They Might Be Linkspam (23 April 2013)

• Disney store introduces ‘Avengers’ T Shirts that tell boys to be heroes and girls to need a hero, and then removes the sexist shirts in response to #NotBuyingIt petition.
• Jane McGonigal, Designer of SuperBetter, Moves Games Deeper Into Daily Life: Unfortunately sexist profile of a really cool person. She has a Ph.D. but they call her “Ms” instead of “Dr”, they refer to her looks as if it’s important, and the article, about computer gaming for women, is in the FASHION section.
• I’d like to belong here. Do you think that I could?: “But here’s the thing: I have not seen charges of “excessive self-promotion” lain against any of my male counterparts. Not the ones in my weight class, not the ones above me, not the ones below me. Not the ones who self-promote ten times as much as I do. I have, however, seen the “excessive self-promotion” accusation lain against other women who make it onto award ballots. And that troubles me, because it demonstrates a gender bias that has been found in a great number of social settings and contexts.”
• Roberta Williams: The mother of computer video games: “Complaints are rife that the video game industry treats female employees and female players as outsiders or worse. But it wasn’t always that way. Laine Nooney, a doctoral candidate at Stony Brook University, has been looking at the contributions of Roberta Williams, who in the early 1980s co-founded one of the early video game companies, Sierra Online.
• Memory Insufficient: Game history e-zine first issue on womens’ histories in games.
• Infographic: Forget Wonder Woman — These Women Nerds Are Our Real Superheroes: Awesome infographic featuring Anita Borg, Angela Byron, Grace Murray Hopper, Mary Lou Jepsen, Radia Perlman, and Janie Tsao.
• Is Organic Better? Ask a Fruit Fly: “Now a sophomore at Clark High School in Plano, Tex., Ria said she was excited to see her work accepted by a scientific journal. “I had no idea what publishing my research meant,” said Ria, who last week was juggling high school exams, a swim meet and a sweet-16 party. “My mom told me, ‘This is a pretty big deal.'””

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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.

A merry linkspamming band (1st September, 2011)

• Results from the 2011 Wikipedia Editor Survey: using only logged-in users as subjects (so, different to the 2008 UNU-Merit study – WMF intends to use this one as a baseline for future studies). Had 4,930 total respondents, of which 434 (9%) identified as female.
• Calling Pythonista sisters: Five reasons to attend a coding conference: Five reasons women should consider attending events like PyCon AU.
• Nurture affects gender differences in spatial abilities. In this study, we use a large-scale incentivized experiment with nearly 1,300 participants to show that the gender gap in spatial abilities, measured by time to solve a puzzle, disappears when we move from a patrilineal society to an adjoining matrilineal society. (Mainstream audience summary at Ars Technica.)
• (Warning: screenshots of video game violence.) “Did she just money-shot herself with his neck-blood?”: And in a patriarchal society where masculine = good, strong and feminine = bad, weak these women (made by dudes for dudes) exist as tokens of counterfeit empowerment because they enact male fantasies of power. This is why the femme fatale, despite having no narrative agency, is sold as a strong character.
• The Luxury of “Reasonable”: But there’s a reason [Brandon] Sanderson can be so reasonable [about his faith-based anti-homosexuality beliefs]… He’s not being told he can’t bring his boyfriend to his own prom. Agents/editors aren’t rejecting his work because he wrote about LGBT characters. He’s not being denied basic rights…
• Different takes on rape and negative portrayals of women in George R.R. Martin’s fiction (meta discussion, some satirical, not graphic):
  • Enter Ye Myne Mystic World of Gayng-Raype: What the “R” Stands for in “George R.R. Martin”: Sady Doyle is no fan of George R.R. Martin.
  • Feminist Media Criticism, George R.R. Martin’s A Song Of Ice And Fire, And That Sady Doyle Piece: Alyssa Rosenberg criticises Sady Doyle’s take, in particular that she reads it as coming close to stating that no artistic depiction of sexual violence is acceptable, and that the anti-geek tone is harmful. Now, sexism is more entrenched and more broadly impactful than disdain for nerds. But that doesn’t actually mean that these kinds of statements are useful or clever when they’re deployed by feminists against nerds…
• Meanwhile, Sady Doyle takes on mansplainers.
• When computer programming was “women’s work’. Reflections by recruiter Anna Lewis on learning about the historic status of programming.
• Changing the Ratio at SXSW. Emma Persky does detailed analysis of SXSW’s presenter gender breakdown.
• So seriously, why aren’t there more women in science?: Yes, the perennial question, but there are some brief interviews with some leading women scientists: Cathy Foley, CSIRO division chief; Suzanne Cory, Australian Academy of Science President; Mahananda Dasgupta professor in ANU Department of Nuclear Physics and others.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious, freelish.us or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

