traveling shoes.”
• Dealing with name changes in publication records for scientists | Savannah at lgbt+physicists+blog (April 21): “The basic idea here is that if one is assigned, for example, a female-typical name such as Robyn O’Troodle at birth, then publishes several papers under this name before transitioning to Jonathon O’Troodle, this would result in a jump from a female-typical name to a male-typical name that might appear awkward (or simply distracting) on one’s publication record.”
• Lady She-Woman: Female Superheroes, Codenames and Identity | Andrew Wheeler at Comics Alliance (April 23): “Identity is central to superhero fiction. It’s a genre that gives us heroes; big, broad, iconic modern gods that lift us up out of the uncertainties of our own lives to a place where who you are and what you stand for is known… For a lot of female heroes, owning a superhero identity presents an almost insurmountable challenge. A significant number of DC’s female heroes are based on other heroes, from Batgirl, Supergirl and Wonder Girl through Stargirl, Mary Marvel and Ravager.”
• Sex, Sexy & Sexism | Storify (April 24): a PAX East 2014 panel on fixing gender inequality in gaming. Featuring Susan Arendt, Brianna Wu, Tifa Robles, and Duane de Four, moderated by Ken Gagne
• No, I Don’t Work for Free | Julie Pagano (April 26): “Asking someone to come do professional work for your for-profit company for free is incredibly problematic. I would argue in many cases it is downright exploitative. I doubt they’d have asked me to come code for them for a few hours for free. They’d recognize how unacceptable that is. Why is it that other work is seen as valuable enough to ask for, but not valuable enough to pay for?”
• Dragon Age Goes Gender-Neutral! | Brad Baron at Gay Gamer (April 23): “Dragon Age: Inquisition… due out this fall, features a figure on its cover that could be any gender. The best part — the character’s gender is totally irrelevant!”

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.

It is a linkspam universally acknowledged (25 February 2014)

• 7 Disney Princesses My Daughter Wishes Existed | cecilyk on babble (Feb 21, 2014): “Like so many 7-year-old girls, my daughter is utterly obsessed with Disney Princesses. […] But because I’m a feminist, I annoy my daughter by having long discussions with her about the way Disney portrays women and how she feels about it. […] she also longs for a princess that is more, well, like her. So we sat down together, and she gave me a list of what she would love to see in a Disney Princess. Take note, Disney!”
• What I learned while editing Wikipedia | Noopur Raval on opensource.com (Jan 27, 2014): “My work with the Wikimedia Foundation and editing Wikipedia has helped me take a hard look at myself as a woman of colour from India in technology. […] The question I ask myself now everyday is whether merely enabling access through infrastructure and providing free platforms like Wikipedia can help us resolve uneven digital geographies created in the process.”
• Software Engineering Made a Woman Outta Me | Jennifer Gilbert on Medium (Feb 18, 2014): “When I decided to learn to code, I knew I was entering a male-dominated field. But I considered that challenge far less worrisome than, say, taming the black magic of recursion. […] And yet, the day I became a software engineer, I became a woman. It was a lonely moment. My dad wasn’t even there to awkwardly hug me before yelling for my mother and excusing himself to Any Room But This One. […] The biggest tomboy alive can suddenly feel like Programmer Barbie if her surrounding context is male enough.”
• debian women – MiniDebConf Barcelona 2014 | DebConf (2014): “On the 15th and 16th of March, Barcelona will host a Mini DebConf with both talks and social events, to which everyone in Debian is invited but the speakers in the talks are all people who identify themselves as female. We consider this important to: Encourage women who haven’t yet given their first DebConf talk; Provide role models for women who are interested in contributing; Debunk the myth that there are not enough women who can give talks in DebConf. The idea behind the conference is not to talk about women in free software, or women in debian, but rather to make discussion about Debian subjects more inclusive for women. […] We are still raising funds to cover the costs of running the conference and to offer travel sponsorship to people who cannot pay for it. Please, consider donating any amount you can, everything helps!”
• Rubrics Like the Bechdel Test are a Start, Not an End | s.e. smith (Feb 14, 2014):
  “The obvious question you have to ask after applying it is ‘why did it pass (or fail)’? You can point to specific scenes, or lack thereof, that helped a film or other piece of media meet the standard, and you can note shortcomings of the Bechdel test; for example, if a piece of media is a solo performance by a woman, it’s going to fail, but does that mean it’s necessarily sexist? If a movie passed, does that mean it’s not sexist? Two women talking to each other about something other than a man in a piece of media don’t necessarily mean that it doesn’t contain sexist stereotypes or other problems.”
• Apparently, these guys don’t want women to write science fiction | Aja Romano on The Daily Dot (Feb 15, 2014): “A conversation on a science-fiction forum this week revealed a section of the community that’s teeming with indignation about recent attempts to make the genre more progressive. […] But these days, the sci-fi community is an increasingly large, public place. And with the advent of instant communication across the Internet, more voices are coming to the table and speaking out”

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.

