- Girls may learn math anxiety from female teachers. Not a new theory, just updated research. One of the researchers says, “It’s actually surprising in a way, and not. People have had a hunch that teachers could impact the students in this way, but didn’t know how it might do so in gender-specific fashion.”
- Via commenter Denise Paolucci, Geeks Drive Girls out of Computer Science. Because stereotypes are endless fun!
- Applications are open for the L’Oreal Women in Science fellowships. If you don’t mind being funded by a makeup manufacturer. Also see stemming.org, a gathering place for “women and girls interested in science, technology, engineering, and math—at any level.”
- Bao Phi talks about being a nerd of color.
- Dana Oshiro of ReadWriteWeb collects interviews explaining why we need tech events for women.
- An interview with Rebecca Skloot about her book on Henrietta Lacks, a tissue sample from whom has been vital to considerable medical research, and whose story raises serious questions about research ethics.
- Restructure! suggests that some undesirable male behavior in IT may be tied to male geeks’ perception that they are low-status.
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.
When I saw The Safety Dance: Helping End Sexual Harassment at Conventions, I was immediately transported back to one of my very first Linux conferences. A friend walked up to me and tickled me, and then was horrified when I told him that that was totally inappropriate behaviour out in public. Why was I so concerned? Because this story from ConFusion is exactly the sort of thing I feared that could follow:
Recently, I was talking about the convention with a young lady who related to me the story of a “a guy being inappropriate” with her. In this story, she was quick to point out at the onset that she was dressed somewhat sexier than normal—in pajamas that were a bit more risqué than those in which she is generally seen around con—so that, as she put it, is was a factor. She was standing, talking with two gentlemen (but, she points out, not flirting or anything, just talking) when this third person approached her from behind, grabbed her in a “grabbing, pinching, kind of tickling motion” on the ribs immediately below breast level, then continued on his way. This is not “a guy being inappropriate” for the record, this is assault.
And it happens. I’ve been picked up, tossed around, poked, and generally had people get in my face in a lot of geek settings. In my experience it’s worse in geeky settings: I can enjoy a rock show and only get hit with the odd spilled beer or drunken patron once or twice in a year of concerts, but if I want to take in an anime screening I can expect someone to do something makes me uncomfortable before the end of the night. I was appalled the first time someone tried to pick me up (like a sack of potatoes) at a Linux event, and now I choose my companions more carefully. I’ve written here about why I don’t often dress up in costumes for cons. But random inappropriate physical behaviour has never been limited to days when I’m dressed up.
Let me say this in no uncertain terms: there is no manner of dress or flirtatious activity that gives you the right to initiate unwanted contact with another member of the convention! This is behavior that is unacceptable, period. Full stop. End of sentence. No mitigating factors needed or even allowed. I don’t care if you have watched a young lady kiss every single person in the lobby on her way to you, when she gets to you, you do NOT have implied permission to initiate contact. You don’t get permission to touch, hover over, leer at, or otherwise harass her. I don’t care if a guy has been talking suggestively with you for the last hour, you don’t get to grab him without explicit permission.
And there’s the thing. I go to an event where I know people, of course I want to give out a few hugs. But if I let anyone initiate a hug with me, I never know if some random stranger is going to do it next. Now, I’ve got a pretty good tolerence for hugs even from strangers, but tickling? Keep your hands off. So even friends I otherwise trust will get slapped in public. Shut down loudly and publicly before someone takes “he did it” as an excuse.
I don’t think The Safety Dance is necessarily telling a lot of us anything we didn’t know, but apparently “don’t grab strangers” is news to someone (It seems to be a common rule at anime cons, and I’m sure there’s a reason.) So maybe it’s worth a little signal-boosting so we can see more cons providing and enforcing some basic rules to protect con-goers. I know this sort of thing would make me feel a bit happier about going to events I’ve previously shunned.
Part 2 of linux.conf.au, in which I at least mention most of the talks I went to, occasionally link out; contains a brain dump of my thoughts on the conference, its organization, the social engineering of arduino hacking, and the unicorns of dooom!
Slides are going up on all the talks on the linux.conf.au wiki, if you want to look at what the talks were like. Every talk I went to was good and worth it. Also, by looking at the slides, you’ll get an idea of what you might like to propose for a talk next year and whether you’d fit into this conference. (Yes.)
read more…
The narratives will come. Tomorrow, gentle readers. Till then, a picspam:
Angie Byron playing with Sridhar’s OLPC at the networking event at the Opera House.
Angela’s picture!
