Tag Archives: gender balance

Bringing Balance to the Force: The Women of Star Wars Episode VII

This is a guest post by Lydia Huxley, a writer who loves playing music or a musician who loves writing. Is there a difference?

Upon looking at the recently-released theatrical poster for Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, one character stands out more than the others. Part of it is because she’s located at the very middle of the poster: a place typically reserved for the star. Part of it is because she is – well …a she. Daisy Ridley’s character, Rey, is the first woman to fill such a spot in the previously male-dominated franchise. In the previous six films there have been a total of two women in major roles: Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia and Natalie Portman as Padmé. And these are supporting roles!

Ridley is not the only actress to land a major role for the latest installment of the sci-fi series. She will be joined by Gwendoline Christie as Captain Phasma, Lupita Nyong’o voicing and motion capturing Maz Kanata, and Carrie Fisher returning as Princess Leia. With the exception of Leia, almost nothing is known about these characters, but all four appear on the theatrical poster so it’s a safe bet that they will be integral to the plot. Four women in major roles? In one movie? That’s double the number in the previous two trilogies combined.

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Pink fluffy unicorns dancing on linkspams (16 May 2014)

  • Study: Gender Bias In Digital Marketing Is Real | Ginny Marvin at Search Engine Land (May 14): “Across the board, female account reps received below average satisfaction scores, and every single male account representative received higher satisfaction scores than the highest rated female. To answer the question of whether men are just better at making AdWords recommendations than women, WordStream pulled performance data from its AdWords Grader tool for the accounts included in the survey. They looked at aggregate grades for the accounts overseen by male and female reps. Lo and behold, the accounts supported by female reps had higher AdWords Grader scores than those managed by men — by 19 percent.”
  • Curbing Online Abuse Isn’t Impossible. Here’s Where We Start | Laura Hudson at Wired (May 15) [warning: rape threats, misogynistic abuse, and discussion of online abuse]: “Riot Games (publisher of League of Legends) found that persistently negative players were only responsible for roughly 13 percent of the game’s bad behavior. The other 87 percent was coming from players whose presence, most of the time, seemed to be generally inoffensive or even positive. These gamers were lashing out only occasionally, in isolated incidents – but their outbursts often snowballed through the community. Banning the worst trolls wouldn’t be enough to clean up League of Legends, Riot’s player behavior team realized. Nothing less than community-wide reforms could succeed.”
  • The Rise of the Voluntariat | Geoff Shullenberger at Jacobin (May 15): “Internships have made work more like non-work by uncoupling it from the expectation of wages. Social media have made non-work more like work by permitting the commodification of spheres of activity previously never conceived of as labor. The emergence of the voluntariat follows logically from both of these developments.”
  • Abolishing Mammography Screening Programs? A View from the Swiss Medical Board | Nikola Biller-Andorno and Peter Jüni at The New England Journal of Medicine (April 16): “It is easy to promote mammography screening if the majority of women believe that it prevents or reduces the risk of getting breast cancer and saves many lives through early detection of aggressive tumors. We would be in favor of mammography screening if these beliefs were valid. Unfortunately, they are not, and we believe that women need to be told so. From an ethical perspective, a public health program that does not clearly produce more benefits than harms is hard to justify. Providing clear, unbiased information, promoting appropriate care, and preventing overdiagnosis and overtreatment would be a better choice.”
  • Doctor Who Names First Female Directors Since 2010 | Susana Polo at The Mary Sue (May 15): “The last episode of Doctor Who to be directed by a woman was “Amy’s Choice,” in 2010, and it remains the only lady-directed episode in the entirety of Steven Moffat’s tenure as showrunner. Not that lady-directed episodes were so exactly abundant before he took over, but they will now be joined by two more episodes when the show returns for Series 8. And that new director is… long-time television director Rachel Talalay, who also sat the director’s chair for Lori Petty‘s cult favorite Tank Girl. […] As the show has come under increasing criticism for the limited or clichéd picture it draws with its female characters, eyes have turned to the fact that there are very few women behind the cameras.”
  • We Can Do Better | Ri Liu (May 14): “This is a visualisation of the gender disparity in engineering teams in the tech industry. […] The creator of this project acknowledges that gender is not always binary, but due to the nature of the data available, only a male/female breakdown is displayed at this time.”