Chelsea Manning: on pressing the button

This is a guest post by Abigail Brady. It originally appeared on August 22, 2013 on her blog. Abigail Brady is a software engineer and writer, and has been a Wikipedian since 2003. This piece is under CC-BY-ND.

Private Manning’s announcement today that she is a trans woman came as no surprise to those of us who’d read the chat logs. Admittedly, the name she’s picked: Chelsea, was a bit of a turn-up: in the logs she’d previously identified as Breanna. Anyhow, on seeing this news I did what any self-respecting Wikipedian would do, and had a look to see if anyone had updated the Wikipedia article yet.

This had come up before, but it was thought that the transcripts and a few sources reporting on the implications of them were not enough. Some trans activists had been championing visibility on this issue, but I had felt uncomfortable with both sides. Sure, Manning, by her own words, which I had no reason to doubt, was probably trans. But those chat logs had hardly been released with her full agreement and she hadn’t socially transitioned (that is, actually asked people to start calling her a different name, or use female pronouns). But, also, it was not clear that’d she’d be able to ask that, as her contact with the outside world was very limited. Wikipedia took the side of caution and didn’t mention it except peripherally, and it certainly didn’t move any articles. Meanwhile, I, in conversations, carefully avoided referring to Manning by anything other than surname.

We’d had a similar issue with the article on the Wachowskis – where there had been rumours floating around about Lana for years, but they all traced back to a single, rather salacious, source (we try to be careful about that, in Wikipedia, believe it or not – although what’s worse is when some article is using us as a source without citing us and we get into a horrible citation loop). Eventually Lana did let it be known – the Wachowskis are quite private so what really clenched it was her official listings on a union site and IMDB. Laura Jane Grace, the lead singer of Against Me, was another interesting case because she initially announced that she was going to transition, so we kept referring to her with her old name and gender for a bit.

What do I mean by “transition”, anyway? Well, as I use it here, that’s the process of actually changing your name and asking people to start calling you by it; and also to use new pronouns. People who aren’t trans (“cis people”, if you follow the Latin pun) often seem to obsess about genital surgery, and claim that “she” is really “he” until that happens, but, disregarding the unhealthy fixation on other people’s genitals, this ignores the legal and practical reality of the situation: being socially transitioned for a good length of time is generally a requirement for surgery. You might as well claim that having passed a driving test is a prerequisite for learning to drive.

Manning’s statement was pretty clear that she was transitioning immediately, such as it was possible (and I don’t even really want to think about doing that inside the US military justice system, but that’s another issue). I got agreement from a few other interested parties on the talk page, and moved the page, and started copyediting it. But to what exactly? There are two schools of thought here (well, there are three schools of thought: the third is that transition is sick and wrong and against nature and biologically impossible and so on, and therefore the prose shouldn’t acknowledge it at all other than as a delusion; but I’ll discount that one).

The first is that you should use “old” pronouns and names for pre-transition events, back when Manning was living as male; and the new ones for ongoing statements of fact and events afterwards. The second is that the new pronouns and names be applied for the entire biography. The first is often justified based on an appeal to the unalterability of the past, and the avoidance of awkward wording, but it can lead to plenty of difficulties in phrasing in its own right. How would we phrase “[X] is imprisoned at Quantico, after [X] was convicted for multiple charges of espionage”? One of these things is in the present; the other in the past. We can’t be switching pronouns within a sentence, that’s what I call real nonsense.

Fortunately, the Wikipedia Manual of Style is completely clear on this point, favouring the second:

“Any person whose gender might be questioned should be referred to by the gendered nouns (for example “man/woman”, “waiter/waitress”, “chairman/chairwoman”), pronouns, and possessive adjectives that reflect that person’s latest expressed gender self-identification. This applies in references to any phase of that person’s life. Direct quotations may need to be handled as exceptions. Nevertheless, avoid confusing or seemingly logically impossible text that could result from pronoun usage (for example: instead of He gave birth to his first child, write He became a parent for the first time).” (my emphasis)

It has been like this for a long time, and reflected long-established usage well before that. So, our manual of style backs me, I’ve got the citation I needed, I got consensus on the talk page. I pressed the button and watched.

