• Dragon Age III’s Gaider On The Impracticality Of Sexism | Rock, Paper, Shotgun: “Prior to Gaider’s GDC talk on the very same subject, I caught up with him to discuss why sexism (and any sort of “-ism,” really) is bad for everyone: you, me, the industry, and of course, women or anyone else directly affected.”
• Why Doctor Who needs more female writers | The Guardian: “Doctor Who hasn’t aired an episode written by a woman since 2008, 60 episodes ago. There hasn’t been a single female-penned episode in the Moffat era, and in all the time since the show was rebooted in 2005 only one, Helen Raynor, has ever written for the show.”
• A very Harry Potter marriage proposal | CustomMade: “Rachel envisioned giving a Quidditch set complete with a Golden Snitch that opened to reveal an amazing engagement ring.”
• What would you do if you weren’t afraid? | Things I Like.: Harassment incident at PAX
• Ten Tips Guaranteed to Improve Your Startup Success | Anil Dash: “#1. Be raised with access to clean drinking water and sanitation. (Every tech billionaire I’ve ever spoken to has a toilet!)”
• Top Secret Rosies: documentary on original female computers [TRAILER] | Technical.ly Philly: “The often forgotten story in the women in tech conversation is the focus of the ‘Top Secret Rosies’ documentary. It first debuted two and a half years ago but is still catching attention, including a Film Office screening this week. See the trailer.”
• PAX East Susana Polo Women in Games Panel [VIDEO] | The Mary Sue: ”You Game Like a Girl: Tales of Trolls & White Knights.”
• More round up on Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In:
  • Sheryl Sandberg is the ultimate good girl careful not to upset those in power | Money | guardian.co.uk: “The good girl myth states that women only have to behave themselves and play by the rules to win in the workplace”
  • Feminism’s Tipping Point: Who Wins from Leaning in? | Dissent Magazine: “With offices in Palo Alto and funding provided by Sandberg’s lucrative and ongoing investment in Facebook, Lean In bears more in common with a well-funded Silicon Valley startup than a grassroots feminist organization. This parallel is central to understanding what Lean In is trying to accomplish.”

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• My experiences in tech: Death by 1000 paper cuts | Julie P.: On microaggressions
• How not to be scary (when teaching programming): Transcription of lightning talk from PyCon 2013
• The Future | The Strand: Content on geek feminism, scifi, Afrofuturism, anxiety, TWD, and more.
• Grandma Got STEM | Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics (+more!).: Great stories of great women.
• Let’s Talk About Names: Ali, hooks, Lee Boggs: “hooks’ critique of naming conventions is one often lost in neoliberal conversations about women “getting ahead,” “breaking the glass ceiling,” and “leaning in.” It is one that suggests, in fact, that these concepts privilege patriarchal values like individualized success and power, self-promotion, and money over matristic ones like communal wellbeing, collaboration, reciprocity, and humility. hooks’ naming politics then asks us to consider a reordering of the very systems in which names, successes, and other social conventions are established as opposed to an effort to “get ahead” within these systems.”
• New challenges in digital history: sharing women’s history on Wikipedia – my draft talk notes | Open Objects: from the Women’s History in the Digital World Conference.
• Feminist hacker lounge at PyCon | Composite: “PyCon gave non-profit booth space to The Ada Initiative and Mozilla for our Feminist Hacker Lounge and it turned out just awesome.”
• A 9 Year Old Just Blew Past Her $829 Kickstarter Goal To Build Her Own Video Game | SFGate: “The funding will help Mackenzie cover the cost of attending an RPG STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) camp where she will be able to make and design her own game.”
• My Halo Is A Centerfold | Cheryl’s Mewsings: “Halo Jones, one of Alan Moore’s most famous creations, and unusually a female comics character who is famous for being just an ordinary girl, rather than for her outsize boobies and lack of clothing. Which is why there has been something of an online fuss today about the Bristol Comic Expo deciding to promote itself by selling a specially commissioned print of Halo (by the original artist), topless.”
• Women In Comics: Simonson, Nocenti Talk Marvel & Gender Roles in Comics | Comic Book Resources: “To celebrate Women’s History Month, CBR is highlighting female creators across the industry, past and present, who helped make the comic book world what it is today. And who better to kick off our series than two of the best-known female superhero comics writers ever: Ann Nocenti and Louise Simonson.”

