Adactio: Links—Tagged with gender

When Women Make Headlines

This is a great combination of rigorous research and great data visualisation.

What is a woman? - Prospect Magazine

An excellent thoughtful piece from Angela Saini (as always):

Popular opinion, “common sense” and the closely related priors of scientific enquiry have never been reliable guides when it comes to decoding human difference. After all, European biologists once thought it was obvious that colour-coded races were different species or breeds that had evolved separately on each continent. It was obvious to taxonomist Carl Linnaeus that monster-like and feral races of humans surely existed somewhere in the world. More recently, neuroscientists were happily insisting that women were innately less intelligent than men because they had smaller brains. A few neuroscientists still do.

History shows that many supposed “facts” about human nature were actually always cultural constructions. Race is one. Gender is another. Now, some researchers believe that sex—generally seen as determined by anatomy, including chromosomes, hormones and genitalia—may to some extent be constructed, too. Binary categories of male and female, they say, certainly don’t fully encompass all the natural variation and complexity that we see in our species.

VOCAL

Each typeface highlights a piece of history from a specific underrepresented race, ethnicity, or gender—from the Women’s Suffrage Movement in Argentina to the Civil Rights Movement in America.

Gendered AI: Gender Presentation and Distributions in sci-fi AI | Sci-fi interfaces

Thorough (and grim) research from Chris.

Programming as translation – Increment: Internationalization

Programming lessons from Umberto Eco and Emily Wilson.

Converting the analog into the digital requires discretization, leaving things out. What we filter out—or what we focus on—depends on our biases. How do conventional translators handle issues of bias? What can programmers learn from them?

CSS dismissal is about exclusion, not technology

As a community, we love to talk about meritocracy while perpetuating privilege.

This is playing out in full force in the front-end development community today.

Front-end development is a part of the field that has historically been at least slightly more accessible to women.

Shockingly, (not!) this also led to a salary and prestige gap, with back-end developers making on average almost $30,000 more than front-end.

(Don’t read the comments.)

Why So Many Men Hate the Last Jedi But Can’t Agree on Why | Bitter Gertrude

While not every white man who dislikes The Last Jedi overtly dislikes its gender balance or diversity, many feel a level of discomfort with this film that they can’t name, and that expresses itself through a wide variety of odd, conflicting complaints about its filmmaking.

Growing role of artificial intelligence in our lives is ‘too important to leave to men’

Here’s a snowclone I can get behind: X is too important to be left to men.

I am convinced that it is not the girls that must change, but rather society’s view of “computing” and the whole culture of the computing industry.

With the advent of artificial intelligence, this is about to get really serious. There are worrying signs that the world of big data and machine learning is even more dominated by men than computing in general. This means that the people writing the algorithms for software that will control many automated aspects of our daily lives in the future are mainly young, white men.

To reduce gender biases, acknowledge them : Nature News & Comment

Deb Chachra:

If research on biases has told us anything, it is that humans make better decisions when we learn to recognize and correct for bias.

Can’t code, won’t code - cracking the secret of gender imbalance in STEM

Adult training represents a way into coding for millions of women who never learnt when they were younger. Meetups such as those run by organisations such as Women Who Code and Codebar can introduce women to the collaborative, problem-solving world of programming.

Absolutely brilliant stuff from Mandy (again). A long hard at today’s tech industry’s narrow approach to bots and artificial intelligence compared to some far more interesting and imaginative approaches in fiction:

Ann Leckie’s superb Imperial Radch series,
Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora, and
Alex Garland’s Ex Machina.

So in addition to frightening ramifications for privacy and information discovery, they also reinforce gendered stereotypes about women as servants. The neutral politeness that infects them all furthers that convention: women should be utilitarian, performing their duties on command without fuss or flourish. This is a vile, harmful, and dreadfully boring fantasy; not the least because there is so much extraordinary art around AI that both deconstructs and subverts these stereotypes. It takes a massive failure of imagination to commit yourself to building an artificial intelligence and then name it “Amy.”

Translating Gender: Ancillary Justice in Five Languages Alex Dally MacFarlane | Interfictions Online

A fascinating look into the challenges encountered translating Anne Leckie’s excellent Radchaai novels into Bulgarian, German, Hebrew, Japanese, and Hungarian.

What is clear in all of these responses is that by examining the notions of ‘neutral’ and ‘feminine’ in grammar and gender through the lens of translation, we reveal their complexity – and some of their possible futures in languages, in both literature and speech.

The Vuvalini | A Working Library

The best description of Mad Max: Fury Road. Read.

A Woman’s Place — Everything Old is New Again — Medium

In a piece for Medium commissioned by Matter, Jon Norris describes a little-known aspect of the UK’s information technology history:

Gender equality is still a major issue in the technology industry, but 50 years ago one British company was blazing trails.

Link tags: gender

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