More horrible than your worst linkspam (18th July, 2011)

• Black and WTF: photographs of suffragettes. In 1912, Scotland Yard detectives bought their first camera to covertly photograph suffragettes.
• A bit of an oldie, but relevant to our recent Google+ discussions: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names: So, as a public service, I’m going to list assumptions your systems probably make about names. All of these assumptions are wrong. Try to make less of them next time you write a system which touches names.
• Great 101 comment from karenm77 about why it was creepy to proposition Rebecca Watson at 4am in an elevator. (Via tigtog.) Yeah, in case you missed it.
• Sheryl Sandberg & Male-Dominated Silicon Valley: an interview with Facebook’s COO. You can’t come [into space], [Sandberg’s son] said. I’ve already invited my sister, and there’s only one girl in space. At first, Sandberg laughed. And then it dawned on her that there is only one woman in these movies.
• Debunking the Top 5 Myths About Lady Scientists: So, people of the universe, when I tell you that I am a scientist, the only conclusion you should draw is that I like science.  Not what I look like or how I dress.  Not what I like to do in my free time.  Not how I interact with other people.  And real world, get used to me because I am your average scientist and I am not at all who you try to say I am.
• A linkspam of a linkspam: Meanwhile, Back in SFland: While I was off enjoying the company of several thousand women (and an increasing number of men, as Sharon Sala graciously noted while accepting her lifetime achievement award) in Romanceland, the gender wars seem to have broken out in SFland again.
• You can’t fight sexism with sexism: So, please, before you write about getting women into the game industry, first check and make sure that you’re not perpetuating the very attitudes you’re arguing against before you publish.
• Are the Open Data Warriors Fighting for Robin Hood or the Sheriff?: Some Reflections on OKCon 2011 and the Emerging Data Divide: Cogent criticism of the demographics of the open-data movement.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious, freelish.us or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

Linkspam isn’t saying no… (13th June, 2011)

• Talk on June 15 at Melbourne University: Dr Cathy Foley, 100 years later: has anything changed for women in science?: This talk will look at what is the status of women in science in Australia, report on the Women in Science and Engineering summit held in Parliament House in April this year. I will then reflect on ways to enhance careers for women in science and the need not only for equity but also for improved productivity and innovation by capturing the full human potential in Australia.
• Why are more women not speaking at technical conferences? Insights from the WiT discussion at CodeStock: Jennifer Marsman discusses the points raised in her panel, with some suggested solutions.
• The Australian talks about online harassment of (female) journalists, which will sound familiar to many other women online: [Trigger warning: online harassment/bullying] War of the Words
  

  And therein lies the Catch-22 for women in the cyber-firing line. On the one hand, they believe it is essential to expose the level of abuse and misogyny that has flourished on the largely unregulated new media. On the other, they fear the only effect that would have is to discourage women from participating in public debates.

• Forever 21 Pulls “I’m Too Pretty To Do Math” Magnet From Online Store: Our submitter writes: OK, it’s not just bad that this was made in the first place. But around the article? Let’s see, You might like: The Top 10 Lies Women Tell Men; 12 Stars Posing Naked With Super Random Props; and the poll of important information: Does Flirting Over Facebook & Twitter Count As Cheating?; Please Just Kill Me NOW.
• Becky Stern has crafted TV-B-Gone (a universal remote for switching off TVs) into a jacket for subtlety: TV-B-Gone jacket (via BoingBoing).
• [Trigger warning: very frank anti-rape campaign] Don’t be that guy: a surprisingly refreshing anti-rape campaign targeting men is now making its way to other Canadian cities.
  

  Typically, sexual assault awareness campaigns target potential victims by urging women to restrict their behavior. Research is telling us that targeting the behavior of victims is not only ineffective, but also contributes to how much they blame themselves after the assault. That’s why our campaign is targeting potential offenders – they are the ones responsible for the assault and responsible for stopping it. By addressing alcohol-facilitated sexual assault without victim-blaming, we intend to mark Edmonton on the map as a model for other cities.