It was not as uncontroversial as it should have been. There is currently a raging argument on the talk page, in which all sorts of mud has been flung (I’ve been accused of misusing my admin rights, even though any user could do what I did!) A lot of this has been supportive of my decision. But a depressing amount of it full of people repeating the same canards as if they are being original, and I’m not even allowed to block them because technically they haven’t done anything wrong (well, apart from the ones who have tried to move it back in a technically incompetent way.) Instead, we’re supposed to argue individually with each tendentious passer-by, each of them saying things like “ooh, but it’s just a matter of the facts” like we hadn’t considered facts before or something. I kept it up for a while, but it’s draining. Instead, I’ll address them en masse here:

Other sites have in fact changing things throughout the day. It’s not like we were breaking news or anything at any point.

Chelsea Manning’s genitals are none of your business. Or mine.

No, we are not a laughing stock of the world. I have been watching twitter. Twitter thinks what we did was awesome. I’ve been watching “Manning” and “Wikipedia” all afternoon and it’s been well 95% positive.

How is it you are so sure of Chelsea’s chromosomes? Did you have her karyotype done?

Can you not read or something? The Manual of Style clearly is meant for cases like this. No, you can’t point out that it only applies in cases where there is a “question” and then claim there is no question.

Look, you seem to be denying the the validity of transsexuality in general and then using that as a basis for keeping the article at “Bradley” and the pronouns as “he”. I don’t expect to persuade you that you’re wrong, not on a Wikipedia talk page, but can you see that failure to even pay lip service to the idea that the entire medical-scientific-social consensus in the West might be right about trans people is not be an entirely sensible basis for a discussion of policy? What are you going to do next, edit Oscar Wilde so it calls him a sodomite?

Maybe putting these answers here will work. Because nobody seems to be listening on the talk page.
It’s easy to forget, dealing with these sort of nonsense, that Wikipedia’s openness has advantages as well. It’s precisely because anyone can edit that I’m able to do so, and that the article was moved at all. Right now, people are voting about whether it should be moved back. Or rather, they are participating in this bizarre consensus-reaching procedure which is way more than a simple headcount. And ultimately, I probably don’t need to be countering every spurious invocation of the same nonsense on the talk page, because the closing admin (the person who takes it upon themselves to be responsible for looking at what we’ve thrown at the wall and somehow discerning the consensus of the discussion) will look at the facts and the policy and the arguments, weigh them up carefully, and decide that it’s not going anywhere.

Editor’s note: Manning’s announcement that she is a woman was quoted by The Nation, among other sources. The chat logs that Abigail refers to were published by Wired. Other background reading includes Manning’s Wikipedia article and talk page (content warning for cissexism, misgendering, and transphobia, particularly on the talk page). Abigail mentioned Lana Wachowski‘s and Laura Jane Grace‘s Wikipedia articles as well. Since the writing of this post, the Wikipedia discussion has taken a more cissexist turn.

When who you are is off-topic

During Open Source Bridge last month, I went to a talk by Brandon Harris about the Wikipedia community. The focus of the talk was going to be on reasons why the number of people contributing to Wikipedia is declining. During the talk, I was reminded of why I don’t participate in Wikipedia anymore.

There’s a Geek Feminism Wiki page about what happened when I was nominated to be a Wikipedia admin in 2006. Until now, I haven’t mentioned in public that Catamorphism is me (though it’s easy enough to guess, since I still use that username on some other sites, and it’s also part of my primary email address).

In short, though, I’d been contributing frequently to Wikipedia a little less than a year at the time. Someone noticed my work and nominated me to be an administrator on the site. Admins have the power to use rollback (reverting an unhelpful edit with one click), as well as a few other rights and responsibilities. As is the usual process, a page — called an RfA (request for adminship) — was put up where people could either vote for, or against, me being an admin.

For a while, I was receiving almost all “Yes” votes. Then, somebody who apparently had an axe to grind made the claim, as part of their “No” vote, that I “made every discussion about [my] gender”. This person never substantiated their claim. As far as I can gather, it was based on the fact that during one talk page discussion, I asked somebody to use the pronouns I preferred at the time (they/them/their) when referring to me. After that point, I started receiving primarily “No” votes, and those people who gave reasons for their votes mainly said that they thought I would be a bad administrator because I would continue to make every discussion about my gender.