New Zealand Wool, maybe with some possum in it:
Jamie’s “Friends Help Friends With Linux” shirt:
My Mac talks to an Aiko/Arduino/Pebble thing:
Nic’s beer cozy mod, for a camera holder on wheelchair:
Nancy who gave the genderchanger/etc talk:
Girl Geek Dinner:
Miskatonic U. Alumn, with small Ada:
We have the same hackerspace tshirt so we must be almost related:
Susanne Ruthven and Andrew Ruthven and kids, conference organizers:
We are invited to do the Ka Mate Haka:
Last but not least, the Linuxchix Gentlemen’s Auxiliary:
On LambdaFail, women writing m/m erotica, and the queerness and/or misogyny of slash fandom
This won’t be news to anyone who moves in fannish meta circles, but I thought it warranted a post for those who might not have encountered the discussion before now.
Back in September, the Lambda Literary Foundation announced that henceforth their awards would be restricted to authors who identified as GLBT, rather than (as had previously been the case) anyone who was writing GLBT-oriented works. This excluded, in particular, a growing segment of the book market consisting of male/male erotica written by (presumably straight) women.
Discussion ensued as to whether such fiction was appropriating gay male culture and offensive to gay men, or whether the backlash against m/m erotica written by women was just another instance of women’s sexual expression being policed by men, as it so often is. A round of Oppression Olympics ensued, with women on one team and gay men on the other; both groups are in the right, being similarly subject to the kyriarchy and privileged (or not) on different axes, but few commentators approached the debate from this perspective in the early rounds.
Recently, the discussion has spread to slash fandom on Livejournal, Dreamwidth, and elsewhere, and this (IMHO) is where it gets really interesting, because that crowd is nothing if not introspective, verbose, smart, and well practiced in massively hypertext discussions of complicated issues.
Slash is m/m erotica written (usually) by women about (usually) male characters from TV, movies, books, etc. Many of the most popular slash fandoms are geek staples such as Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, Buffy, superhero comics, and so forth. Unlike the professional m/m erotica market, slash writers are generally working with existing characters, often from fandoms that don’t pass (or barely pass) Bechdel in the first place. Many slashers use their writing/reading to explore sex and gender in a relatively safe online environment that might not otherwise be available to them. And, it turns out, many or most slashers are themselves queer, despite stereotypes about “straight housewives” and the like.
So, fandom being fandom, and things being always more complicated, the discussion coming out of this is pretty crunchy. Some of the questions/themes I’ve seen covered include:
- Does romance/erotica ignore or erase difficult issues (eg. discrimination, oppression), and should we care? Or does escapism get a free pass?
- Do fanfic writers have a duty to write the other respectfully and realistically when the “other” in question is gay men/MSM? How do we do this?
- Why do fanfic writers write about male characters so much more than female characters, anyway? Is this internalised misogyny?
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. If you’re interested in reading up on some of what’s been posted, take a look at the linkspam and metafandom communities, which have been collecting links to interesting posts on the subject.
Vaginas! And anything that goes in or near vaginas! If you want to be the funniest person in the world, and gross everyone out with how edgy and ewww you’re being, what you should do is compare things to menstrual products.
OMG WHO WOULD WANT TO USE SOMETHING THAT SOUNDS LIKE IT GOES IN/NEAR A VAGINA EWWW! HA HA! #iTampon
Also, people will think you are twelve years old. Which is awesome, because twelve-year-olds are the funniest and coolest people in the history of ever.
Thanks to lots of people who encouraged me to submit talks and apply for money, and thanks to the sponsorship from linux.conf.nz and Google, I went to two conferences in New Zealand last week. For a week and a half I hung out with linuxchix, people from #geekfeminism, and Drupal folks. It was GREAT. I met a zillion people, gave three talks, and learned a lot.
Kelly picked me up from the airport on Saturday. The next day she and Daniel drove me and some friends all over the south end of the island. Sunday, I sneaked away from the welcome sessions and “how to give a talk” tutorials to visit the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary, where I saw a lot of wet birds, fern trees, and a tuatara. There was also a historical display with an excerpt from the Diary of Laura Fitchett, an early British settler. It went like this: “Wet today. Still wet. Very wet. Could not dry the clothes. Too wet for laundry. Rained again.” Kind of like most of my visit to Wellington!
On Monday, we had the Haecksen/Linuxchix mini-conference. Lana Brindley did a great writeup of it. I especially enjoyed Sara Falamaki’s “Happy Hackers, Happy Code” talk even though it made me cry a little bit to think that things might be so nice. Sara outlined some specific advice for good tools and processes for version control, knowledge management, task tracking, build system, testing systems, and development itself, and going for goals like code that improves by shrinking in size, while she threw candy with a wicked overhand at us for participation. Suggestions for great tools from the audience: Valgrind, whiteboards and markers, printf, virtualization, backups, bugzilla summary reports, google docs, RT, your mouth, nice commit messages, Firebug and Web Developer, good sys admins, and pastebin.
