Tag Archives: economics

Recruiting youth to our linkspamming lifestyle (2nd November, 2010)

Posted on by
  • Trying to do it mostly right most of the time: The Border House‘s rho interviews Failbetter Games’s Alexis Kennedy, primary writer for Echo Bazaar, about the game’s approach to diversity, sexism and racism in a setting that was historically sexist and racist.
  • Feminomics: calculating the value of ‘women’s work’: an interview with Marilyn Waring, author of If Women Counted. But how will we know [about women's unpaid work] in the future? This past summer, the Conservatives, in rewriting the long-form census, eliminated only the section on unpaid work. That means that, in the future, StatsCan won’t be able to tell us with any certainty that men perform an average of 2.5 hours of unpaid work per day while women do 4.3 hours, like they did in 2005.
  • I’m Right Here: Rudy Simone on Life as an “Aspergirl”: Aspergirls is partly a personal memoir and partly a book of advice and support for women on the spectrum and their parents and friends. Simone has asked a chorus of Aspie women to speak through its pages, and this personal testimony is deeply moving.
  • British student invents a solar-powered refrigerator: [Emily Cummins] is a graduate of Leeds University, and was once refused a place on an engineering course because “she didn’t have the correct qualifications”. She qualified now?
  • “Renewable Girls” Peddlar Responds: Earlier this week, I critiqued the sale of a cheesecake calendar to help promote and sell solar panels, and asked readers to write to its purveyor, a dude called John B.
  • Stephen Fry, how could you? asks Laurie Penny. Unfortunately, everyone’s favourite gay uncle really has proposed that women only ever have sex for money, or to manipulate a man into a relationship. (oursin responds with to Penny: No, really, say after me ‘It’s always more complicated’)

If you have links of interest, please share them in comments here, or if you’re a delicious user, tag them “geekfeminism” to bring them to our attention. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links in comments and on delicious.

In Malaysia, women are 52% of CS graduates. So what?

Posted on by

Via BJ Wishinsky (@anitaborg_org), via Gerald Thurman (@nanofoo), a post from the CACM blog, Only the developed world lacks women in computing, by Mark Guzdial.

Mark talks about a study that shows that in Malaysia, 52% of computer science graduates are women. Sure, that’s fantastic. But if his headline is anything to go by, I think Mark’s missing the point pretty badly.

  • How did this get generalised from “In one developing country women are in a slight majority” to “Only in the developed world are women in a minority.” Logic fail.
  • Malaysia is around the 28th highest GDP-PPP in the world according to the World Bank, right near Belgium (29th) and Sweden (31st), and has the highest GDP-PPP per capita in Asia. So it’s arguably not even outside the developed world.
  • If we’re going to talk about women in technology in developing countries, let’s talk about literacy. Throughout the developing world, women’s literacy is key to their economic independence. Focusing on one relatively developed country with a high literacy rate (83% of women vs 89% overall) doesn’t actually tell us anything about women in developing countries. (Hat-tip to Nnenna Nwakanma from Free and Open Source Software Foundation for Africa for clueing me up in this regard.)
  • We need to consider the status and remuneration of women in IT, too. In Malaysia, women earn only 80% of what men do for the same work, and their average income is only 36% of men’s (source). Having more women in technology, if that work is seen as low-status and is poorly-paid, is not necessarily a win, nor something we should seek to emulate.

Mark wrapped up his description of the Malaysian study with, “Vivian concluded that the gendering of computing is constructed by the West, not at all inherent to the field.” Fair enough. But that’s not what he brought through to the headline: “Only the developed world lacks women in computing.”

Too many times, I’ve heard this study referred to in a way that says, “The lack of women in the western tech industry is a localised problem,” and implies, “so sexism isn’t as big an issue as you think it is.”