• Thought on Diversity Part 2. Why Diversity is Difficult. | Medium: “I left that meeting wondering how I could, in good conscience, continue to work in an organization where the Sr. VP of Engineering could see himself as a technology visionary and be so unaware of this blind spot in his understanding of diversity. Leadership keeps citing the pipeline when the data does not support it. They continue to churn out ethnic and racial minorities and women but still claim a commitment to diversity.”
• Rise of the Bias Busters: How Unconscious Bias Became Silicon Valley’s Newest Target | Forbes: “The central contradiction of hidden bias training is that you can’t train something you can’t control. The classes suggest that you can become more objective just by learning about and thinking about your unconscious biases, but it’s not that easy. “Understanding implicit bias does not actually provide you the tools to do something about it,” said Greenwald, the University of Washington psychologist. He thinks there may be another reason driving companies to do trainings: publicity. “Perhaps the main value of this training to Google and Facebook is to put a desirable appearance on their personnel activities by indicating their (commendable) awareness of problems and implying that they’re doing something to effectively address the problems,” he wrote in an e-mail.”
• Fake Cover Letters Expose Discrimination Against Disabled | New York Times: “Employers appear to discriminate against well-qualified job candidates who have a disability, researchers at Rutgers and Syracuse universities have concluded. The researchers, who sent résumés and cover letters on behalf of fictitious candidates for thousands of accounting jobs, found that employers expressed interest in candidates who disclosed a disability about 26 percent less frequently than in candidates who did not.”
• Anonymous sexism in paleoanthropology | john hawks weblog: “There is absolutely nothing strange about the top candidates with archaeological experience being all women, because our students are mostly women. How could a senior scientist be oblivious to this reality? One reason is that some departments have such a history of sexism and harassment that other scientists advise women students to avoid them like the plague. Some scholars don’t have students who are women because they are driving women away.”
• Why SXSW Cancelled a Panel on Digital Harassment | Autostraddle: “I asked Caroline if she and her panelists were going to accept the offer to be a part of SXSW’s Harassment Summit, and she said they were on the fence. I asked what would have to change about the offer to convince them to accept it, and she responded: “Talks of security, where and how our panel will participate, and Save Point being moved back to its regularly scheduled programming in SXSW. It’s a journalism panel, put it where people who are seeking digital journalism will find it.” I clarified. You mean SXSW wants to include Save Point in an anti-harassment lineup? To which Caroline simply replied, “Yeah.””
• Part 1: Actually, Inside Out’s Gender Norms Are A Major Problem Turning Inside Out Upside Down | Satricalifragilistic: (Link from August) “The perception that father’s careers are central in families affects women’s professional advancement both on the family and work fronts — and Inside Out’s San Francisco setting in particular reinforces some ugly sexist patterns in the tech industry.”

