Tag Archives: Silicon Valley

Back to the linkspam (16 January 2013)

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  • Harassment in nerd spaces, and encouraging honesty: “I hope this story encourages more people to talk seriously about experiences they’ve had at conventions, at gaming meet-ups, at comic book stores, or any other male-dominated spaces that (however unintentionally) end up housing predators and “creepers” who make people feel unwelcome and uncomfortable. People should feel like they can talk about their experiences without having to use jokey euphemisms (“creeper”) or make supposedly-satirical-but-sort-of-serious videos.”
  • On false dichotomies and diversity: “A person who calls for greater diversity is not necessarily advocating the implementation of a quota system — that’s a straw man fallacy. Similarly, having a diverse roster of speakers at a conference does not imply that those speakers were not chosen on merit. Diversity and a merit‐based selection process are not mutually exclusive. To state the contrary is a false dichotomy. And before assuming that a conference probably couldn’t find enough women because not enough women applied (blaming the victim), first find out whether or not the selection process actually included an open call for talks.”
  • Rocket rain: “The ques­tion for me is, what signi­fi­cance the inci­dents actually occur­ring have for various atten­dees: inci­dents like sexist modera­tion, the reduc­tion of women to head­less bodies, or the hacking of Asher Wolf’s blog. For the majo­rity (I would guess) such events are little things, if they are noti­ced at all. Even if you find them ugly, they don’t tar­nish the ent­ire event. They have the signi­fi­cance of a bro­ken plate in a com­mer­cial kit­chen: it hap­pens, but it’s not signi­fi­cant. It’s just a blip. For many other people, and I include mys­elf here, these events carry a dif­fe­rent weight. They are indi­vi­dual cases of cho­lera on a cruise ship, or dog poop on the hem of the wed­ding dress: the ugly blips makes the over­all situa­tion dan­ge­rous or intolerable.”
  • [Trigger Warning: Violent Images] Facebook’s Questionable Policy on Violent Content Toward Women: “After a Change.org petition collected over 200,000 signatures and the issue appeared in mainstream media outlets, some of the pages promoting the rape and assault of women were removed. Others were allowed to remain on the site if they were categorized as “humor” sites. Given the seemingly inconsistent application of the site’s own guidelines regarding violent and threatening images and speech, it’s hard not to wonder: What is Facebook’s actual policy regarding content that advocates rape and violence toward women – or does one exist?”
  • Silicon Valley Congresswoman talks the 2013 tech agenda: “‘The outcome of the SOPA fight last year is the Big Content people realize the days of getting their way completely is kind of at an end. It doesn’t mean they don’t deserve consideration — they do. It’s time to work with technology and instead of seeing it as a threat, seeing it as an opportunity to grow your market.’”
  • 10 Awesome Female Engineers from Science Fiction: “Everybody knows that the engineers are the ones who keep everything going in a science fiction story. They’re the ones who make the ship fly. They build the megastructures. They make the spinning things spin and the jumping things jump. And some of the coolest engineers and designers in science fiction just happen to be women.”

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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.

Eredar Lord of the Burning Linkspam (28 August 2012)