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.

• Girls Who Code, 2013 Summer Immersion Program — apply now: 2013 Summer Immersion Program Locations: New York City; Detroit, MI; San Jose, CA; Davis, CA; San Francisco, CA
• Upcoming first meeting of the Empowermentors Collective: intersectionally marginalized POC in free software & free culture! | The Silent Number: First meeting (via IRC) of the Empowermentors Collective – Sunday, March 24th at 12:00 pm eastern time. “The Empowermentors Collective is a skillshare, activism, and discussion network for intersectionally marginalized people of color (for example people of color with disabilities, trans* people of color, queer people of color, and women of color) within the free culture and free software movement.”
• DeTora Clinches Pro Tour T8 | GatheringMagic: “Congratulations are in order for Melissa DeTora, who just made Magic history as the first woman to Top 8 a Pro Tour.”
• Hello Kitty in Space Won Science Fair | The Mary Sue: Also, see the video if you haven’t yet.
• If you’re ready for a build server so pretty you could take it to the prom, you’re ready for @Atlassian Bamboo.: Sexist tweet by Atlassian
• Duke University Is Training Feminist Bloggers | The Frisky: “Duke Women’s Center has created a program during the spring semester called Write(H)ers, which will train 23 students on how to be feminist bloggers.”
• Popular science blog is run by a woman – to the surprise of some on Facebook | The Guardian: “Administrator for Science is Awesome posts a link to promote her Twitter profile and is met immediately by sexist comments”
• Female Characters in Gears of War | The Mary Sue: “Perna says some puzzling things about gender presentation in character design, acknowledges that he’s proud of the playable female characters of the Gears of War franchise and that he knows that a lot of women fans of the series find those characters to be empowering, and then turns right around and shores up the self-fullfilling prophecy that games with female lead characters don’t sell.”
• I Love Ya But You’re Strange – Women In Charge? Talk About a Mystery in Space! | Comics Should Be Good! @ Comic Book Resources: “Today, based on a suggestion from my pal Kristen, we take a look at a bizarre little tale from over 60 years ago in Mystery in Space #8 by John Broome, Bob Oksner and Bernard Sachs, where we see a world where women are in charge and a brave man willing to try to change that! The ending of this tale needs to be seen to be believed!”
• More about be(com)ing a woman in STEM – Web Librarian: A fabulous memoir.

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.

• From celebrating women in computing to changing the system | fdiv.net: “To sum up — I heard a range of experiences, good and bad. I heard a lot of factors that played into those experiences, and not just gender — parenthood, class, race, age, culture, personality. I heard an impressive array of coping strategies and survival tactics for adapting to the system that makes it harder for some people than others to be in computing. Coping strategies and survival tactics can be useful. But if that’s all we talk about, then we’re accepting the system. We’re reinforcing the system. What about changing the system?”
• How to create the PL culture I’d like to believe we deserve | Everything in Context: “Of course, it’s significantly easier to say “yes, we want to include everyone!” than it is to actually be a fertile community for them to not only feel welcome but to thrive and lead. In light of that, I want to try to present some concrete advice that you can apply whenever socializing and collaborating with other PL enthusiasts or potential PL enthusiasts.”
• Samsung GS4 launch: Tone-deaf and shockingly sexist | CNET News: “Samsung’s long parade of ’50s-era female stereotypes, in the midst of an entirely other long parade of bad stereotypes, just put me over the edge.”
• Social Media Problems: “Just don’t use it, then” is Not An Acceptable Response | This Ain’t Livin’: “There are lots of things I don’t like and I work to change them because I don’t like them and I think they are wrong. I don’t like the fact that voter suppression is an issue in the United States, for example. I’m not going to just stop voting, stop caring, or stop working to protect voters’ rights just because someone tells me to. And I don’t think anyone else should, either.”
• Stereotyping prime obstacle to women in commercial science | EurekAlert: “Women are available,” says UMD’s Ding. “The numbers are there. They just are not being selected.”
• Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In gives contradictory advice. | Slate Magazine: The entire book plays out like this. Sandberg encourages women to fake confidence in the workplace by investing in “an hour of forced smiling” or by “assuming ‘a high-power pose.’ ” Then again, women would do best to communicate “authentically.” Women shouldn’t be afraid to cry on a colleague’s shoulder at an emotional time, she says. Then again, “research suggests” that “it is not a good idea to cry at work.” Women shouldn’t be afraid to advocate for flexible work hours to handle family commitments. Except that “employees who make use of flexible work policies are often penalized.” Women “need to shift from thinking ‘I’m not ready to do that,’ to thinking ‘I want to do that, and I’ll learn by doing it.’ ” But then again, men are promoted based on their potential while women are promoted based on their past accomplishments. Except that “a woman who explains why she is qualified or mentions previous successes in a job interview can lower her chances of getting hired.”
• [Trigger warning] I am the blogger who allegedly “complicated” the Steubenville gang rape case — and I wouldn’t change a thing | xojane: She talks about her process of searching for and finding social media posts from that night as well as the backlash she has received.
• [Trigger warning] The Rape of James Bond: “On Sexual Assault, and “Realism” in Popular Culture.”