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Enough of this linkspamming nonsense (7th September, 2011)

  • (Warning: stalking and threats of sexual violence.) OkCupid allowing impersonation, which allows someone to set up an account with your email address inviting, essentially, harassing replies. (In this case, someone also maliciously posted their target’s address, which is harder for OkCupid to check for automatically, but a complaint should result in a takedown.)
  • Don’t dumb girls down: The next time you want to tell a little girl how cute she is, try something else instead. (Discussed on Hacker News, ‘ware general fail.)
  • Gender Bias in Wikipedia and Britannica in International Journal of Communication, Vol 5 (2011). Is there a bias in the against women’s representation in Wikipedia biographies? Thousands of biographical subjects, from six sources, are compared against the English-language Wikipedia and the online Encyclopædia Britannica with respect to coverage, gender representation, and article length.
  • Women’s Quest for Romance Conflicts with Scientific Pursuits, Study Finds: Four new studies by researchers at the University at Buffalo have found that when a woman’s goal is to be romantically desirable, she distances herself from academic majors and activities related to science, technology, engineering and math…
  • Seriously, stop with the booth babes: On the one hand, YES! Absolutely!
    On the other hand, women have been saying this for years and been told, "You're making too much of it."
    Now, all of a sudden, the mens are up in arms. *facepalm*
  • A widely linked nymwars post by danah boyd that we may not have shared yet: “Real Names” Policies Are an Abuse of Power: She draws on Skud's survey, and adds some additional context based on her FaceBook research. boyd points out that ethnic minorities and teens have used handles on Facebook—signing up and giving the name that they were most commonly known by.
  • Felix Salmon believes Apple CEO Tim Cook’s sexuality should be publicly discussed. (Salmon discussed it in Don’t ignore Tim Cook’s sexuality and Why I’m talking about Tim Cook’s sexuality.) Ken Fisher at Ars Technica asks Does the press have an ethical duty to out powerful gays in tech? Note that Cook is not on the record about his sexuality or his private life much at all.

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.

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A merry linkspamming band (1st September, 2011)

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.

Group of male-type and female-type body symbols, 8 male, 2 female

More is different

This is a guest post by Brianna Laugher. Brianna is a software developer who appreciates significant whitespace. She is also known around the web as pfctdayelise.

I have spent the past weekend in Sydney attending PyCon AU, the second Australian conference for the Python programming language. It’s only the second time this conference has been held, but attendance grew by 50% (from 200 to 300) and to my mind, the programme was noticably better as well. (I might be biased though, as I appeared in it.)

However by far the most cheering aspect to me was the extent to which the organisers made efforts to make it a women-friendly event. They had diversity grants to attract women who would not otherwise be able to attend. They had a code of conduct, announced it each morning, and reiterated it when they informed delegates that they had had to enforce it. They announced a ‘women in Python’ breakfast as part of their schedule. And they invited two women keynotes: Audrey Roy of PyLadies, and GF’s own Mary Gardiner of the Ada Initiative, both organisations that support women in software development, more-or-less broadly.

Their efforts paid off: women’s attendance increased from 10 last year (5%), to 35 this year (11.6%).

It made a visceral difference to my experience: instead of glancing around and finding myself the only woman in a room, this year there was always women in my line of sight. It was so nice to talk to many different women from all over the country and find out how they are using Python. It’s so nice to have conversations where you know for sure that you are ordinary rather than exceptional. I mean literally, being viewed as an exception. It’s so nice to know you can confess all you don’t know, without feeling that you might be [http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Stereotype_threat ruining the reputation of women everywhere].

After there was a lightning talk about the Girl Geek Coffees network, @fphhotchips opined,

While I understand that there are many issues with women in IT/SE, I wonder if so many groups for women results in exclusion.

It’s not clear to me what kind of exclusion @fphhotchips is concerned about. Men missing out on their fair share of geeky conversations with women? That would be disappointing I suppose, although those conversations can happen at any time during the conference. But the flipside is an order of magnitude more important: most women in software developer roles in Australia miss out every single day on the chance to see themselves reflected amongst their peers and their seniors. Reflected in numbers that cannot be reduced to an enumerable number of individuals: that is, the feeling of 10 is different to the feeling of 35. More, as they say, is different.

Maybe once a month, at a “girl geek” event, or once a year at a women-focused event at a conference, can technical women enjoy relief from a mental burden that they may not even consciously realise they are carrying. It is not the world’s hugest burden by any measure, but it exists, and can keep us self-silencing, self-doubting, and generally takes away our energy from changing the world, or at least making the next release deadline.

When the burden is lifted, we can enjoy a brief respite called freedom. Freedom to admit mistakes. Freedom to not have to wonder if someone reacted some particular way because you’re a woman. Freedom to compliment someone on their cute bag without being seen as frivolous or invoking an unwanted reminder to others that you are a woman. Freedom to enjoy the norms of speech that women more commonly (but not exclusively) follow, like turn-taking. Freedom to make a (radical!) feminist comment without hurting anyone’s ego. Freedom to not represent 50% of the population. And I am not even getting into the much heavier burdens that some women bear, with actively hostile workplaces, harassment, the need to conceal aspects of themselves for their own safety.

Freedom to look around and see people like you. For some of us it comes around more often than others. If you see an event for women happening and feel left out, just chill out and remember we’ll soon enough be back to our usual distribution. And remember that we, as presumably you do too, want most of all to not need to hold such events. And when we are more, we will not.

