- 18 year old German woman Lisa Sauermann has just won the International Mathematics Olympiad (contested between talented high school students) with a perfect score of 42. This is Sauermann’s fifth medal, four of them gold and one silver, the best series of performances ever. (Some sources say she’s the first recipient of four golds, there have actually been two others.)
- BU Today reviews Project Artmesis, a five week summer computing program for high school girls that has just wound up.
Please Sir, I Want Some More:(See comments for why this link was removed.) (For that matter, new to this linkspammer: the Gay YA site where this appeared.)LGBTQs need more and deserve more. We need escapism just like our cis straight brothers and sisters. We need to be portrayed in roles we wouldn’t be expected to be in.
- Help Us Find These 1970s AT&T Engineers:
In this 1975 AT&T film, five female AT&T engineers are profiled. The film starts with male attitudes towards women working as engineers. There are no surprises there… What’s most interesting, though, is that AT&T apparently cannot locate any of these five — they (and I) would like to ask followup questions and learn how things have changed since 1975.
- Open Source Community, Simplified: The Bugzilla community’s secrets. Not specifically feminist advice, but advice that will help create a woman-friendly coding space.
- Erase me:
And, basically, it comes down to authors wanting either something exotic or inclusion cookies without putting in any real effort or respect into their characters or having any awareness of the tropes and stereotypes they are tapping into… So I’ve finally come down on saying – stop. Erase me. No, really. I’d much rather be erased than tokenised or stereotyped.
- Girls Go Geek… Again! and Normalizing Female Computer Programmers in the ’60s:
This article appeared in a 1967 issue of Cosmopolitan and quotes computer scientist Dr. Grace Hopper, a pioneer in the field, discussing why programming is a perfect fit for women — by drawing partly on gender stereotypes by assuming women are
naturals
at programming because they’re patient and pay attention to details…
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.
Geek Feminism Blog 
I strongly object to linking Dennis R. Upkins on a feminist blog. His novel includes the “good” male characters saying really hilarious zingers like: “Cindy Robbins and Toni Marrett. Two of the most stuck up skanks at this school. I would know. I did them both in a hot tub last month” and “Ms. Robbins, for the sake of your music and your love life, I do hope that you learn how to blow properly.” These are just two examples, but the entire novel contains incredibly sexist content that’s supposed to be funny. He’s not woman-friendly and certainly not a feminist-friendly male author/blogger. It’s disheartening to see one of my favorite feminist blogs suggest we read him.
And why promote male bloggers at all on a feminist blog (like Dennis Upkins and Sparky)? Women have been saying the same things they have for years… not to mention that men have plenty of other spaces to promote their work.
I can’t speak to the link: I didn’t add it, but I wouldn’t have known anything about Upkins if someone had asked me to add it anyhow. Thank you for the warning for those of us who know nothing of him.
But I can speak to promoting male bloggers in general: I think it would be rather odd for us to frequently encourage more men to speak out on feminist issues and then, at the same time, have a policy that specifically ignores those who do! So while I think many of us do have a preference for promoting women as part of the goals of the site, I don’t think you’ll ever see us doing so exclusively.
And while this may be trite, I’d like to remind everyone that the best way to make sure the linkspams promote more women bloggers is to submit links from women bloggers! This is especially important if you feel that men are being promoted more often in general, since we get many of our links from other media and thus their biased choices may show up in a trickle-down effect in our linkspams. So if this is especially important to you, please help us avoid that trap!
But Upkins isn’t a feminist. He’s stated before that he wants to…
Note from Mary: this comment was paraphrasing Upkins’s anti-lesbian hate speech. I have therefore placed the text at trigger warning http://privatepaste.com/3ecd941185 where you can read it if you wish (expires in 1 month).
Given this, I will remove the link. Sorry about that.
We don’t, and can’t, background check people we link to for anti-feminist speech in other venues. In an ideal world, this would be a great thing to do but given the time available to bloggers here, mistakes will be made.
WHAT IN THE
I did add it, thanks for the warning.
I think it’s unlikely we’ll adopt a policy of only linking to women, or non-men (for starters, how would we tell?) but I’ll raise it with the other bloggers just in case.
Shout out to Skud and to Geek Feminism on the EFF Deep Links blog: A Case for Pseudonyms by Jillian York