Author Archives: Mary

About Mary

Mary is co-founder of the Ada Initiative, a non-profit that promotes women's participation in open technology and culture, with Valerie Aurora. She is also a Free Software programmer at large and sometime computational linguist. She can also be found at Hoyden About Town and Lecta.

Increasing your programming skill

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This is an Ask a Geek Feminist question for our readers:

I’m a geek feminist trying to get into IT, specifically object-oriented programming and Flash/Actionscript. What I’m having the most problems with is practice – I’m taking some Continuing Ed courses because I have a totally different day job, but I still don’t feel like I’m gaining much skill in programming, probably also because I know exactly what I WANT to learn, but I haven’t found anything yet that covers it.

What I’m wondering is, for the typical programmer/developer job path, how do you figure out how to solve programming problems that aren’t covered in your classes? Do you just search through the language documentation (e.g. Java API) looking for relevant code?

This is in many ways closely related to an earlier AAGF question about finding newbie coding problems, but also a little broader: programmers, when you were learning, did you go to the puzzle sites, or work through language docs, or work on open source, or something else?

Writing violence against a woman

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This is an Ask a Geek Feminist question for our readers:

I am male who wants to write a novel about a female superhero. Since this is a superhero novel there will be violence and at some point my hero will have to lose a fight (though of course she wins in the end).

I am wondering how I should write the scene where the supervillain beats the crap out out of my female hero. Should I just write as if she were a male? Or do I need to take precautions so I don’t end up glorifying violence against women?

A quick thought on this one: there’s no “just” in “write as if she were a male”. A big part of the problem is that this is pretty rare, hence the Women in Refrigerators trope and similar critiques. Your own knowledge that she’s a woman will influence you to write violence specific to her gender and to cultural tropes about male-on-female violence.

So, I think you’ve set up a bit of a false dilemma between “write what comes naturally and it will be just like as if she was a man getting beat up” or “go out of my way to de-glorify the violence against her”. Another thing you need to be careful of is “write what comes naturally and spew your cultural uglies about women and their bodies and violence against them all over the page completely unawares.”

Second thought: you don’t want to “write as if she were a male”, in any case, because she isn’t. You want to write as if she was a person. Your current thinking on this seems to be edging towards “men are the pattern for people, women are special unique cases of people” which is a little concerning for your characterisation of a woman!

Do you have a writing group who review each other’s drafts? Does this group contain women? Obviously the women in your writing group should be reviewing all the work that your male peers do, not just “hey, I have a woman-centric bit here, so now you’re the expert, but I’ll ask John about the rest of my writing.” But you could ask the group in general for feedback on this and since you can show them the actual draft, they may have more specific thoughts.

You could perhaps get some of the way with playing around with reading and writing drafts of your violence scenes gender-switched and with more ambiguous pronouns in order to try and keep the uglies out of it, but I think this is where we need some fiction writers to step in. What think you?

GF classifieds (April to June 2012)

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This is another round of Geek feminism classifieds. If you’re looking to hire women, find some people to participate in your study, find female speakers, or just want some like-minded folk to join your open source project, this is the thread for you!

Here’s how it works:

  1. Geeky subjects only. We take a wide view of geekdom, but if your thing isn’t related to an obviously geeky topic, you’ll probably want to give a bit of background on why the readers of Geek Feminism would be interested.
  2. Explain what your project/event/thing is, or link to a webpage that provides clear, informative information about it. Ideally you’ll also explain why geek women might find it particularly awesome.
  3. Explain what you’re looking for. Even if it’s not a job ad, think of it like one: what is the activity/role in question, and what would it involve? What is the profile of people you’re looking for?
  4. GF has international readership, so please be sure to indicate the location if you’re advertising a job position, conference, or other thing where the location matters. Remember that city acronyms aren’t always known world-wide and lots of cities share names, so be as clear as possible! (That is, don’t say “SF[O]” or “NYC” or “Melb”, say “San Francisco, USA”, “New York City, USA” or “Melbourne, Australia”.) And if you can provide travel/relocation assistance, we’d love to know about it.
  5. Keep it legal. Most jurisdictions do not allow you to (eg.) advertise jobs for only people of a given gender. So don’t do that. If you are advertising for something that falls into this category, think of this as an opportunity to boost the signal to women who might be interested.
  6. If you’re asking for participants in a study, please note Mary’s helpful guide to soliciting research participation on the ‘net, especially the “bare minimum” section.
  7. Provide a way for people to contact you, such as your email address or a link to apply in the case of job advertisements. (The email addresses entered in the comment form here are not public, so readers won’t see them.)
  8. Keep an eye on comments here, in case people ask for clarification or more details. (You can subscribe to comments via email or RSS.