• World Fantasy’s Harassment Non-Policy | Pretty Terrible: “I will note that they they had the better part of two years to come up with a policy and this was apparently the best they could do. Despite the existence of a number of other policies that they could have used and despite Geek Feminism’s sample policy, this is what they come up with.”
• Call for ideas & help : a collective blog-zine-thing about disability & brain weasel repellent &tc |lizcommotion: “I have been brainstorming with partner and some other dw folks about a potentially very cool and exciting project… A blog-zine-website type thing a la The Toast or Autostraddle, but aimed at disability-type issues or interests.”
• After Gamergate Misstep, SXSW Weighs An All-Day Online Abuse Forum | Re/code: “SXSW festival organizers are considering an all-day event that focuses primarily on combating online harassment, sources told Re/code. An announcement could come before the end of the week. The planning comes after backlash over the festival organizers’ decision to shut down two panels, one of which was set to address harassment in the tech industry, over threats of violence.”
• ACM Europe: “In Memoriam: Beryl Nelson It is with great sadness that we inform you that our friend and colleague Beryl Nelson, passed away on 23 October 2015. Beryl was a great contributor to ACM-W Europe as one of the founding executive committee members, and did considerable work to illuminate the situation around diversity in tech. Especially of note is the Tech Talk of her research The Data on Diversity: It’s not just about being Fair.”
• TrulyMadly presents Creep Qawwali with All India Bakchod | YouTube: : A Bollywood-style song about getting creepy comments and microaggressions online. Here is an English translation: Your creep is not even a legit creep | MetaFilter
• Here’s the Egregious, Mealy-Mouthed Clump of Bull**** That is the 2015 World Fantasy Convention Harassment Policy | Whatever: “I am not a lawyer, but I expect that ReedPOP, the company that runs NYCC (among many other conventions around the US) has maybe a few lawyers on its staff. If NYCC is utterly and absolutely unafraid to promulgate a harassment policy even though there is a legal statute defining what harassment means in the state of New York, I expect it might have been possible for World Fantasy to have done likewise, if they chose to do so.”
• Girls can be Geeks too! by Carrie Anne Philbin | Staffrm: “Want more diversity in your computing or coding club? Here are some tips that worked for me.”
• So here’s what you can do | The Bookland Reeve: Thoughts on what a nongendered menstruation tracking app would look like.
• The option of privacy | missbananabiker.com: “This is why a free internet is so important to me. This is why the right to privacy is so fundamental in my opinion. Because we all deserve to be free from those who would hold us captive, whether those folks are our bizarrely cruel fathers or the people who’ve built a surveillance apparatus that makes the Stasi look like amateur hour.”
• Toptal Scholarships For Female Developers | Toptal: Toptal are offering 12 scholarships worth $5000 and one-on-one mentoring, over 12 months, to girls and women aged 13 and over anywhere in the world.
• Gamergate didn’t fade into obscurity. We just stopped noticing its existence | Jessica Valenti | Comment is free | The Guardian: “It’s been over a year since Gamergate brought online misogyny to the forefront of the national conversation on women and gaming and, while mainstream circles have moved on to the next controversy and news story, women online and in the gaming industry have continued their work – and continued dealing with a regular influx of abuse and threats.”

• Her Code Got Humans on the Moon—And Invented Software Itself | WIRED (October 13): “Margaret Hamilton wasn’t supposed to invent the modern concept of software and land men on the moon. It was 1960, not a time when women were encouraged to seek out high-powered technical work. Hamilton, a 24-year-old with an undergrad degree in mathematics, had gotten a job as a programmer at MIT, and the plan was for her to support her husband through his three-year stint at Harvard Law. After that, it would be her turn—she wanted a graduate degree in math.”
• The Sixth Time | Accidentally in Code (October 11): “I’ve watched things that I started get less inclusive because I left and the people who took over had different motivations. We ran one event on interview prep that I wanted to open up to PoC, and low-income, and instead… it became women from one specific university. At that point… what are we even doing? It’s not “inclusion” it’s “diversity” and what they actually mean by “diversity” is “recruiting”.”
• [cw: harassment] Why Twitter’s Dying (And What You Can Learn From It) — Bad Words — Medium (): “abuse — not making money — is the great problem tech and media have. The problem of abuse is the greatest challenge the web faces today. It is greater than censorship, regulation, or (ugh) monetization. It is a problem of staggering magnitude and epic scale, and worse still, it is expensive: it is a problem that can’t be fixed with the cheap, simple fixes beloved by tech: patching up code, pushing out updates.”
• [cw: harassment] A woman who happens to tech — Startups, Wanderlust, and Life Hacking — Medium (October 9): “While the tech industry is made of people, people are not made solely of tech. A person has to exist outside of what they do. We cannot punish people for doing so, or pretend the industry is some safe haven from the rest of what’s happening out there. What’s happening out there is the same thing that’s happening inside our warm caffeinated bubble.”
• Harry Potter Where Hermione Doesn’t Do Anyone’s Homework | The Toast (October 13): “Hermione wheeled around and fixed him with a venomous look. “Don’t ever suggest again that I am responsible for your failures, Harry Potter. I love you like a brother, but you rise and fall on your own. You will not place a burden on my shoulders that was meant for your own.””
• [cw: sexual harassment] How Astronomers Sought to Intervene With Geoff Marcy — and What’s at Stake for Women in the Field | The Chronicle of Higher Education (October 14): “Women in astronomy worked quietly for a decade to persuade Geoffrey W. Marcy, the acclaimed Berkeley astronomer whose alleged sexual harassment of students has roiled the discipline, to change his behavior before four former students finally filed complaints against him last year.”
• [cw: sexual harassment] Geoffrey Marcy to Resign From Berkeley Astronomy Department | The New York Times (October 14): “Geoffrey Marcy, the renowned astronomer who was found guilty in a campus investigation of sexually harassing students, is resigning from the faculty of theUniversity of California, Berkeley, where he has been a professor for 16 years.”
• St. Louis ‘Project Comic-Con’ celebrates women in the industry | Fox 2 News (October 17): “This year’s theme was focused on women creators and their contributions to the industry. Artist Emily Warren says she’s glad to be part of the new emergence of females in the comic book world.”