• Androcentrism: It’s Okay to Be a Boy, but Being a Girl…: androcentrism… a new kind of sexism, one that replaces the favoring of men over women with the favoring of masculinity over femininity.
• Researcher reveals how “Computer Geeks” replaced “Computer Girls”, an account of a talk by Nathan Ensmenger. (Don’t forget Jennifer Light, when namechecking people to quote on this!)
• Rebecca Koeser of Emory University, won a prize in the DevCSI challenge at Open Repositories 2011 for her use of Microsoft Pivot as a repository-visualization tool. Here’s a picture of Koeser accepting her prize.
• Women Atop Their Fields Discuss the Scientific Life: Elena Aprile, Joy Hirsch, Mary-Claire King and Tal Rabin talk about their scientific work and life.
• How Not To Be An Asshole: A Guide For Men: Chris Clarke re-posts this in ‘honour’ of Tammy Camp’s harassment experience

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious, freelish.us or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

Wednesday Geek Woman: Mary Delany, amateur of science and gifted craftswoman

Wednesday Geek Woman submissions are open for one more day after this post appears.

Portrait of Mary Delany (née Granville) by John Opie, National Portrait Gallery, London

Lesley Hall recently published an essay on the missing narratives of women in science in L Timmel Duchamp (ed), Narrative Power: Encounters, Celebrations, Struggles, Aqueduct Press, 2010

Mary Delany (née Greville, previous married name Pendarves) (1700–1788), amateur of science and gifted craftswoman.

Mary Greville was born to a well-connected aristocratic family and had the benefits of an excellent education, although her particular branch of the family was not well-off, leading to her first, very unhappy, marriage to a much older man. During the course of her long life, she engaged in various forms of craftwork, including embroidery and making shell designs, and what she is perhaps most famous for, a series of flower collages in paper. While these, and her embroideries reveal the skill of her hands and the quality of her taste, they also demonstrate accurate botanical details of the flowers she depicted.

Along with her close friend, the Duchess of Portland, Delany was part of an extensive circle of individuals with an informed interest in the eighteenth century development of the study of nature in its numerous forms, and who were introducing the new Linnaean system of classification. Her collages were praised by such authorities as Sir Joseph Banks. Art, science and craft were intricately associated in her life and her productions.

A splendid piece about Delany and the need to take a less condescending view of women’s craftwork in the past by historian of C18th domestic life, Amanda Vickery
Some examples of Delany’s collages, embroidery and drawings
Molly’s Flora Delanica {A Tribute to Mrs. Delany} : video, including reconstruction of Delany’s collage methods.

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

From comments: women in science, their history as told by… men?

A few strands are coming together in comments.

First, our linkspam linked to Richard Holmes’s The Royal Society’s lost women scientists, and Lesley Hall then commented:

I’m somewhat annoyed at all the coverage A MAN talking about lost women scientists is getting, when we have several decades-worth of women historians of science who have been saying the exact same thing. This seems to me pretty much the standard thing of no-one listening until it’s said by a bloke (even if the women have already been saying it).

Meanwhile on the Wednesday Geek Woman post on Maria Goeppert-Mayer, Chronic Geek asks:

As a side note. I have been searching for a good book on a history of women in sciences. Can anyone recommend one?

The following have already been recommended:

• Margaret Wertheim (1995) Pythagoras’s Trousers: God, Physics, and the Gender War
• Julie Des Jardins (2010) The Madame Curie Complex: The Hidden History of Women in Science

Lesley Hall herself also has a book chapter: (2010) ‘Beyond Madame Curie? The Invisibility of Women’s Narratives in Science’ in L Timmel Duchamp (ed), Narrative Power: Encounters, Celebrations, Struggles.

For readers just starting out on this, what works would you recommend on the history of women in science and the invisibility of women in science? What women historians of science do work you love?

With a name like linkspam, it has to be good (8th March, 2010)

• Role Playing Girl Zine, a yearly publication about women in gaming, is seeking “submissions of essays by women gamers, designers, researchers and others interested in role playing games.” Cartoons also welcome. The 2010 theme: “International Update.”
• 1999-2009 in news about women in tech.
• Small tech firms specifically looking to recruit women include Quilted, a web and print design co-op based in Berkeley and Boston, and Germany’s Openismus, which wants to hire and mentor women and minorities (training them to develop open source software).
• “Tech support girl”: a post on others’ expectations.
  