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.

• MIT Media Lab: Feedback from our SXSW party: Followup on the wristband thing.
• Computer Coding – It’s Not Just for Boys | NYTimes.com: “Little Miss Geek runs school workshops and gets women from the industry to talk to students. Ms. Parmar hopes to secure corporate sponsorship to expand the effort with coding clubs for girls and more classroom sessions. For International Women’s Day, her team is going to two London schools with iPads, BlackBerrys and female role models.”
• #include – Computer Science for All: “We are a group of teachers who are passionate about giving ALL students the opportunity to study Computing.”
• Men who spy on women through their webcams | Hacker News: Comments are very “Shit Hacker News Says”. RE: Meet the men who spy on women through their webcams | Ars Technica
• Saying What You Mean to Say | Athene Donald’s Blog: On the genderedness of letters of recommendation in science.
• New Study Exposes Gender Bias in Tech Job Listings | Wired.com: “According to a paper recently published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, there could be a subtle gender bias in the way companies word job listings in such fields as engineering and programming. Although the Civil Rights Act effectively bans companies from explicitly requesting workers of a particular gender, the language in these listings may discourage many women from applying.”
• [Trigger warning] Cops Arrest Tech Whiz Marlin Pohlman For Allegedly Drugging, Assaulting Women: FYI for Portland hacker/maker peeps
• An Open Letter To the Nashville Tech Community – Martha Kelly: Developer’s response to blowback (“horrible”, “punitive”, “hijack” etc. over her and others pointing out male=default language in tech editorial that was supposedly a community bridge-building reachout): new Nashville STEAM group, an encouraging, women-friendly tech space.
• Superheroes are for girls, too!: Adorable girls dressed as superheroes!
• Geek Speak | DORK TOWER 12.04.13: Why it sometimes seems like geek girls can’t win…

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.

• Donkey Kong “Girls Can Save The Day Too!” Edition made by father for his little hero princess | Plan8 Media: Dad hacks Donkey Kong so the girl saves Mario.
• Meet the First Female Comic Book Artist to Draw Batman | Oprah.com: “Holy female perspective, Batman! How comic book artist Becky Cloonan is shaking up the industry.”
• Women in science: Women’s work | Nature: “A special section of Nature finds that there is still much to do to achieve gender equality in science.”
• Justly Unequal | The Caravan: The unlikely history of our greatest delusion [meritocracy]
• Finally, a tablet simple enough for a woman to use | Ars Technica: O hai pinkwashing.
• “That May Sound Sexist,” Says Guy Who Won’t Hire Women | Lowering the Bar: That may sound sexist, because it is!
• WTF MIT MEDIA LAB?!?!? | Adeline Koh: Wristbands at South by SouthWest. Misogyny at its crassest.
• Rejoicing for the Return of Community, NBC’s Subversive Feminist Sitcom | Bitch Media: “Community reminds us that the images and stereotypes on which TV relies are ridiculous, and finds its humor in such images’ absurd departures from lived reality.”
• I Married A Fake Geek Girl; A Defense of Casual Fandom | Apex Magazine: “Oh, in case you hadn’t guessed, this whole fake geek girl thing pisses me right the fuck off. So does the idea that only those who are hardcore fans of something can be considered to be TRUE GEEKS. Seriously people, cut that out.”
• Medical research has focused on males | SFGate: “We don’t study females,” her professor said. “Their menstrual cycles would mess up our results.”