Lana and Sara at lunch: 
I gave my talk “Code of Our Own” which was really Advanced Feminist Solidarity Theory for Coders. We have named the problem, documented it a lot, and we have lots of “Women in Thingie” groups with overlapping memberships. We have some efforts at classes and mentoring. That’s great. What now? What do we need? What helps and what might be helpful to try? My thoughts here are mostly: let’s code together. In meetups, friendships, miniconferences, unconferences or open space, and so on.
My favorite bit is where I said how teaching programming to 11 year old girls is awesome but it’s not helping us, the ones doing the coding now and dripping out of the leaky pipeline, and when I report problems I face and then a bunch of guys go “Oh, well, I know the answer, let’s go teach some 11 year old girls” there’s no way I can argue with their awesome altruism because they’re doing a good thing, but they might as well have said “Sucks to be you, bitter old hag, we’ll just start over then with some tabula rasa infants.” Good luck with that; sounds like a recipe for repeating the same conversation for the next 30 years. It was nice to say a few outrageous crude things while then slipping back into constructive, positive, niceness and yet during both the mean-ass and the pollyanna moments, seeing so many women’s faces around the room nodding, smiling, and cracking up. So, the slides give you a feel for what I talked about, but if you want the full talk with all the jokes and asides and digressions, there is a Code of Our Own video on the Internet Archive which you can download. There will be videos of all the talks very soon from LCA.
Joh Clarke’s talk on security was hilarious and scary. Her point was that the sky has already fallen and you can’t assume anything is secure and we need to face that, somehow, without having the Howard Hughes learns about Germ Theory reaction. She managed to be scary, reassuring, and devastatingly wry all at once, with pictures of her cat breaking into various boxes.
Afterwards a bunch of us went to the Catalyst office where Joh works and worked on moving the geekspeakr.com site to a new server. Emma Jane, who is a freelancer and author of Front End Drupal, awesomely outlined all the things we would need to do on a whiteboard. It was great. She broke it down into a lot of steps so that lots of people could contribute and this also clarified everything to be done.
Emma Jane is also the person who knit the famous Drupal Socks.
It struck me that there were an awful lot of steps to do this seemingly simple thing (as usual) and each step required a set of esoteric and non-obvious background knowledge. We needed sys admins. We had them! We needed people to fuck around on the command line installing and configuring things and moving things around into version control and making it work. (That was me and Angie, and it’s my particular skill.) We needed front end people to scoot blocks around and write themes! And people to document what we did! And we needed people to buy beer and do QA and do all the other things which I didn’t notice happening because I was installing and configuring. Yay!
Here are a bunch of us poking away at the server!
We got pretty far, but didn’t finish upgrading or theming. I’m probably going to go do the upgrade. Janis (who is usually a gcc hacker and who explained allpairs and Delta to me; they help her debug) did some QA on the site the next day. I was happy to be sharing a keyboard with Angie Byron who is a kick ass Drupal core developer.
Elky, Cat, Joh, and the Linuxchix Gentlemen’s Auxiliary were there doing stuff too! I ended up feeling like I would happily work with any of them, any time. They’re sensible! Smart! Nice! They get things done.
Here we are feeling tired and happy!
It was like Christmas – I hung out with kick ass open source people all day long, heard great talks, gave a talk and asked for more coding and development with other women, and then got to do that very thing with people I greatly admire!
I felt inspired to FOR SURE make it to the CodeChix meetup next time it happens in the SF Bay Area.
So, I have a lot more to say and will have to post several more times about linux.conf.au and about DrupalSouth. Stay tuned!
And a final thought about the joy of coding with others:
To be of use
by Marge PiercyThe people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half submerged balls.I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who stand in the line and haul in their places,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.
- On the work-and-school front: Design shop hiring worker/owner in Berkeley or Boston; women, PoC, & LGBTIQQ encouraged. Also, there’s a $10K scholarship now available for female undergraduates studying game design.
- An oldie but a pretty-goodie: YouTube – Video Games and the Female Audience. (One could wish the narrator had let his guest actually speak.)
- More brilliant reactions to Shirky’s rant: danah boyd, “whose voice do you hear?” and Jezebel, “3 Reasons Why Women Can’t Be More Like Men.”
- On similar themes, Work: Ur Doin It Rong, about men yet again telling women how they have to behave to be successful, and (trigger warning) Naomi Wolf explaining why complaining, even about clear sexual harassment or abuse, can harm more than it helps.
- On a lighter note, Female mathematicians in fiction.
- Nichelle Nichols tells her story about staying on Star Trek because Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told her he was a fan of her role, and how important it was that she remain a role model.