One of the primary values of Wikipedia is supposed to be substantiating every factual claim with a citation to a reliable source. None of the “no” voters asked for citations before deciding that the original claim — that I derailed every discussion to make it about my gender — was correct. They just believed the person who originally made the claim. I can only gather from this the “citation needed” label gets applied selectively on Wikipedia, and that unsourced claims that jibe with the existing beliefs of editors are less likely to be challenged.

Bizarrely, part of the RfA discussion devolved into various people debating what my “real” gender was. At the time I identified as genderqueer, but they were convinced that I must have some “true” gender that was different from that. Based solely on this picture of me, which I displayed on my Wikipedia user page at the time, some parties were vehemently convinced that I must “really” be male, while others were just as convinced that I must “really” be female. The picture was taken when I was 24 years old, before I started supplementing exogenous testosterone. I found it amusing that some people were absolutely convinced that they were looking at a man, when the only thing that made me a man at the time was invisible (and in fact, that’s still true, since the only thing that makes any of us the sexes we are is invisible — inside our heads). It illustrates the constructed nature of the sex binary. But I digress.

The RfA took an even weirder turn when the person who’d originally nominated me — a man using the handle of “Erik the Rude”, changed his vote from “yes” to “no” and announced he’d only nominated me to humiliate me, because he hated “bulldykes”. What follows was one of the only occasions when I’ve experienced serious harassment online because of my gender. A user of the hate site called Encyclopedia Dramatica (now rebranded as the warmer, friendlier site “Oh, Internet”) created an article about me that was solely based on the transphobic comments I received during my RfA. Because its title was my username — Catamorphism — and because Encyclopedia Dramatica had high page-rank at the time, the attack page was one of the first hits when someone searched for my username. “Catamorphism” is a technical term used in my field, so chances were good that potential colleagues or employers — just looking for information on a technical term used in the narrow professional field I work in — they would find a page with a picture of me and someone calling me a “bulldyke”. There’s nothing wrong with being a bulldyke, but it’s not a term that describes or ever has described me; if people are going to hate me, I’d prefer they hate me for who I am rather than what I’m not.

In the end, the “no” votes outweighed the “yes” votes — and again, I emphasize that the only real concern raised by the “no” voters was the unsubstantiated claim that I derailed unrelated discussions to talk about my gender — and I was denied adminship. I decided I didn’t particularly want to expend effort to contribute to a site that would have welcomed me as an admin if I was a binary-gendered person. I didn’t want to work with people who called it “disruption” to request that others use my preferred pronouns to refer to me, but didn’t consider it rude to misgender somebody. So I stopped editing.

Although I created a new account eventually and I still edit once in a while, I avoid editing that is potentially factually contentious. I just don’t have the energy to argue with aggressive people anymore. What’s more, I don’t have the energy to explain, over and over, that cissexual and heterosexual people’s points of view are not automatically more neutral and objective than the points of view of trans and queer people. I used to believe in the concept of “NPOV” (neutral point of view) that is one of the governing principles of Wikipedia, but I don’t anymore. The old saying is that history is written by the winners. Likewise, in practice, a neutral point of view seems to mean the particular point of view of whatever political groups have the biggest cognitive and emotional weapons. As a concrete example, I repeatedly ran into resistance and even ridicule when editing articles about trans people that used the phrasing “was born female” or “was born male”, to use the phrasing “was assigned female at birth” or “was assigned male at birth” instead. While the latter phrasing makes fewer assumptions, editors insisted that it was “POV” to say that people are assigned a sex at birth, but “neutral” to say that someone who may never have affirmed himself as female was born female. I can’t conceive of “NPOV” as being anything but a tool of domination anymore. Rather than striving for neutrality (which doesn’t exist), I would rather strive to mark opinions as opinions and provide citations for facts. I think it’s easier to distort the truth in an atmosphere of false neutrality than it is to do the same in an environment where it’s the norm to acknowledge your biases and the social position from which you speak.

Because of my experience, I found it hard to listen to the Q&A section of the talk, because what seemed missing to me was an acknowledgment of the fundamental brokenness that resulted in a group of cis people deciding to exclude me from volunteering in a certain role solely because I asserted myself as genderqueer. On the whole, though, I appreciated the non-technical talks I went to at Open Source Bridge because the presence of those talks made the conference feel like a place where nothing was off-topic.

