Tag Archives: racism

Linkspamming from the mountaintops (29th November, 2010)

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  • A Very Special Episode of Grey Areas: Privilege Denying Dude Edition: In social justice, not all tactics that are divisive are effective, but all tactics that are effective are divisive. That doesn’t mean we should set our phasers to divide, but when a tactic is labeled as divisive or radical, there is a chance it might be one worth considering.
  • HTML pseudocode cross-stitch for geek feminist gift-giving.
  • 15-minute writing exercise closes the gender gap in university-level physics: Think about the things that are important to you. Perhaps you care about creativity, family relationships, your career, or having a sense of humour. Pick two or three of these values and write a few sentences about why they are important to you… This simple writing exercise may not seem like anything ground-breaking, but its effects speak for themselves.
  • Disalienation: Why Gender is a Text Field on Diaspora: Sarah Mei writes The “gender” field in a person’s profile was originally a dropdown menu, with three choices: blank, male, and female. My change made it an optional text field that was blank to start. A wide open frontier! Enter anything you want.
  • Grandma’s Superhero Therapy (18 photos) – My Modern Metropolis: GO SUPER MAMIKA!!!!! A few years ago, French photographer Sacha Goldberger found his 91-year-old Hungarian grandmother Frederika feeling lonely and depressed. To cheer her up, he suggested that they shoot a series of outrageous photographs in unusual costumes, poses, and locations.
  • New-ish site you might want to check out: Ars Marginal: So much of the arts and entertainment we get exposed to is by and for straight White guys*. We figured it’s time for us to talk about what we get out of it. Because, frankly, we’re tired of that shit. Ars Marginal flips the script and looks at movies, TV shows, comic books, and games from our point of view.
  • Context. Or, no you don’t get to apply your Internet niche knowledge to me doing my job. :>: yes, using a swastika in your gaming profile is going to get you banned, internet contrarian.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the geekfeminism tag on delicious 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.

The Myth of White Male Geek Rationality

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This post was originally published at Restructure!

People who consider themselves fully rational individuals are ignorant about basic psychology and their own minds.

It is easy for white men in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields to perceive themselves as more rational than other groups, because our society associates rationality with whites, men, and STEM professionals. When white men in STEM fields believe in this stereotype, they might assume that bias is more common in non-white people, women, and people in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. After all, these other groups seem to want to discuss bias more often, and unexamined associative “reasoning” would link bias to those who bring up the topic of bias. Under logical scrutiny, however, it does not follow that the act of thinking about bias makes one more biased.

Green Red Blue
Purple Blue Purple

Blue Purple Red
Green Purple Green

the Stroop effect refers to the fact that naming the color of the first set of words is easier and quicker than the second.

A basic tenet of contemporary psychology is that mental activity can be unconscious. Unconscious simply refers to any mental activity that is “not conscious”, and it is not equivalent to the unscientific New Age concept of the Subconscious. A good example of unconscious mental activity interfering with conscious intentions is the Stroop effect (right). If you try to name the colours of the colour words aloud, the first set of colours will be easier to name than the second set of colours, because you unconsciously read the words. This means that you do not have full control over your thoughts and behaviour, and your willpower or logical reasoning cannot overcome the unconscious cultural bias of being able to read in English. Of course, there are other unconscious cultural biases aside from English literacy bias.

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A long time ago in a linkspam far, far away… (20th July, 2010)

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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.

Good girls don’t linkspam (3rd May, 2010)

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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.

It’s not a gender issue, it’s a linkspam issue (25th March, 2010)

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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.

Hottest linkspam evar. Or something. (27th October, 2009)

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  • “Manolith” has a list of 12 hottest geek girls. I think you can gather from the name of the site how this list is meant to go, but I was surprised to find that the profiles of the women they chose were actually fairly interesting, and they included some serious geek credentials as part of their selection criteria. (No Women near tech for them?) But yeah, although that’s an interesting nugget, the list is a lot of drooling and scantily clad celebrity geeks — click at your own risk, and I’m guessing you should just skip the comments.
  • Shweta Narayan explains things to John Ottinger III after his post “For Those Who Cry Sexism or Racism in SF Anthologies, Shut Up”. Ottinger apologizes, Narayan tells him keep on speaking up.
  • In one of her other blog lives, our own Liz Henry hosted Disability Blog Carnival #59: Disability and Work. Without reposting the whole carnival, here are some of the posts of geek feminist interest:
    • Disability and Work: What I do, talking about work and play in the light of ideas in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, together with disability and unemployment, together with women’s work (including fandom) not counting as real work.
    • Disability Employment Awareness Month, about working at an open source company (warning per Liz: “contain[s] some hatred expressed towards disabled scooter users who are fat”)
  • Pamela Fox was asked to prove her technical chops after giving a non-technical talk in a non-technical (apparently) outfit. She asks Should I Defend My Cred?
  • Kaliya Hamlin submitted a panel proposal to SXSW entitled “What Guys are Doing to Get More Girls in Tech!â€,  SXSW Panel Selected — now to find Panelists
  • Despite Elizabeth Blackburn’s Nobel win, women face battles, particularly presence in senior roles.
  • Apple’s iPhone App Store is hard on satire, but fine with “Asian Boobs” (note, several sexualized example photographs from the application in question will be displayed at the link)
  • A slashdot comment compared the Windows 7 launch to the return of a difficult ex-girlfriend, Decklin Foster parodies with the genders reversed. (Warning: there is ableist language in the original comment and it is not questioned by the parody.)

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