- Felicia Day is not pleased with Vanity Fair‘s condescending portrayal of herself and other female social media entrepreneurs.
- Role Models and Stereotypes: discussing the comparative helpfulness in attracting women to a field of both questioning stereotypes about that field, or having women as role models in it.
- Proof That Mentoring Matters: studying the effect of mentoring on junior academics over a number of years.
- Gender divide in children’s use of cell phone features, study finds: Shelia Cotten’s study finds that boys are using their phones for games, media and e-mail, whereas girls use them to maintain contact lists more often. She speculates this is a socialisation difference.
- Few gender differences in math abilities, worldwide study finds: “Girls around the world are not worse at math than boys, even though boys are more confident in their math abilities, and girls from countries where gender equity is more prevalent are more likely to perform better on mathematics assessment tests, according to a new analysis of international research.”
- Getting ready for Science Online 2010: Anne Jefferson is convening a session on “Casting a wider net: Promoting gender and ethnic diversity in STEM” at the Science Online unconference.
- Women-in-geoscience and blogs presentation: the blog version: Kim Hannula discusses joint research with Anne Jefferson on women geo-scientists and how blogging interacts with their career.
- I won’t even come CLOSE to everything that’s wrong with this picture…: Ragnell is angry that Wonder Woman, a female superhero originally pitched at girls, is very much getting the sex object makeover.
- On public discussion and safety: Melissa Draper discusses why the #ubuntu-women IRC channel is needed and given that, how to balance needs for privacy, safe-space assistance, and transparency
- Why Women Leave Engineering: radengineer discusses data on why women drop out of engineering majors despite being self-selected for very high levels of talent and interest.
- Net Neutrality And Why It Is Important To Women: Mary Alice Crim argues that the USA campaign to preserve net neutrality has important consequences in that it means feminist discussion on the ‘net can’t be censored by carriers.
- Diversity at what cost?: Lucy questions the push for diversity in FLOSS for its own sake and whether women are being pushed into it against their own interests.
- In the name of awareness: Only related to Mackenzie’s New Year’s resolution in the sense that they’re both about women’s clothing, but interesting also. The “what colour is your bra?” breast cancer awareness meme on Facebook others… women who have had mastectomies!
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.
Geek Feminism Blog 
I want to let you know that the 20th Down Under Feminist Carnival is up now here. Enjoy! :)
Thanks!
I’ve wondered what to do about adding carnivals to the linkspams: I’ve tended to stick to the global feminism one in order to avoid being all-carnivals-all-the-time. What do people think though? Is there some way that GF could highlight carnivals and links of general anti-oppression interest without burying geek stuff too deep?
And indeed, any woman who doesn’t wear a bra for whatever reason – trans women whose breasts don’t (yet) require a bra, for example.
Absolutely true. In this particular case it struck me that failing to be aware that survivors of the disease you’re raising awareness about may be especially unlikely to be unable play your game was an especial fail, but there’s plenty of assumptions about women’s bodies and preferences in it.
In their defence, a lot of women get implants after a breast cancer mastectomy. Some even get implants as part of the same surgery.
I’m a little bit hesitant about how to put this, because I have breasts myself and generally wear bras and moreover haven’t had cancer. Women who’ve had mastectomies for treatment or prophylaxis of cancer will each have an individual story and decision, but… in aggregate, there has been some feminist criticism (from survivors) of various aspects of reconstruction, including its normalisation and thus soft coercion by society and by medical practitioners (ie assuming you’ll reconstruct or conceal unless you state otherwise). And if one has a reconstruction I still suspect many (not all) survivors have a more complex relationship with their bra contents than “yay boobs and pretty boob housing” afterwards.
It thus still strikes me as problematic from that angle to make the bra-wearing case the “normal” state of affairs in this meme, in addition to Alexis’s point about equating “am a woman” with “have breasts and like to wear bras” for some other women.
The Diversity at what cost link has a lot of great fail in the comments. There’s a bit of a discussion going on, but it’s also full of dudes going, “See, that’s why we don’t need to care about the disparity of women in FLOSS!”
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.
Seen on Not Exactly Rocket Science: How sexual objectification silences women: the male glance as psychological muzzle. The comments are full of fail.