When I first started reading Usenet newsgroups in 1995, one thing that was drilled into me by all the documentation I read was that you had to be on-topic. If you posted an off-topic post, you were wasting hundreds or thousands’ of people’s time, which was the worst thing you could do. Over time, I’ve come to enjoy online fora better when they’re community-based rather than topic-based. In 2006, though, being rejected as an admin felt like such a slap in the face largely because of the shame of being off-topic. Though it was baseless, I was being accused of bringing up something that wasn’t relevant, and of course, as someone who wasn’t unambiguously recognized as a white cis man, I wasn’t allowed to decide what was relevant; other people got that privilege.

I guess that’s why it was so gut-wrenching for me to be voted down. Later on, I experienced retaliation for reporting harassment that forced me to leave the graduate program I was in, and at the job I went to next, was threatened because I spoke out in favor of having a code of conduct that reflected awareness of power dynamics. Despite not putting my education or job in jeopardy, the Wikipedia incident was more painful for me than my experiences at either Portland State or Mozilla, because of the shame of being off-topic, and perhaps also because of the misunderstandings that lay at the heart of the RfA discussion. I was never heard in the Wikipedia discussion, and any attempts to make myself heard just elicited more refusal to listen.

I no longer seek out places where I’m required to stay on-topic, though, because I want to be my entire self wherever I am, as much as I can. Staying on-topic feels like having to leave part of myself at the door — whatever parts of myself the group I’m in doesn’t like very much. As Audre Lorde said, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle, because we do not live single-issue lives.” I appreciated Open Source Bridge because it felt like a broader acknowledgment that even programmers don’t live single-issue lives. At the conference, I went to talks on impostor syndrome, empathy, labor ethics, depression, and other topics that weren’t just about how to do thing X with software package Y. It made me feel like caring about the human side of computing didn’t make me a less qualified software professional, and like all of a sudden, it was the norm to have and acknowledge feelings rather than something that made me marginal. There were other little things about the conference that made me feel like I was the norm for once, too, like the all-vegetarian and mostly-vegan food at breakfast and lunch, and the “Intersectional Feminism Fuck Yeah!” stickers on the swag table. Going to the conference brought back a little bit of what my experience with Wikipedia erased: belief that there is a place for me in open-source culture and that what I have to contribute will be better because of — not worse because of — the ways in which I’ve experienced marginalization.

I’m pro-linkspam and I vote (3 May 2013)

• Can Videogames Teach Us About Race? “The conversation has moved beyond simply arguing for less revealing clothing and “more agency” for fictional women, towards dissecting a paradigm shift for the entire industry, highlighting the role of women as both consumers and producers of videogames. And while anyone at least casually interested in social equity will no doubt find this thrilling, the conversation is overwhelmingly white, with all these calls for industry-wide changes in favor of equal representation completely omitting race.”
• Super Ladies: Missing Why not show female superheroes in ensemble shots??
• Women Genre Authors Much Less Likely to Get Reviewed: “So, basically, there are tons of female sci-fi authors out there, but they’re not getting nearly the same coverage as their male counterparts.”
• 30 Days Of Sexism: “From March 7 – April 7, I documented everything blatantly sexist anyone has said to me. None of these comments were provoked, none of them were replies to something I said, none of them were at all out of the ordinary and the vast majority of them (an original count of 77 images) have been taken out so that this post isn’t as long as it probably should be. This is a 10-picture indication of what it’s like to be a woman who endorses game culture, every single month.”
• [TW: Harassment]Consent & Consequence at Cons: An Alliterative Appeal to Acknowledgement “You are not responsible for another person’s choices.”
• Women in Science and Engineering (Boston): Jun 24-25, 2013: “Our goal is to help scientists and engineers become more productive by teaching them basic computing skills like program design, version control, testing, and task automation.”
• White Men Wearing Google Glass: Making a point about who does (and, by omission) doesn’t worry about a collaborative panopticon?
• This Is What The Next Generation Of Programmers Looks Like: “As sophomores in high school, none of the girls have made a decision about whether or not they want to pursue computer science careers. But if app building appears as accessible to others of their generation as it does to them, the future of programming looks very bright.”
• 17 year old girl wins hackathon: “Let’s focus on how one teenage girl, Jennie Lamere, defeated a room full of smart, motivated, experienced, full-grown men. This would seem to be instructive to the greater argument about women in technology, and besides, it has the added bonus of being based in fact rather than opinion.”
• What’s missing from the media discussions of Wikipedia categories and sexism: “It’s not always the case, but in this instance the system worked. Filipacchi saw something on Wikipedia that she thought was wrong. She drew attention to it. Now it’s being discussed and fixed. That’s how Wikipedia works.”

