Enjoy!
- A tool to help fix sexism in tech: The Inclusive Team Tests.
The Inclusive Team Tests are a collection of tests which can be used to roughly determine how inclusive a team is of a particular group. The level of inclusiveness (or disadvantagement) that a particular group might experience within a certain working environment can be expressed as a score on the test.
- Two women got on this year’s Hugo ballot for best short story: Nancy Fulda for “Movement” and E. Lily Yu for “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees”.
- Sweden just added the gender-neutral pronoun hen (similar to an English “ze”) to their National Encyclopedia, and the Henerator is a plugin that switches all han (Swedish for “he”) and hon (“she”) to the new pronoun. More info here.
- Title says it all on this one: On Female Characters: This isn’t Highlander. There can be more than one.
- A gaming analogy to explain privilege: Straight White Male, The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is.
- Women In Magic, The 2012 Edition: combating sexism at competitive Magic: The Gathering events.
- A large scale link round up on Sexism in Geek Culture, with a look at Comics.
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.
A follow up interview with the author of the gaming/privilege analogy – http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/05/john_scalzi_straight_white_male.html
This whole thing made me feel awful. The comments to the original article were terrible. I think that it was so painful for me because I have had these conversations in person, with real white dudes telling me how 1) privilege doesn’t exist, and 2) if it did (which is doesn’t) then able bodied, cis, straight, white, american, guys would have the least because of PC, or the media, or feminism. ugh!
My response to the Scalzi article and various other conversations it sparked is here. I try to address the “but so what should I DO???” questions being asked (whether in good faith or not.)
Kate Bachus: Legos, spaceships, breasts.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/201204/the-mysterious-case-the-vanishing-genius
Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequency has a Kickstarter for here new project about Tropes vs. Women in Video Games.
She met her initial goal of $6,000 in under 24 hours and has now expanded the project by 5 episodes and the goal is $15,000. If you haven’t watched any of the Feminist Frequency episodes before, do yourself a favor and go watch them all right now.