But pink is a linkspam’s colour (13th October, 2010)

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  • Our regular commenter Jenni wants to share a new geek feminist group blog she’s writing for: Bad Reputation. From the first post: Our strapline is a feminist pop culture adventure. We’re named after a Joan Jett song for a reason – we want to be a good first route in for people just starting to become interested in gender issues, and we also want to reclaim some of the inspiring, rock ‘n’ roll energy that characterised the feminist movement in previous generations..
  • A prologomena to all future blathering about gender on the Internet: I am proposing a new maxim: those who wish to argue from personal anecdote that a certain character trait is dictated by evolution should endeavor to advance the argument beyond 1792.
  • K. A. Laity on Joanna Russ on Slash Fiction: Laity highlights some of Russ’s analysis of slash.
  • Oh goody: bodies presented in cinema will be even less attached to the real appearance of humans. Software to slim actors on-screen
  • Art in the roller derby medium: BUMP flesh bump data -> live art units: For Bloodbath, the packs also have a virtual life, from robust wireless sensors (wiimotes) installed on the heads of players, collision, speed and rotational information is sent to a server and from there, on to data driven artworks. The artists are making their artworks live on site, in real-time, and these are projected as the game is played out.
  • Pat has begun a series of posts on feminist readings of the Achewood comic.
  • Women helping women get into tech: Girl Develop IT, an educational effort [Sara Chipps] helped start, is introducing women of all ages to programming.

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.

8 thoughts on “But pink is a linkspam’s colour (13th October, 2010)”

    • I read it through a couple of times, and I don’t think it’s actually claiming that “offering onsite daycare is antithetical to being a high performance organization” — that seems to be just a collateral. If you boil it down to its basics, it’s really just saying “If you don’t reward your employees well, you’ll just keep the fanatics” — which is not actually true, as you’ll also keep the ones who don’t think they’re good enough to get anything better. I think it’s just not very deeply thought-through, rather than specifically sexist.

      It’s reminded me of something I’ve been wondering about; although the gender salary gap is one of the commonest indicators of inequality, is the relative importance of the different things one gets from a job typically the same for men and for women? Obviously it’s a gap that has to be closed, but I’m sure it’s not the only one. And I’ve sometimes seen, for example, flexible working hours, or the possibility of telecommuting, put forward as particularly advantageous for women, but they seem pretty advantageous to men, too. (I myself (male) would want a fair bit more pay for the same work if required to work fixed hours in a fixed location, than for the same work with flexibility.)

      The animated talk about motivating work that someone’s put in one of the comments to that article is much more interesting.

      • This sounds a bit like the pregnant person fallacy.

        The article claims that if your employees have primarily “lifestyle” motivations your company has an issue. It cites daycare related motivations as an example. Motivations to do with work/life balance, caring responsibilities are not solely the preserve of women as you observe (far from it indeed), but they are disproportionately required and expected of women, thus, deciding that they are the mark of an uncommitted employee or an insufficiently awesome workplace culture is sexist, even though it doesn’t impact every single woman, and it does impact not a few men.

        • Any thoughts about this article, which says:

          The best thing a working mom can do for her own work life balance is to advocate for men’s work life balance. I know that sounds like a loaded comment so hear me out. We have women to thank for the strides that have been made in the last 40 years when it comes to workplace flexibility and leave policy.

          and goes on to conclude:

          In short, work life balance is unlikely to improve for working moms until it improves for working dads. Sadly, we still live in a patriarchal society. Once a problem becomes a “white male problem”, we start to do something about it. As long as we stay rooted in the old paradigm, men, women their families and their employers will all continue to pay the price.

        • John,

          I definitely agree with that article. In a Newsweek article from September:

          [...] Despite apparent progress—young couples believe in coparenting and sharing the household chores—very little has actually changed. The average wife still does roughly double the housework of the average husband: the equivalent of two full workdays of additional chores each week. Even when the man is unemployed, the woman handles a majority of the domestic workload, and it’s the same story with child care. If both parents are working, women spend 400 percent more time with the kids. Meanwhile, the number of fatherless kids in America has nearly tripled since 1960, and the percentage of men who call themselves stay-at-home dads has stalled below 3 percent. The old roles, say sociologists, are hard to shake.

          There’s growing evidence, however, that they can be expanded. Consider contemporary family life in Sweden. In the past, new parents split 390 days of paid leave however they liked—monthly, weekly, daily, and even hourly. Women used far more of it than men. But today, new fathers no longer rush back to work, leaving the mother to raise little Sven all by herself. The reason for the change? Smart public policy.

          In 1995, Sweden passed a simple but revolutionary law: couples would lose one month of leave unless the father was the one who took it. A second use-it-or-lose-it month was added in 2002, and now more than 80 percent of Swedish fathers take four months off for the birth of a new child, up from 4 percent a decade ago. And a full 41 percent of companies now formally encourage fathers to go on parental leave, up from only 2 percent in 1993. Simply put, men are expected to work less and father more.

          By altering the roles of the Swedish father and the Swedish worker, Sweden’s paternity-leave legislation has, in turn, rewritten the rules for Swedish men (and, by extension, women). “Swedish dads of my generation and younger have been raised to feel competent at child-rearing,” writes Slate’s Nathan Hegedus, an American who experienced the system firsthand. “They simply expect to do it, just as their wives and partners expect it of them.” If a man refuses time at home with the kids, he faces questions from friends, family, and, yes, other guys. Policy changes produced personal changes—and then, slowly but surely, society changed as well.

      • Who wants to have employees who are distracted with finding childcare? Who take longer breaks because there’s no snacks or coffee available on-site? Who refuse to seek medical help when in pain/sick/injured because they’re worried about the cost?

        I get that people want to hire only the most driven folk, but a culture that doesn’t include the “safety” perks seems completely the opposite of an environment in which people *can* be their most driven.

        I wonder if it isn’t just a way of avoiding firing people. ‘Cause really, that seems like a more logical solution to these “freeloaders” he’s trying to avoid.

    • There was also a post in the forum that pricked the balloon of happy feelings this morning:

      My suspension of disbelief was shattered the moment the csr said “There’s a chick . . .”