• 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.”

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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.

• Mothership: A la carte career mentorship videos for women developers, hosted on GitHub (just started, growing fast)
• Hostile Territory: Q&A with Gamer Jessica Price on How Gaming is (Slowly) Growing Less Sexist | Bitch Magazine: “Jessica Price works as a project manager at tabletop roleplaying game publisher Paizo Publishing—a progressive company with a female CEO. But Jessica’s career reaches across jobs and companies. In the worlds of video and tabletop games, her experiences have run from sexual harassment to seeing real and positive industry change.”
• Boys don’t read Girl Books and other lies my Society Told Me | Culturally Disoriented: “You know what? I’ve got a teenage boy in my life, and he reads ‘girl’ stuff just fine.”
• Meritocracy and Discrimination in Tech – Ben Kamens: “So we’ll continue encouraging females, children, and just about anybody to get into tech by celebrating milestones along the way. To those this threatens – oh.”
• Webstock and why words matter | Joanna Mcleod: on sexist/anti-fat language at the Webstock web conference

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.

• Lingering misconceptions keep women from entering the technology sector | Entrepreneur | Financial Post: “The data show women make up 47% of the overall Canadian workforce. Yet they comprise just 24% of the tech sector workforce.”
• Pseudoscience and stereotyping won’t solve gender inequality in science | The Guardian: “A parenting guide aimed at drawing more girls into science lacks evidence and promotes old-fashioned gender stereotypes”
• Being a female software engineer: Animated GIFs mocking the bullshit technical women put up with.
• This Is What A Scientist Looks Like: “This Is What A Scientist Looks Like is a project developed to challenge the stereotypical perception of a scientist.”
• Inclusivity Is Not A Double Standard: Why Forbes is Wrong about Women in Tech | Lauren Bacon: “Everybody’s talking about Etsy’s success in recruiting women engineers – they’ve increased the number of women in their engineering department by 500% in one year – and that’s awesome to see.”
• Creating a Mozilla workshop for beginner Hacking of Mobile HTML5 Games | Lukas Blakk: “We made an exciting discovery in our first meeting, which was that we could host the game from a github page and this meant every girl in the workshop could hack on her own customizations of the game in github’s web interface code editor and see their changes reflected on a mobile device immediately.”
• To a Future Woman In Tech | @bitchwhocodes: “As a future woman in technology, I want so much more for you than I can articulate. Hopefully, things will have seen some change when you are ready to make this world your own. If that is not the case, here is what I wish for you, for every young woman, and for this industry.”
• What changed in 2012 for women in open tech and culture?: “2012 saw the first stand-alone conferences specifically for women in open technology and culture, AdaCamp Melbourne in January and AdaCamp DC in July.”
• Weregeek » 2013 » February » 04: “Face it, bud. You’re looking at the new face of fandom.”
• What Feminism has to do with Software Freedom: “You can’t claim to be returning control to people when you are ignoring or mistreating over half of them. – not if you want any credibility, anyway.”
• Gender equality eludes groundbreaking scientist | The Globe and Mail: “Veronica Dahl isn’t the sort of person to get worked up over $17. But, back in 1984, when Simon Fraser University refused to reimburse her $17 for one hour of babysitting for her infant son while she gave a lecture at an out-of-town conference, the computer scientist was incensed.”

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.

• Impostor Syndrome, Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4: “So just like social capital is unevenly distributed, impostor syndrome is too. For any given person, coping is a fixed resource; when you go through life getting told in subtle and not-so-subtle ways that people of your gender or your race, or people whose bodies look like yours or who think and communicate the way you do, or people with your sexuality or your economic class, just aren’t good enough (and must, if they do well, only be doing well because they were given a “handout”), you tend not to have a lot of coping left to sustain yourself in a challenging and often hostile academic environment.”
• Moving Past Brogramming « The Official Klout Blog | Klout: Klout’s 2013 apology for their 2010 recruiting poster.
• Responses to “Free as in Sexist?” | Open Codex: “It’s always gratifying when people read something I’ve written and point out shortcomings or issues that could be further explored.”
• My Thank You Gift to Everyone Who Pledged to the Counteract a Bigot Drive | Whatever: “As a way to show my appreciation, I commissioned a piece of art.”
• jenseninman | Blog | Speaking up, it’s time: ” I learned we have a long way to go in creating a welcoming culture within our industry.”
• And Read All Over | Jamelle Bouie: “If the majority of technology users belonged to a select demographic group, this would make more sense, but that’s not the case at all: Gadgets are used by everyone.”
• Girls Lead in Science Exam, but Not in the United States | NYTimes.com: “For years — and especially since 2005, when Lawrence H. Summers, then president of Harvard, made his notorious comments about women’s aptitude — researchers have been searching for ways to explain why there are so many more men than women in the top ranks of science.”
• I Don’t Have Time For Your Sexism | Lukasa: “Let’s fix this. Let’s not stay quiet any longer.”

–

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.

• Free and open source software and ‘the anarchist-libertarian ethic’ | skycroeser.net: “the answer is not more top-down control; initiatives that come out of the community and are lead by those who have previously been marginalised are far more likely to provide sustainable long-term solutions.”
• I’m a Black Female Cosplayer And Some People Hate It | xoJane: “After my pictures started making the rounds on deviantArt, tumblr and 4chan, it became pretty clear that my cosplay brings all the racists to the yard, and they’re like…white cosplay is better than yours.”
• The Internal Memo That Allowed IBM’s Female Employees to Get Married | The Atlantic: “Women, in those days, were seen as temporary hires, holding a spot for a man, which she would relinquish if she got married.” Also links to an interview:
  • The Face Of A ‘Computer’ From 1946 | Huffington Post: “Eleanor Kolchin was once a computer. When she accepted her first full-time job in 1946, “computers” were people, not machines: As a programmer at Columbia University’s Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory , Kolchin helped astronomers make sense of the universe by operating sofa-sized calculating machines capable of little beyond basic arithmetic. She wasColumbia Engineering Quarterly’s first-ever female contributor, and spent over two decades manning computers to complete astrophysics research at New York University.”
• Speaking up. | Sarah Parmenter, a web and UI designer.: “Six months ago, something happened to me that I kept quiet. Some of my best friends in the industry knew it was happening and tried to help as much as they could. I started writing a post back then about what happened, I got halfway through and found it too much. Coming back, maybe with a stronger disposition because of what happened with my Mum, I now want to share what occurred.”
• [ableist title] Women Don’t Negotiate Because…| women2.0: ”women don’t negotiate for a very simple reason: they sense – correctly – that it will hurt them if they do.”
• The dark side of HackerNews: negativity at best, suppression at worst | Keen IO: “Within about ten minutes, Michelle’s post had about 20 comments, from different perspectives, and it was on the front page of HackerNews. The debate raged for about an hour, and then out of nowhere, new post activity slowed markedly.  A friend pointed out to us that, for some reason, Michelle’s post had been buried on the third page!”
  
• The Importance of Putting on a Diverse, Inclusive Conference | TechWell: Good summary of BritRuby fiasco, concrete benefits of diversity, resources for reachout etc.

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.