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  • What I Learned At Facebook’s Girl Geek Dinner: “Is timing everything? You can’t rush time… Everyone will create a unique arc or trajectory in life. As Sheryl Sandberg says today’s careers are jungle gyms. Your life will not go up and to the right in a straight line or trajectory. Remember it’s the journey that counts – keep learning, keep producing, keep shipping.”
  • Men of Silicon Valley: We’re sexist, we just don’t know it. “Women are a big market, maybe the biggest, and women founders and engineers bring a unique and needed perspective to female-specific pain points. We need them involved, but any women in the audience for the pitch listening to the juvenile wisecracks probably felt discouraged from doing something like this. Why would they want to put so much effort into starting a company if that’s what they would have to endure in front of hundreds of people every time they want to promote their business? To put it in user experience terms, some men in the room were adding unnecessary and unfair friction for women founders.”
  • Guild Wars 2 and the misogynistic bad guys: “If you dig into the lore, you’ll find they have pretty similar rationales for the exclusion of women. In both cases, there was a woman hundreds of years ago who stood up to them, and they decided to generalise from that woman to all women, decide that women can’t be trusted, and ostracise them thereafter. I want to say that this is just cartoon supervillainy, with the evil turned up to 11. I want to say that it’s as if they revealed that these factions stand for punching kittens and pouring toxic waste in duck ponds. I want to say that, but I can’t, because that kind of ridiculous exclusion of women is too prevalent, still, in real life.”
  • How to Criticize Women in Technology: “If you want to deliver a cogent, non-sexist criticism to a woman in a non-traditional field that doesn’t reinforce nasty cultural norms, (which we need as much as the next person) you have to take the rhetorical tool of patronizing them out of the tool kit. Speak respectfully and recognize their achievements in public. It’s not too much to ask.”
  • Let’s Discuss Apologies: “Oh no! Suddenly your social media feeds and inbox are full of irate people peppering you with accusations of being insensitive, a bigot, all because you used a sexist/racist/homophobic/transphobic/etc. word, image, or phrase. What do you do?! Fret not, I will go through a list of actions you should take and avoid.”

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.

This Linkspam Will Burn (21 August 2012)

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  • Gaslamp Games forums are amazing: “I’m about to tell you a story about videogames, kitchens, and internet forums that has a happy ending. Stop laughing, I’m serious.”
  • Racialicious Crush of the Week: George Takei: “Takei’s advocated for the US government to rights its wrongs against Japanese Americans and for bridge-building between the two nations. Among other things, he asked his fans to call their senators to not vote for a bill that echoed the executive order that interred Japanese Americans and co-founded the Japanese American National Museum.The Japanese government bestowed the Order of the Rising Sun, Golden Rays with Rosette for his activism. Oh yes… and he-like his fellow Racialicious Crush Of The Week Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson-has an asteroid named after him. From the earth to the heavens, from history to the future and back again-I couldn’t think of a cooler person to co-steer us through, calmly and boldly.”
  • Moms at tech start-ups say they can have it all: “Here in the Valley, especially, female technology executives with young children were rankled by a recent controversial story in The Atlantic on the inability of working women to “have it all.” At a USA TODAY roundtable of 14 tech moms held here on Aug. 6, many insisted that “having it all” is possible with the proper network of friends, a supportive partner, outsourcing and ruthless time management.”
  • Geek Time with Karen Sandler: Video interview of Karen Sandler, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation.
  • [Trigger Warning: Racism, Homophobia, Misogyny] 5 Prejudices That Video Games Can’t Seem to Get Over: “We’ve mentioned before that movies still inexplicably revolve around prejudices that we thought we had outgrown decades ago, but that can at least be attributed to the age of the medium. Movies came into their own nearly a century ago; those prejudices are likely just strangely persistent moral throwbacks. But video games are different, because they’re ours, right? There’s no reason to inherit our grandparents’ bigotry because we made these things up: We’ve set the standards, we’ve made the rules and we know that being racist, sexist, homophobic jerkholes is wrong … don’t we?”

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).

Tough as an old linkspam (8th December, 2011)

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  • Not the thought police:
    • How to be a fan of problematic things: Liking problematic things doesn’t make you an asshole. In fact, you can like really problematic things and still be not only a good person, but a good social justice activist (TM)!
    • Does Pop Culture Have Social Responsibility?: …pop culture in general does not actually have an obligation to be socially responsible. But, it often positions itself in a way that suggests it is making an important social commentary, is contributing to ethical discussion, is attempting to cultivate responsibility among viewers. When creators of pop culture do this, it leaves them wide open to criticism…
  • The Sketchbook of Susan Kare, the Artist Who Gave Computing a Human Face: Susan Kare designed much of what is best-known about the Mac interface.
  • The 8th volume of Transformative Works and Cultures is available, a double guest-edited issue: Race and Ethnicity in Fandom and Textual Echoes.
  • Letting my black-girl-geek flag fly: All I knew was that my unintentional eccentricity played a role in making me a target, and not in the general you’re-a-dork way but the you’re-a-dork-and-you’re-too-white way.
  • Stranger In A Strange Land OR Being A Woman In Tech: I had breakfast with a young woman who is an associate at a very well-known firm. She is the only woman investor. On the down-low she asked me if I think about wearing glasses or contacts to be taken more seriously (Yes, I have thought about that) and did I have any strategies for making my voice heard in a room full of men (Yes I do).
  • Mary Wollstonecraft’s image is beamed onto Palace of Westminster: She has been called the mother of British feminism, so it is perhaps fitting that her image was blasted onto the building known in some parts as the mother of all parliaments.
  • Changing the Culture of Ocean Science: a DSN core value: Glamour magazine, where the HELL are female scientists in your annual women of the year awards?