If you’d like some more background/tips on how to reach out to women for your project/event/whatever, take a look at Recruiting women on the Geek Feminism Wiki.)

Good luck!

Nurturing a girl scientist

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This is an Ask a Geek Feminist question for our readers:

I’m a English-major Geek. You probably knew a dozen or two like me in college. You want conversations on Shakespeare, grammar, early science fiction, or a Fruedian analysis of The Hobbit, I’m your woman. I’m not science or math-phobic, I’m really not. But for the past twenty years, I’ve been getting most of my science from NOVA, science fiction novels, and pizza-and-beer lectures from friends. (I get my math from Vi Hart videos.)

My spouse is similarly situated.

Now, we have a precocious daughter who is exceptionally science-y. Has been since she became fascinated with early hominid evolution when she was three. She once interpreted a Science Museum docent to explain, patiently, that the skeleton he was showing was Homo ergaster, not a Neanderthal. In fact, it was Turkana Boy. She was four and she was right. (He’d grabbed the wrong photo.)

I’ve been scrambling ever since I figured out that I’ve likely got a scientist on my hands. Turns out that Women in Science is THING! (I knew that before but it wasn’t really immediately relevant to my life until that moment.) So I’ve done what I can: she watches NOVA and ViHart with me, I read the Scientific America blog, we practically live at the local Science Museum and Natural History Museums. I try to explain the science of what I’m doing at any moment, as well as I understand it.

I even discovered that most of the scientists doing studies in pediatric brain development are women. So I’ve signed her up for every “brain study” in the city so she can see female scientists at work. (At age 6, she’s had about a dozen MRIs.)

But I feel like, as an English Major Geek, I should be doing something more. Or different. Thoughts? Suggestions? Resources?

What do you think?

Open thread: what’s your dump stat?

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[Warning! TVTropes!] A Dump Stat is a gaming concept: a quality in the game that you choose not to allocate any character-building resources to (and thus your character does not possess). Say, your character is a wizard, and has really low strength because you traded it for intelligence (which usually translates to spell-casting power).

Photograph of an origami wizard in blue and white

Wizard, design by Hojyo Takashi, photo by Origamiancy, CC BY.

This guy’s dump stat is definitely fire resistance.

I think my dump stat is probably all-nighters. Can barely stay awake at all: certainly the amount of work produced is nowhere near worth the cost, which is basically a full-on hangover the next day regardless of use, or lack thereof, of intoxicants. And I don’t find them fun. So, I would definitely have no points in all-nighters.

How about you?

Quick note: let’s try and keep this light ok? Stuff you’re OK with being bad at, rather than stuff that tears you apart. And steer clear of “and I don’t care because [whatever skill] is universally useless anyway!”: you can be sure someone here will be into it.

This is also an open thread for any other topics of interest to you. Comment policy applies.

“Does sex sell?” is an empirical question

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This is an Ask a Geek Feminist question for our readers:

We keep hearing the old chestnut “sex sells”, and we hear it most especially when we complain about how some item of geek culture is sexist – video game bosoms or ridiculous outfits on superheroines, for example – as if that was some kind of excuse for objectification.