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.

• Damsel in Distress (Part 1) Tropes vs Women | Feminist Frequency: The first video and transcript are now available.
• “It’s a powerful thing to have people tell me how important this game is to them”: Interview with Merritt Kopas | the Brindle Brothers: “I wanted to make something about navigating categories and the unpredictable nature of recognition and placement in those categories, and the fear and uncertainty that comes with that: walking into a space and wondering how people are going to see you and what the consequences of that are going to be.”
• What If Your Superpower Was Ending Street Harassment? | Campus Progress: “As part of a project for Hollaback! Philly, a branch of an international anti-street harassment organization, the three [activists] are working on a crowd-funded comic book that stars Red and Yellow, two women dealing with street harassment, and Blue, a man learning to engage with his responsibilities as a bystander.”
• Hawkeye Initiative cosplay lets the guys show off their rears for a change | io9
• Giant Squid TED Talk | The Mary Sue: “Edith Widder is an oceanographer and inventor who, as she explains in her TED talk, put together a camera rig designed to be as interesting and unthreatening to a giant squid as possible.”
• The Finkbeiner Test | Double X Science: “In the spirit of the Bechdel test, a metric that cartoonist and author Alison Bechdel created to measure gender bias in film, I’d like to propose a Finkebeiner test for stories about women in science.”
• This year’s Google I/O event has a surprisingly well-written anti-harassment policy. It seems it was actually written before last year’s I/O, but I hadn’t seen it linked from official conference pages before. Quoting from the bottom of the policy: This policy is based on several other policies, including the Ohio LinuxFest anti-harassment policy, written by Esther Filderman and Beth Lynn Eicher, and the Con Anti-Harassment Project. Mary Gardiner, Valerie Aurora, Sarah Smith, and Donna Benjamin generalized the policies and added supporting material. Many members of LinuxChix, Geek Feminism and other groups contributed to this work.
• A collection of links discussing the current attention to women’s workplace issues:
  • Suddenly, Sheryl Sandberg’s Critics Care About Working-Class Women – Gayle Tzemach Lemmon – The Atlantic: An interesting counterpoint to Trickle-Down Feminism
  • Lisa Belkin: Marissa Mayer’s Work-From-Home Ban Is The Exact Opposite Of What CEOs Should Be Doing | HuffPost Women: “The CEO of Yahoo!, who made news when she took the position last summer while five months pregnant, announced through the company’s human resources arm yesterday that employees will no longer be permitted to work remotely.”
  • Working Women Blues | Carolyn Edgar: “I’m really annoyed that Slaughter, Sandberg and Meyer are the faces of women’s workplace issues. They represent a very narrow, elite segment of women in the workplace. Yes, there are still barriers to women making it to the top of organizations in both the public and private sector, and those issues are worth discussing. But it seems the issues of elite women workers are the only women’s workplace issues we ever get to discuss.”

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.

