- New Statesman | What we talk about when we talk about trigger warnings: “A trigger warning is not a rule, it’s a tool. It does not demand that we withdraw from topics that are taboo or traumatic, but rather suggests that we approach such topics with greater empathy, greater awareness that not everyone reads the same way.”
- Labs Are Told to Start Including a Neglected Variable: Females | NYTimes.com: “In a commentary published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the N.I.H., and Dr. Janine A. Clayton, director of the institutes’ Office of Research on Women’s Health, warned scientists that they must begin testing their theories in female lab animals and in female tissues and cells. The N.I.H. has already taken researchers to task for their failure to include adequate numbers of women in clinical trials. The new announcement is an acknowledgment that this gender disparity begins much earlier in the research process.”
- X-Men Days of Future Past Women | The Mary Sue: “Absence of protest in the face of a woman’s part being diminished is, sadly, no surprise. But there’s also been no outcry at Kitty’s absence from the meat of the action because no one misses a character they hardly know. This didn’t have to be the case. Make us care about her, and she could have been the central focus of the film, with all the action necessary to carry it off as a summer blockbuster. The idea that audiences couldn’t have related to her is an excuse among many that prevents characters like her from being able to take the reins. That’s all they are, though; excuses based on fear. The fear of losing money, the fear that a film won’t be successful if a woman is the main character, the one with, in this case, the most agency. “
- Erasing your audience isn’t ‘fun’: The false choice between diversity and enjoyment | Polygon: “This construction where it’s impossible to have ‘fun’ and ‘inclusion’ side-by-side by reflecting diversity in your games is a total illusion, a mirage thrown up to distract us from the simple fact that they just don’t want to make that effort.”
- Mind the gap: Incomes, college majors, gender, and higher ed reform | Sapping Attention: “It would be a bitterly ironic outcome if attempts to fix college majors ended up rewarding fields like computer science for becoming systematically less friendly to women over the last few decades.”
- 20 years on the web | Releng of the Nerds: “I found this picture the other day. It’s me on graduation day at Acadia, twenty years ago this month. A lot has changed since then.”
- The Bechdel test is fine just the way it is · For Our Consideration | The A.V. Club: “The Bechdel test has steadily entered the public lexicon and brought with it a growing awareness of the enormous sexism inherent in Hollywood. It’s time to stop quibbling about minor rules of the Bechdel test and put all feminist tools—even the imperfect ones—toward fixing the problem of gender inequality on screen. “
- ‘Pushy’ Is Used to Describe Women Twice as Often as Men – | The Atlantic: “To Subtirelu’s smart analysis, I would only add that these trends are about more than just observed behavior, or even pervasive sexism—they’re about expectation. People expect women to be communal leaders and men to be autocratic ones. When women violate those norms—or “push” past them, if you will—they still suffer consequences. “
- Women In Astronomy: Fed Up With Sexual Harassment: Power to Speak Up | Women in Astronomy: Part 4 of 5 in a series of posts on sexism in astronomy.
- Wiscon 38 Guest of Honor Speech | Epiphany 2.0: Too many great moments to pick just one quote!
- Book Review: Girls Coming to Tech! A History of American Engineering Education for Women by Amy Sue Bix | LSE Review of Books: “Ultimately, this book looks likely to provide the historical background for the current efforts to tackle female underrepresentation in engineering. It is necessary to reflect on the gendered dimension of technology and its surrounding “manhood” myth. As Girls Coming to Tech supports this process and gives female engineers a voice and space within this historical analysis, it is a worthy contribution to both the MIT Press’ Engineering Studies Series as well as ongoing emancipatory development.”
- Harvey Mudd College Makes School History Awarding Majority Of Engineering Degrees To Women: “Harvey Mudd College made school history this week when it awarded more engineering degrees to women than men at its commencement ceremony Sunday.”
We link to a variety of sources, some of which are personal blogs. If you visit other sites linked herein, we ask that you respect the commenting policy and individual culture of those sites.
You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on Pinboard, Delicious or Diigo; 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.