Does sex sell? Does sexism sell? Where’s the evidence for this? I’ve got moderately good Google-fu but haven’t been easily able to turn up much in the way of useful information or anything more rigorous than blog rants and newspaper opinion pieces. Can anyone answer this one, or point me to some useful resources? Where is the real, empirical evidence for this? Are advertisers and content providers (comic artists, game producers etc.) operating on an outdated or scientifically unjustified model?

I’ve read quite a lot of your basic feminist literature. I’d like some science, or at least some vaguely scientific numbers. Can anyone help?

What do you think?

GF classifieds: wiki edition

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As you may know, we have a wiki as well as a blog. In fact the wiki is more than a year older than the blog—we have a little history page up now—and it only has a few (3 to 5 at any given time) regular editors. There’s also a lot of attention paid to the Incidents relative to the rest of the wiki. That’s not a bad thing, but the rest of the wiki could use some love too.

Hence, every so often we’ll point out areas of the wiki you could help out with. At any given time, this list will be hugely incomplete, so you can also go over there and do what suits you.

If you need a hand, drop in on the Community portal and ask for help.

Tech industry! There was a lot of work on this a few years ago, and some of it needs to be brought up to date/expanded:

Resources for allies! The resources for men page is a collection of blog posts, mostly. Seen any good feminist blog posts aimed at allies recently, and that speaks to geeks? It almost certainly isn’t there yet because, again, it’s been a few years. Please add it.

Getting articles ready for feature article status! Getting a featured article on our wiki is nothing like the arduous Wikipedia process: we simply want articles about a geek woman or group of geek women doing awesome stuff! They should be several paragraphs long, reasonably copyedited, in the correct categories, and have a picture. Fixing up our proposed feature articles to bring them up to scratch would be a good task if you know your way around Mediawiki wikis a bit.

We could particularly use a hand with the article on Anita Borg, because it will be the next feature article. And if you’re involved in the Organization for Transformative Works and you can fix the OTW article up with a few more paragraphs, you’ll almost certainly be the feature article after that.

GF wiki editors or readers, what would you like to see more work on?

Does the sexism in CS ever get better?

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This is an Ask a Geek Feminist question for our readers:

Dear Geek Feminists:
I have a little story for you, and then a group of related questions. About two years ago, I was miserable, isolated, and overwhelmed in my undergraduate computer science (CS) program at a male-dominated polytechnic institute. I went to my advisor, an accomplished woman professor who had taught and studied computer science at quite a few schools, and asked her if she had any advice about dealing with sexism in our discipline.

“It never gets better. Either you learn to deal with it, or you leave,” she said. I was crushed by this, and I believe her fatalistic assessment contributed to my failing out of that school in that semester.

My question, then, is in several parts.
1) If you’re a woman in CS, does it ever get better? If it got better for you, where and how did that happen?
2) If you’ve learned to deal with it, how?
3) If you left – as I left, as Skud left – would you go back? Did you go back?
4) If being ostracized and viewed as gross and weird for being feminist and female “never gets better,” why stay in CS?

What do you think?

When does diverse hiring become tokenism?

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This is an Ask a Geek Feminist question for our readers:

When people from video game development talk about making game development more inclusive and diverse, it’s often taken for granted that more diverse teams will be better able to bring out a well-rounded game that avoids or at least minimizes stereotypes.

However, I wonder to what extent this is true, and to what extent it represents tokenism. In a sense, this might be a case of developers not wanting to try – i.e. “Let’s just hire a woman or two, and then things will sort themselves out.” Then again, I can also see this being true, i.e. a diverse team *does* bring different perspectives to the table.

So what do you think? Do gender-diverse teams tend to create better/more unique/more inclusive games? How high is the danger of tokenism and/or essentialism here? Can you point us in the direction of real experiences made by gender-diverse development studios in these regards? Is it helpful for a developer to actively seek out female developers in order to create a more diverse team, or does this lead to problems?

See also an AAGF question from 2010 on being on the receiving end of tokenism.

What do you think?