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.

Have a nice cup of hot linkspam (2nd July, 2011)

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

Magical linkspam sparkles (26th May, 2011)

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

Kids these days spend so much time linkspamming they don’t know what real friendship is (14th January, 2010)

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  • tigtog has some tips for bloggers at How I minimise the online abuse I receive: So here is an assortment of technical tips & tricks whereby bloggers can cut down the volume and the repetition coming from this cyberbullying cadre of keyboard jockeys, making the harassment little more than a tiny hiss of background noise instead of an overwhelming flood of spite.
  • “Amazingly, less than 1 per cent of Silicon Valley investment money goes to women-founded technology companies. Less than 3 per cent of the money goes to companies with women as CEO.” From Melissa Clark-Reynolds’ Diary of an Entrepreneur
  • Eleni Stroulia writes about Women, Computing and Other Minorities “It seems to me that the fundamental reason why there are few women in CS is because our society still (and always) has a gender-specific value system”
  • Shameful Gender Discrimination at UC Davis Veterinary School: I thought at first that someone might be messing with me. It was unbelievable to me that someone would treat a pregnant student this way, leaving her [grades] to the [vote] of her classmates.
  • Syne Mitchell’s History in Code: After this initial taste of programming success, I decided I wanted to learn computer programming “for reals.” I knew that computers thought in binary, but I wasn’t able to find a binary programming book. So I settled for something called Assembly language. Unfortunately, I had no 8080-assembly compiler handy, so it quickly became an exercise of writing PEEK and POKE code calls on paper to store and recall variable amounts and then checking my work manually. Even a truly geeky thirteen-year-old girl will find this dull after a while.

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.

Death by a thousand links (20th April, 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.

A crisis of linkspam proportions (5th 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.

Organic freerange sustainably harvested linkspam, 28 February 2010

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  • In multiple posts, Lucy Connor continues thinking about possible costs of diversity
  • N.K. Jemisin considers how she accidentally wrote a postfeminist protagonist in her new fantasy series
  • Maura McHugh, aka Splinster laments the SF industry’s failure to ask women’s opinions:

    In the article the magazine asked 34 directors, screenwriters and authors to name an obscure or under-rated cult horror that deserved better recognition. Yup, you guessed it, not a single woman was asked for her opinion.” What’s more, in a plot twist worthy of any novel of the genre, the SFX publication comes smack dab in the middle of Women in Horror Month, set up to raise awareness of and give recognition to the genre’s many female creators.

  • More event backchannel inappropriateness, this time in the PHP community.
  • There’s been some discussion about Silicon Valley diversity of late. See what Techcrunch and Mercury News had to say.
  • Maybe this article about meritocratic hiring could be insightful to startups wanting to avoid non-diverse hiring pools:

    Now, whenever I screen resumes, I ask the recruiter to black out any demographic information from the resume itself: name, age, gender, country of origin. The first time I did this experiment, I felt a strange feeling of vertigo while reading the resume. [...] And, much to my surprise (and embarrassment), the kinds of people I started phone-screening changed immediately.

  • From the compare-and-contrast department: How the gamer stereotype stacks up against reality.
  • An unscientific survey of MIT students indicates that geeky students are a typical subset of society with typical sex lives as opposed to the stereotyped socially awkward folk. But we all knew that already, right?
  • Not all countries have the same gender disparity in Tech. Stanford Uni’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research examines gender roles regarding Technology based careers in Malaysia, where women reign supreme.
  • The Free Software Foundation is seeking donations to help sponsor more attendees for their Women’s Caucus at LibrePlanet 2010 next month.

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.