• 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.

• Nerd Rage: Gendered Tech During the Rise of Radio: “Radio is for boys only. No girls allowed. Or at least that was the message from so many young men at the dawn of the medium.”
• How you can help #banboothbabes at CES: “The problem starts when women are turned into sexual objects, dehumanized, and used to sell products to or attract attention from men (or rather, a certain subset of men).”
• Hilary: the most poisoned baby name in US history « Not So Standard Deviations: “This weekend I took the opportunity to learn how to scrape the social security data myself and do a more complete analysis of all of the names on record.”
• Daily Dot | GitHub code search reveals coding community’s hidden bigotry: “But while progressive politics are all well and good for geeks on a national level, racism, homophobia, and sexism are an ongoing plague in geek culture, judging from a stroll through GitHub, the open source code-sharing site that lets geeks bare their code—and their prejudices—to all.”
• Linux Conference Australia: Haecksen « skycroeser.net: “I spent today at the Haecksen miniconference, which focuses on women in open source.”

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.

• UBC med student develops panic button for sex trade workers | The Ubsssey, UBC’s official student newspaper: “In a January 2012 missing women’s commission report, she read that sex workers mentioned GPS panic alarms as something that might be helpful.”
• Warning: Cissexist No Willy No Woman’s Hour | Emma Mulqueeny: “Woman’s Hour has occasionally stuck in my craw as a title, but I think that – like the rest of the country – I adopt it with an indulgent smile, a nod to our ability to see humour in everything and satire is our bag, right?”
• A field guide to privilege in marine science: some reasons why we lack diversity | Deep Sea News: “It’s really important to remember that undergraduates – particularly the driven and responsible undergraduates most likely to succeed in science – often don’t want to explain the details of their financial and logistical difficulties to their professors. They may mysteriously turn down opportunities that seem perfect, or not show up to lab activities.”
• A Dream Deferred: How access to STEM is denied to many students before they get in the door good | The Urban Scientist, Scientific American Blog Network: “Quite unexpectedly, she placed in the school fair and qualified for the county-wide Science Fair. I was so proud of her. But apparently, kids of her ilk were not expected to place.”
• Who I am, since #IamScience | Subsurface Life: ” I often wonder how I would have progressed through science without some of them, including my first boss who told me I could only be her technician for three years, and then I had to consider grad school because I was “too good” for her. And my PhD adviser, who grew up on a farm and later became department head, even after being told in grad school that she didn’t belong in a lab since she should be making someone dinner.”
• Two new upcoming open tech events with friendly space or anti-harassment policies: Open Tech NYC Conference and EcoHackSF .

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.

• Help People Afford to Attend Your Conference: “If you aren’t providing childcare, provide a list of reputable and trustworthy childcare facilities in the venue area”
• Thoughts on a Diversity Discussion: “The intent was essentially “how can we improve diversity to such a degree that we don’t have to talk about it any more” – a laudable, but perhaps overly ambitious goal.”
• Men In Tech: Marshall Kirkpatrick | LadyCoders: “What is it like to be a man in tech?”
• “Free as in sexist?” Free culture and the gender gap: “Despite the values of freedom and openness, the free culture movement?s gender balance is as skewed (or more so) as that of the computing culture from which it arose.”
• The Grassy Road: Why booth babes at CES is a dumb marketing decision: “There is absolutely no need to objectify women to sell millions of dollars worth of consumer products.”
• Third-person effect and gender in online gaming: “[B]oth genders are found to perceive the opposite-gender as more susceptible to the influence of negative effects of games.”
• Just-So Stories About Hermaphrodite Fish: “But there’s a larger setting in which the fact that sex is a spectrum gets erased, and that’s in descriptions of biology and the animal kingdom as a whole. One way this happens is when biology textbooks fail to mention the fact that instances of intersexuality are found in all animals.”
• Entrepreneur of 2012: Limor Fried | Entrepreneur.com: “With $10,000 her parents had allocated for her tuition, Fried bought a bulk quantity of parts and began assembling and selling her kits, making about $10 on each unit. In the beginning, running the company consisted of shipping a couple of packages a day from the 24-hour post office next door to her dorm.”
• The Third Bit | Citation, Please: “Another day, another flood of defensive, ill-informed commentary on the Internet about women in technology.”
• BBC News – The battle against ‘sexist’ sci-fi and fantasy book covers“Hines, a fantasy author, is posing like some of the female characters on science fiction and fantasy book covers he says objectify women. He gets into character by twisting his body into the same contorted positions as the female characters on the books.”

–

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.