Wall of Spam, by freezelight on Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0

Hubris, thy name is linkspam (12th July, 2011)

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.

Linkspam migrating south for the winter (8th November, 2010)

  • It’s official, over 5% of Ubuntu Members are women!
  • Stephen Fry declares the Stephen-Fry-says-women-don’t-enjoy-sex discussion Silliness (pushback at, for example, Ideologically Impure and Pickled Think via tigtog and also Rules for Anchorites).
  • Truthout About Kyriarchy: An Open Letter To “Feminist” Writers, Bloggers, and Journalists: Lisa Factora-Borchers explains what she was doing when she introduced Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza’s neologism “kyriarchy” to blogging, and where it’s gone wrong since.
  • Questioning Transphobia writers are fundraising: Lisa and I are both struggling to survive. Both of us are unemployed. I don’t have money for food this next fortnight, let alone internet or hormone treatments. Lisa has a staph infection she can’t afford to see a doctor for, and no money for hormones either.
  • Forget Cinderella, Find Fred Astaire (changethis.com/manifesto/show/76.01.ForgetCinderella): Why have companies worked so hard at improving the gender balance with such unsatisfactory results? Because the approach taken was to focus their efforts on the wrong part of the problem: women. It’s time to stop asking what’s the matter with women that they aren’t making it to the top? and start asking what’s the matter with our organization if we can’t recruit, retain, and promote the majority of the educated talent in the world today?
  • Why it matters: [The women] were complaining how silly it was that we were constantly talking about how great it was that there were more women speakers at this conference than any other year… My first thought was a flash of anger. And then I recalled that not very long ago, I was just like them.
  • Rosalind Franklin and DNA: How wronged was she?: Nicholas Wade and Lynne Osman Elkin debated the size of Rosalind Franklin’s contributions at a panel earlier this month.
  • The 30th Down Under Feminists Carnival is up.

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 (twitter uses can use #geekfeminism). 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.

Hairy-legged bra-burning linkspam (17th June, 2010)

  • Open World Forum 2010 (Sep 30 to Oct 1, Paris) is having a Diversity Summit: Why women matter? relating to women in Free/Open Source Software. There’s an associated poll to gather data about women in FLOSS that anyone involved in FLOSS might be interested in taking.
  • Andrea Phillips is super-excited about Caitlin Burns and Jurassic Park Slope events.
  • Making games is hard: On the barriers that women face: … as someone whose life has been consumed by learning the ins and outs of game development for the past three years, I have to say that making a game is pretty damn hard. And I think that the complicated process of game development itself can be a barrier to women entering the field
  • Discussing sexism in geek communities is more important than discussing gender imbalance: Restructure! writes Ironically, when some female geeks use the capitalist discourse of increasing female representation in STEM fields as a structural strategy for reducing sexism and improving our personal autonomy / right to pursue our career of choice, many male geeks misunderstand these efforts as being anti-choice.
  • In light of Restructure!’s post, see Eric Ries, Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business): That’s why I care a lot about diversity: not for its own sake, but because it is a source of strength for teams that have it, and a symptom of dysfunction for those that don’t.
  • Women and Technology and Myth: Adriana Gardella interviews Cindy Padnos, a venture capitalist. The article is a little bit on the "suck it up, buttercup" end of the spectrum, but has good points about critical mass and homophily.
  • Jessa Crispin has given up reading bad books about women: I had to give up on a pretty good book because halfway through I did a little equation: what was the probability that the two women in the book would turn out to be anything other than gold diggers and sluts. Not great! So: gone.
  • Isis the Scientist has more on John Tierney, bonus humorous pictures!
  • What I got wrong about women in science: Maggie Koerth-Baker writes Several hours after I hit “publish”, I realized that I’d managed to put together a panel on diversity made up of nothing but white people.
  • Her blogging about social justice doesn’t make Renee your on-tap free expert on womanism, anti-racism or social justice.

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.

Quick Hit: Too Many Dicks

Anita Sarkeesian over at Feminist Frequency just posted a vid critiquing the gender imbalance in video games, to the Flight of the Conchords song “Too Many Dicks on the Dance Floor”. It’s inspired by sloanesomething’s Star Trek vid along similar lines.

Anita writes:

Not only are these games dominated by male characters but even the few women characters who get staring roles are replicating the overly patriarchal, violent, macho behaviour all wrapped up in a hyper sexualized body. I specifically used clips from two games that help to counter this male dominance: Portal a game of strategy and Mirror’s Edge which stars a woman of color in a dystopian future.

Not surprisingly the vast majority of game producers, designers and writers are men. To put it simply, there are too many dicks on the dance floor!

Too many misters, not enough sisters! If you enjoy the vid, drop seedling a comment on her blog.