• Joseph Reagle on the gender gap in geek culture | Surprisingly Free (podcast): “Joseph Reagle, Assistant Professor of Communications Studies at Northeastern University and author of a new paper entitled, “Free as in Sexist? Free culture and the gender gap,” returns to Surprisingly Free to address geek feminism and the technology gender gap.”
• Why can’t any recent Sherlock Holmes adaptation get Irene Adler right? | io9: ”Why is Arthur Conan Doyle’s Irene Adler so much better than the versions crafted by Steven Moffat and Guy Ritchie?” — “The original Irene was far more progressive and canny. She knows the best way to throw Holmes off — and it’s not sex.”
• BioShock Infinite, Tomb Raider and exploitation | still eating oranges: ”The West has consumed moe for years through imported, otaku-targeted anime, manga and video games; but we have not regurgitated it into our own culture. The video game industry is set to break that trend next month.”
• Algorithmic Rape Jokes in the Library of Babel | Quiet Babylon: “Yes, lowered barriers to entry mean more small scale making and writing. Yes, domestic rapid fabrication and print on demand services open the floodgates to amateur designers and authors. They open the floodgates to algorithms too.” … “‘We didn’t cause a rape joke to happen, we allowed a rape joke to happen,’ is not a compelling excuse. It betrays a lack of digital literacy.”
• How I made a d20 engagement ring for my secret lesbian D&D proposal | Offbeat Bride: Joyfully geeky!
• PTSD: The Futile Search for the “Quick Fix” | Scientific American Blogs: “Preventive measures, like the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) are the only cure for PTSD”
• Women involved in Open Data | datalibre.ca: List of female speaker candidates in this burgeoning tech area.
• Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering | US National Science Foundation (NSF): Intersectionality statistics in STEM.
• Solvitur ambulando | Why we don’t speak up: “I want more diversity in the open culture movement, and I do not want the people we recruit to feel like that. Those of us who are here already, please join me in making your harassment public, when it is safe for you to do so, so that we can have a more useful community-wide dialogue on the issue.”
• Evan Prodromou | Google+: +Linus Torvalds you have a terrible temper and you treat people really badly
• Sergei Brin’s Masculinity | Coyle’s InFormation: “It makes little sense to eliminate women from your market, and promoting a product as a kind of ‘technology viagra’ is not going to win over female consumers.”
• Autism spectrum conditions and anti-harassment: “In conclusion, because it seems to need repeating a lot: autism spectrum conditions are not a reason for harassment, they are not an excuse for harassment, and Internet-diagnosing unfamiliar-to-you highly socially competent predators makes life harder for everyone except predators.”

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.

• Men and Women Use Uptalk Differently: A Study of Jeopardy! | Sociological Images: “The punchline? Women use uptalk more frequently, but men use it as well. For men, however, uptalk signals something completely different.”
• Balance | nickd: ”Sometimes people need encouragement when they’ve been discouraged for a lot of their lives.”
• What Your Culture Really Says | Pretty Little State Machine: “Let’s examine popular startup trends that are being called “culture” and look beneath the surface to find the real culture that may be playing out beneath it.”
• Creating a Commons | Solvitur ambulando: Text of the keynote address from the code4lib 2013 library-technology conference, focuses on diversity and inclusiveness.
• Journalism, Storification, and Harassment | Critical Damage: Great post about the ethics of reporting on controversial subjects by using embedded tweets
• geek+ (with tweets) | mcdaldno: “i think a lot about geek culture. these are my thoughts on how we can improve our geek cultures and spaces. it’s also a manifesto for how i plan to act from here on out.”

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.

• Trigger Warning Games Imitating Life: Rape Culture In MMORPGs? | the border house: “I bring all this up because of a scene that was roleplayed out one day in a tavern.”
• BBC celebrates Doctor Who’s musical genius | The Independent: “Working from 1963 to 1972 for the Radiophonic Workshop, a unit created to provide sound effects and music for programming across the BBC, Derbyshire was responsible for many of the futuristic sounds that were to fill living rooms across the nation. She and fellow Radiophonic colleagues were denied credit for their work because the BBC deemed them to be “engineers”.”
• Comic-book superheroine Cat aims to see off gender stereotypes | Books | guardian.co.uk: “I looked around at the room full of young women – so smart, determined, keen and committed – and remembered that in the original comic, Batgirl was meant to be a PhD student. Why do we never see women like this in comics – women who are normal, likeable and just really, really clever?”
• Warning: descriptions of verbal abuse and manipulation This is what happens to women on the Internet | The Accidental Beard: “Yesterday I was enjoying some delicious brunch when I overheard one of the women sharing our table tell her friends about her experience at a bar the previous night.”
• Genderswap, Cosplay, and Harassment | Backup Ribbon Project: “But then he took it one step further and wanted to see what it would be like for him, as a man who did not think of himself as a sexual icon, to genderswap cosplay a character that IS one.”

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.