  So, when I feel most like a ‘woman’ behind the counter, it is when I am confronted with an older generation. A generation that is used to transferring the technical duties to men, because of the misperception that men are more inclined to understand these technical doo-dads than women.

• The Anita Borg Institute has announced the 2010 Anita Borg Women of Vision Awards winners. This year’s women honored for making significant contributions to technology are:
  • Kristina M. Johnson, Under Secretary for Energy, US Department of Energy. She’s led colleges and universities and won awards for her work in optics, and I get exhausted just looking at the summary of her resume.
  • Kathleen R. McKeown, a computer science professor at Columbia University. “Her research interests include text summarization, natural language generation, multi-media explanation, digital libraries, concept to speech generation and natural language interfaces.”
  • Lila Ibrahim, who went from a design engineer on the Pentium to general manager of the Emerging Markets Platform Group at Intel. She leads “research, definition, development and marketing of technology platforms specifically designed for education.”
• From Mary: A link possibly of interest to people who followed Terri’s discussion about hardcore gamers a while back: Status and Signals: Why Hardcore Gamers Are Afraid Of Easy Mode (via a comment on The Border House).
• An Indian anthology seeks submissions of feminist speculative takes on the Ramayana.
• Stemming’s Friday links.

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 del.icio.us (yes, I know they don’t care about the old-school URL anymore but I miss it).

The long, long trail

Hello everybody

I spent the past weekend at the 18th Annual Women’s History Network conference, which this year was held in the rather lovely surroundings of St Hilda’s College, Oxford. It was one of the original Oxford women’s colleges (and the last to admit men, within the past 2 years), but with the passage of time it is no longer of the austerity that Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own might lead one to anticipate. The food was certainly not as dire as that she recorded, though not quite of the standard I enjoyed at a conference in Lady Margaret Hall some years ago. The rooms were very comfortable, and being a women’s college (and a women-run conference) there was an adequate supply of loos (a topic which is much on my mind because of a book on the topic I was recently sent — I think there will be blogging about this later on).

Apart from these matters of physical comfort, it was an intellectually stimulating few days. The theme this year was ‘Women, Gender & Political Spaces:  Historical Perspectives’ and there was a good deal of resonance between the issues discussed in historical context and present-day concerns. There were over a hundred papers, in 6 sessions of 6 strands each, as well as 5 plenary lectures, which meant that perforce I missed a lot of fascinating things.

My own paper was on the emergence of an abortion law reform movement in the UK in the 1930s, bringing the subject out from being either something doctors talked of as a strictly professional matter, or something that women exchanged information about in whispers, into a topic for public discussion and the advocacy of legislation to make safe abortion legal and accessible. The role of women activists was central to this development.

There was an excellent panel on women and learned societies, which was perhaps a little depressing in demonstrating how long a tradition there has been of men not wanting women impinging upon their serious manly spaces where they do serious manly learned things.  However, the papers did show that there was some degree of ambivalence and some possibilities of flexibility: Claire Jones’ paper on the Royal Society indicated that the Society, although it did not admit women to the prestige of Fellowship until after the Second World War*, did publish their articles in its journals, and gave them grants in support of their research, and even occasionally awarded them medals for work of outstanding importance.  A good point was raised in discussion that this desire of men to keep their homosocial spaces unsullied (and to position themselves as part of a completely male genealogy of Great Minds) does suggest that we need a lot more critical and analytical work directly on masculinity (or various versions of masculinity in particular contexts).

This question of men resisting the influx of women into previously male spaces also arose in a paper on women on juries — even after the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act of 1919 gave women the right to sit on juries, the qualifications still privileged men, while both judges and barristers took various measures to exclude women through the process of challenge. The ambiguous potential of legal systems for women was explored in other panels: for example,  Kimberley Welch presented on her research on women’s successful use of courts in antebellum Mississippi and Lousiana in cases of matrimonial dispute.

Some of the themes that recurred across various panels and plenaries: women’s capacity to negotiate some degree of advantage for themselves within apparently profoundly patriarchal systems; that changes do not just happen but have to be campaigned for; the ways that women’s stories get left out of the accepted narratives (this is something else that might get blogged in more detail). There is an exciting diversity of  historical research going on about women and gender. It was also lovely just to reconnect with other scholars and friends in the field.

* Well, they did make the astronomer Caroline Herschel and the mathematician and science writer Mary Somerville honorary Fellows, but they could trust them to know their place as ladies and not to try and actually attend meetings of the Society.