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

I’ll be post-linkspam in the post-patriarchy (30 April 2013)

• How One College Is Closing The Computer Science Gender Gap: “There are still relatively few women in tech. Maria Klawe wants to change that. As president of Harvey Mudd College, a science and engineering school in Southern California, she’s had stunning success getting more women involved in computing.”
• Calling All Hackers: “Hackers treat the paradigm of “some people are in charge and some people aren’t” as social damage, and they invent ways to route around it.”
• Reviews, Genre, and Gender ? Radish Reviews: In the recent dustup over whether female-authored SF/F books get reviewed, an entire review outlet was left out because its bread and butter is romance-novel reviews, even though its SF/F reviews are not limited to romance.
• Feminist Hackerspaces as Safer Spaces?: “In the case of feminist hackerspaces, such safer spaces are not only about safer speaking spaces, but also safer making and trying spaces.”
• Tech companies that only hire men: Quotes from job descriptions that specify gender. Really??
• For all the women I have loved who were dragged through the mud: “I’ve read a lot of great essays about how fandom is female-majority and creates a female gaze and a safe space for women and etc. But spend five minutes in fandom and you’ll have an unsettling question. Why does a female-majority, feminist culture hate female characters so much?”
• little girls R better at designing heroes than you: Superheroes based on costumes worn by little girls.
• Journalists don?t understand Wikipedia sometimes: “Thus, a well-meaning attempt to include women in the main categorization for American novelists (where many of them were never listed in the first place) may result in women writers no longer being easily identifiable to those who might want to find them.”
• Dropcam’s Beef with Brogramming, Late Nights, and Free Dinners: “[M]any startups in Silicon Valley, especially the ones I was familiar with, would only hire young, male programmers, people who didn’t have families and weren’t going to have kids in the next few years… We do maternity and paternity leave and all of the things that used to be things that only big, mature companies did. That has allowed us to hire from a bigger group of people than we would be able to if we were part of the brogrammer culture.”
• Women Are Earning Greater Share of STEM Degrees, but Doctorates Remain Gender-Skewed: “Possible explanations include gender bias, the prospect of short-term postdoctoral jobs that complicate child rearing, and a lack of role models.”
• Bacon is Bad For You: A talk about developer monoculture and how it puts all of us (even the vegans) at risk.

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

The nearest linkspam may be behind you (29 January 2013)

• How To Be Inclusive: “To create cultures of inclusion, you first have to make acts of inclusion. A culture of inclusion is about offering help before offering criticism. It’s about knowing that everyone’s circumstances are different, and understanding those circumstances before jumping to judgement or conclusions. It’s about teaching, it’s about learning, and it’s about knowing that you can learn from the same people you can teach.”
• No More Objectification: “The widely-covered “Objectify a man in tech” day started out as a lark that emerged when I got fed up with experiencing — and seeing other women writers and presenters in gaming and tech — fielding irrelevant compliments on their appearance when people referenced their work.”
• Women Don’t Need to “Lean In” More; Powerful Men Need to Reach Out: “But women in the US now represent the majority of college graduates, the majority of MAs and the majority of PhDs. How much harder do you want them to ‘lean in’?”
• How do you edit Wikipedia?: “Wikipedia is seen as having a particular culture: valuing openness, cooperation and transparency, commited to the idea of “neutrality”, often adversarial and prone to edit wars and aggressive behaviour. I see myself as only partly fitting into this culture.”
• Interdependence and Strong Female Characters: “As long as we insist that female characters can only be strong through total independence, we do both them and women in the real world a disservice. The real mark of strength isn’t in how much of a loner you can be, how much you can isolate yourself, but how you can strike a balance, maintaining your strength and integrity while being unafraid to build emotional connections with other people.”
• A field guide to privilege in marine science: some reasons why we lack diversity: Scientists don’t always recognize the additional barrers, besides hard work, that prevent people from succeeding at science… Here, I present a short field guide to type of privilege that I’ve observed in science, and explain why becoming a scientist becomes immensely more difficult for people without that form of privilege.”

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