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.
Lucy Connor’s “Diversity at what cost?” and Benjamin Otte’s blog post on equality got me thinking about the backlash against diversity and outreach initiatives in open source. Specifically, I sometimes see arguments that inclusivity
- is a slippery slope into coercion and quotas
- should not be a FLOSS value, or
- competes with the core mission of his/her software project.
In response to Otte’s thoughts on whether the principle “all men are created equal” stands in opposition to core GNOME and Fedora goals, I said in part:
The words “equality” and “inclusive” can be easy to misinterpret. Advocates often use them as a softer way of saying “don’t be sexist/racist/etc.” and “let’s give due consideration to people we’re inadvertently leaving out.” Perhaps [critics] are misreading this suggestion as greed for market share, or conflating cowardice with the intention and practice of thoughtful inclusivity.
Yes, it is an important principle that all people deserve to be treated equally *by the law*, and as an ideal to reach toward, it’s laudable. However, it’s a straw-man argument to suggest that advocates for equality and inclusion propose that all seven billion people’s opinions should have equal relevance in every endeavor and choice.
Every organization has a specific mission, such as “change the government’s policies to improve the environment” or “maintain an excellent Linux distribution with cutting-edge innovations.” This is its “value proposition,” in US English. It embodies some of its core values. The Fedora project is indeed facing a tension between its value proposition and one facet of inclusivity — suitability for novice users. But there are many other aspects to inclusivity and an interest in equality, such as accessibility, nonsexist language, university outreach, and documentation. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
You may also be interested in http://geekfeminism.org/2009/11/29/questioning-the-merit-of-meritocracy/ for thoughts on meritocracy in FLOSS.
… If you simply find any good product unstylish as soon as a certain proportion of the population starts to benefit from it, that strikes me as needlessly snobbish, and implies a misanthropy that will permanently be opposed to even the least controversial inclusivity initiatives.
We linkspammed Connor’s piece a few days ago, and commenter koipond noted:
I hear the sentiment, but it’s kind of missing the point. No one is saying “Diversity at all costs” where they want to force people in who don’t want to be there. It’s more a case of trying to break down the barriers that prevent people who might be interested but see a toxic morass and refuse to swim in the pool.
My comment was along similar lines:
When I read http://geekfeminism.org/ or the http://geekfeminism.wikia.com wiki, or listen to the women on the Systers mailing list, I don’t hear a general and undifferentiated “WE MUST GET MORE WOMEN INTO FLOSS” or tech agitprop agenda. I see lots of initiatives to help underrepresented groups — African-Americans, women, people from developing countries — get in on the joy and empowerment of hacking.
I think there is a separate argument to be made that everyone, of every gender and from every socioeconomic, ability and ethnic background, should be generally technically literate, which means being able to code a “hello world” in some decent language and feeling empowered to modify their computing environment a little. To extend the analogy, I know it ruined your [Connor's] enjoyment of Model UN when the teachers forced everyone to participate, but you’re not against the goal of everyone learning a little about how international politics works.
And because these sexist behaviors and attitudes keeping women out of high-status and high-paying professions are just now starting to fade, it’s important to take an extra look at seemingly innocuous traditional attitudes to make sure they don’t conceal yet more barriers and discouragement. As Kirrily Robert pointed out in her OSCON keynote, the community as a whole grows organically and benefits greatly from (voluntary, of course) women’s participation:
http://infotrope.net/blog/2009/07/25/standing-out-in-the-crowd-my-oscon-keynote/
Like you, these advocates like helping people. Check out http://gnomejournal.org/article/88/the-un-scary-screwdriver for an example of the kind of noncoercive, entirely opt-in outreach that most advocates, well, advocate.
As I noted to Connor: Sure, coding, and open source work, are not really intrinsically appealing to lots of people. But because there are so very many external factors keeping interested girls and women away from tech careers and open source, I’m comfortable prioritizing breaking those down, so that maybe in fifty years people’s intrinsic interests will shine naturally through. And then we’ll talk and see what interesting patterns show up.
Those of you who attend WisCon probably already know that they are seeking program ideas. For those who have never attended WisCon before, it is a Feminist Science Fiction Convention held each May in Madison, Wisconsin. I went for the first time last year, and met many of the GF bloggers there for the first time, not to mention many of our regular commenters. It was a great experience, and one I look forward to repeating this year. If you’ve never been to an SF convention before, I can recommend this one to first-timers.
Anyway! My point! I had one!
Program suggestions close on the 22nd. What are you going to suggest? Got any half-formed ideas you’d like to bounce around? Do any of the geek feminist events of 2009 suggest panels? And the most important question: GF Party Y/Y?