We link to a variety of sources, some of which are personal blogs.  If you visit other sites linked herein, we ask that you respect the commenting policy and individual culture of those sites.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on Pinboard, or Diigo; 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.

• #FFFFFF Diversity | Medium (8 Oct): “The [Women Techmaker’s] summit itself was great. The team did a great job, and were I a white woman in tech, I probably would have been delighted at everything…but I’m a black woman in tech, so things didn’t feel quite so good to me.”
• I Watched Xploration Outer Space, and It Gave Me Feminist and Space Feels | The Mary Sue (8 Oct): “Even though I am late to the table when it comes to Xploration Outer Space, a show that started airing about a year ago, but when I saw it was a show about science and engineering hosted by a young woman, I remember that any time is a good time to talk about science shows.”
• [Major Spoilers] “The Beginner’s Guide” Is Brilliant, Horrifying, Secretly Feminist | Autostraddle (7 Oct): About the “experimental narrative-based game” The Beginner’s Guide and its feminist implications, particularly the end reveal.
• Letter to the Editor: STEM | The Easterner (5 Oct): “To the women in my engineering classes: While it is my intention in every other interaction I share with you to treat you as my peer, let me deviate from that to say that you and I are in fact unequal.”
• ‘I’m Disappointed’: Zoe Quinn Speaks Out on UN Cyberviolence Report | VICE Motherboard (1 Oct): “The report has come under fire for its troublingly broad purview as well as its reliance on dubious sources to make controversial claims—one of which is the claim that violent video games and movies cause violence.” In response, the UN has backtracked on the report and will release a revised version “within two weeks”.
• Social Justice Warriors and the New Culture War | Boing Boing (4 Oct): “There’s a culture war happening right now. It’s happening in games, in film, in journalism, in television, in fiction, in fandom. It’s happening online, everywhere. And everywhere, sexists, recreational misogynists and bigots are losing. They are losing, and they don’t know why.”
• New Wearable Tech Jewelry Company Tinsel Makes Headphones Glam | HelloBeautiful (7 Oct): Interview with Tinsel founder, 29-year-old Black woman Aniyia Williams.
• Episode 5: Talk with the WG Feminist Coalition | Super Heroines, Etc (4 Oct) : “Join the Super Heroines, Etc. podcasters as they talk with the co-founders of WG Feminist Coalition, a chapter of NOW (the National Organization for Women) that was formed by students at Webster Groves High School who saw a need to bring attention to gender discrimination and subsequently experienced intense backlash.”
• The Cool Girl Trap: Or, Why Sexism in Tech Isn’t Going Away. | Medium (6 Oct): “It’s a trap, though. This status is only granted to girls who are cool on her male colleague’s terms — the second she steps outside the bounding box of that status, she is ostracized, or at the very least, looked at differently forever. It’s why sexism and other negative behaviors are so common in the industry. Speaking up about these things, once you’ve already been established as a ‘Cool Girl,’ can at minimum make you a social pariah and at worst, impact your career.”

We link to a variety of sources, some of which are personal blogs.  If you visit other sites linked herein, we ask that you respect the commenting policy and individual culture of those sites.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on Pinboard, or Diigo; 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.