- Applications to attend the Ada Initiative’s AdaCamp DC close today. AdaCamp DC is a 150-200 person unconference in Washington, D.C. on July 10-11, 2012, focused on the subject of “women in open technology and culture.” (Attendees of any gender are welcome provided they demonstrate sufficient interest in and expertise in the topic.)
- Meet China’s First Female Astronaut | Discovery News : “Liu Yang, a 33-year-old major in the People’s Liberation Army who entered the astronaut training program just two years ago, will take part in China’s fourth manned space launch”
- Geeks, You Have A Problem | pandagon.net : a nice recap of a lot of the various current issues in geek feminism.
- Is The Internet Convincing Women Not To Study Computer Science? : “The internet is dominated by sexist men, which discourages women from getting involved in related fields.”
- why we need anti-harassment policies | scrambled tofu : “People should feel comfortable and safe in our community. An anti-harassment policy is a statement that our community makes an effort to be inclusive, friendly and safe for everyone.”
- DrupalCon Code of Conduct (Revised Draft) | Drupal Groups : “revised draft of the DrupalCon Code of Conduct based on community feedback and input to the original draft.”
- Update on the Hacker Grants Program | Etsy News : “With help from all of you, Hacker School received applications from 661 women, nearly a 100-times increase from the previous session.”
- Yammer joins Etsy, 37signals in funding Hacker School grants : “these grants also send a public signal about something very important to us at Yammer: cognitive diversity. When people organize to solve a problem, they each bring to the table their own cognitive tools—worldviews, strategies, tactics, facts, skills, quirks, past experiences, hangups, etc.—all of which are inextricably linked with who they are and what they’ve done.”
- Feminist Hacker News | Composite : “At a couple of conferences lately, Hackmeet and She’s Geeky, as well as at the feminist science fiction convention WisCon, I hosted a discussion of feminist hackers and feminist hacking. I wanted to put the idea out into the world and see what other women had to say about it.”
- Why Strong Female Characters Are Bad for Women : “I think the major problem here is that women were clamoring for “strong female characters,” and male writers misunderstood. They thought the feminists meant [Strong Female] Characters. The feminists meant [Strong Characters], Female”
- [Trigger Warning : rape culture] Lara Croft Reboot Link Roundup | theborderhouse : and even more links in the comments
- The Horsewomen of the Feminist Apocalypse | Lousy Canuck : Skeptic feminists riding My Little Ponies
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.
Geek Feminism Blog 
Do you really check the linkspam comments for submissions? They often seem to fail to make it in…
Submissions:
Overtly ‘girly’ scientists alienate potential students
New Scientist discusses the results of a recently-published article by Diana Betz and Denise Sekaquaptewa, “My Fair Physicist? Feminine Math and Science Role Models Demotivate Young Girls”. Betz and Sekaquaptewa found that images of conventionally feminine women in science fields actually demotivated female middle school students and decreased their perceptions of their likelihood of success in science and math.
. . .
“Science: It’s a Girl Thing!”
Sociological Images looks at the utter failure of the new video released by the European Commission, “Science: It’s a Girl Thing!”, meant to encourage girls to consider careers in the natural and physical sciences, presenting science, as the title suggests, as an area compatible with femininity and other “girl things” — make-up, high heels, and fashion.
PS The first response video is already in and it rocks:
video: The Un-Official response to the Official teaser “Science: It’s a Girl Thing!”
Hmm. The comment I left above that one seems to have been eaten. I no longer have the links at hand–hope it may be in the mod queue.
More updates:
Olga Khazan covers some of the blacklash against “Science: It’s a Girl Thing!” video at the Washington Post
And Feminist Philosophers asks: “And why didn’t they just show images of females actually doing science? Or show what genders look like together, doing science?”
. . .
And on a different but related note:
Athene Donald: End the macho culture that turns women off science – “We are wasting an enormous pool of talent by not encouraging women to enter and stay in this discipline”
We do check them. I think most do make it in. If they’re not particularly relevant, or if we’ve had too many on the same topic they might not. It is up to each compiler’s discretion. And some might get missed or one of us might forget one time (we’re only human). But I think what you’re probably noticing is that I made this particular one several days early, so most of the links from the one right before this post weren’t there yet and got pushed to the linkspam after this one rather than showing up here.
Thank you for taking the time to reply, ellie–and more than that, thank you for putting in the work to compile the linkspams.
allies are awesome. check out a couple of Jay Smooth’s videos:
http://www.illdoctrine.com/2012/06/all_these_sexist_gamer_dudes_a.html
http://www.illdoctrine.com/2012/06/why_you_should_feed_the_trolls.html