Tag Archives: science

Who moved my linkspam? (22 September 2014)

  • “You Cannot Be Mommy”: A Female Cook on Ratatouille | Rebecca Lynde-Scott at The Toast (Sept 15): “Notice that, while her position is never specified, she’s low enough on the totem pole that she’s given the job of training the despised plongeur (“garbage boy” in the film, actually dishwasher), a job only given to the person occupying the station the new person is moving into, so she’s pretty damn low. […] Linguini announced his and Colette’s relationship to the press, “Inspiration has many names. Mine is named Colette.” That moment in the movie is supposed to be about how he’s betraying Remy by not being honest, but he’s betraying Colette nearly as much just by these two sentences. In eight words, he demotes her from competent cook on the way up to artist’s muse. As the former, she could keep working her way up. As the latter, she might never get another job in a really good kitchen again, if she and Linguini break up. That gets ignored, of course, shellacked over with Remy’s story, some sharp remarks, and that trademarked Disney happy-ever-after.”
  • [warning for discussion of harassment] Pushing Women and People of Color Out of Science Before We Go In | Jennifer Selvidge at Huffington Post (Sept 18): “The misogyny and racism I experienced and saw at MIT became more and more concerning […] I know that even with close to straight As, I am still unwelcome in my scientific community and unwelcome as an engineer. I will be competing with white men with lower GPAs and less research experience who will likely be chosen over me, as professors on graduate committees. After all, some of those very same graduate school committee members probably remember fondly “the days when men were engineers and women were flight attendants.” The problems in STEM are the people in STEM. I shouldn’t have to play catch up, when I am already ahead.”
  • New FOSS Outreach Program internships for female technical contributors | Quim Gil at Wikimedia (Sept 18): “The Free and Open Source Software Outreach Program for Women offers paid internships to developers and other technical contributors working on projects together with free software organizations. […] The application period starts on September 22nd and ends one month later on October 22nd.”
  • [warning for police brutality] Police killed a black man dressed up like an anime character |  Aja Romano at The Daily Dot (Sept 16): “For the second time in two months, a black man has been shot and killed by police officers while holding a toy weapon. The Utah police fatally shot 22-year-old Darrien Hunt on Wednesday.”
  • Participate in a Survey About Gender Diversity in Video Games | Carly Smith at The Escapist (Sept 16): “Student researcher Jennifer Allaway is examining the relationship between players’ desires for diversity and game developers’ understanding of that desire, among many other topics, for a GDC 2015 talk.” There are separate surveys for developers and consumers.”
  • [warning for discussion of sexual harassment] Misogyny and the Atheist Movement | Comment by Hold your seahorses at Metafilter (Sept 15): “The article makes a passing mention of new “rules” for the “gender dynamic” and I think there’s actually something to that, as far as the reason why at least a subset of men get extravagantly, sometimes violently, upset and retaliatory when they run up against, or see someone run up against, those “rules”. Because yes. Absolutely, the rules are changing about what you “can” and “can’t” do with/to women (at cons, in public, online, in general). But the people getting upset about this tend to misunderstand what the idea of “the rules are changing” means. The “rules” – that set of norms that determined where you could and couldn’t acceptably transgress with someone – used to be much more liberal from the male perspective. […] That sense of assurance, of insulation from consequences, is what’s been increasingly yoinked away from men as it becomes less and less acceptable to do these things.”
  • Time to Raise the Profile of Women and Minorities in Science | Brian Welle and Megan Smith at Scientific American (Sept 16): “over the past few years, we discovered some pretty ugly news about our beloved Google Doodles. We had been making these embellishments to the corporate logo on our home page, often in honor of specific people on their birthdays, ever since the company was founded in 1998. For the first seven years, we celebrated exactly zero women. We had not noticed the imbalance.”
  • why many women of colour within the so-called ‘Western countries’ and those outside are very alienated with the [mainstream] feminism | lesetoilesnoires at tumblr (Sept 20): “The idea that to show a White young woman in the West why and how she needs feminism, or why and how she has benefited from feminism, you have to appeal to the ‘tragic plight’ of Women of Colour ‘elsewhere’, turn these Women of Colour into caricatures of victimhood while contrasting it with White, middle-class women as ’empowered subjects’, is simply condescending in the best case and outright racist in the worst case.”
  • Albert Einstein, Anti-Racist Activist | s.e. smith at this ain’t livin’ (Sept 22): “It is perhaps not surprising that Einstein’s contributions to anti-racism were erased at the time. It was easy to focus on the media-friendly physicist who amazed people with his mind, and to quietly skate around details of his personal life. His work can’t have made contemporary media comfortable, either, as he was unafraid when it came to specifically confronting white complicity and talking about what whites needed to do.”

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, Delicious 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.

The Large Linkspam Collider (22 July 2014)

  •  how to recruit a diverse team | the evolving ultrasaurus: “There is no quick fix to diversity hiring. The easiest way to hire for diversity is to start with diversity — to start when you add the second person on your team — but if you reading this post, you likely have an imbalanced or homogeneous team. I’ve primarily written this for all-white or all-male teams in tech.”
  • The Problem With Science| Shakesville: “This doesn’t speak well of one of the industry’s leading publications. It also doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence (which, as I’ve already explained, I’m short on) that the folks making or breaking careers by deciding which papers are “sexy” enough to publish are going to have the professionalism to ground their decisions in something other than a creepy desire to excite their presumed readership of straight white cis guys.”
  • A handy template for online trolls: “It has come to my attention that you are [a person of color/woman/ LGBTQ/differently abled/immigrant] and you have posted an online essay suggesting that your situation in life is somehow challenging because of a circumstance relating to people who are not in your condition. As an Internet commenter, it is my mouse-driven duty to anonymously respond to your post. I’m not sure what would happen if I failed to do so, but I saw what happened when they stopped pushing the button in LOST so I will not take any chances.”
  • No More “Put A Skirt On It” | molly.is/saying: “Good news: the next time you draw a person or create a user avatar, you have an opportunity to fight the sexist patriarchal bullshit! Like many instances of patriarchy-smashing, it’s not actually that hard once you get the principles down. Here are 2 simple rules to keep you on track.”
  • Ninja Pizza Girl and The Thorny Tangle of Girlhood | Apple Cider Mage: “The crux of it is Jason Stark, the head of Disparity Games, relating precisely how and why Ninja Pizza Girl came to be. He talks about how the concept came straight from his childrens’ mouths but more importantly he  also describes the stumbles in his own assumptions about not only game design but also about his daughters’ growing vulnerability as they move into teen-hood and beyond. It was a bit of insight that I found intriguing, not so much as a gamer, but rather as a woman.”
  • Opinion: Selena Deckelmann on Portland tech’s gender divide | Portland Business Journal: “I was surprised and horrified to discover every woman in tech I knew had similar, and, disturbingly, far worse stories than mine. Many of these women, successful in tech and making good money, supported families and could not just quit and find another job in the small job market in Portland. Sure, they could move to another city — but with kids, spouses with jobs or in school, these decisions are rarely simple.”
  • Feminism and (Un)Hacking | Journal of Peer Production: CFP for articles on feminism and hacker/makerspaces: “With this special issue of the Journal of Peer Production, we hope to delve more deeply into these critiques to imagine new forms of feminist technical praxis that redefine these practices and/or open up new ones. How can we problematize hacking, tinkering, geeking and making through feminist theories and epistemologies? How do these practices, in fact, change when we begin to consider them through a feminist prism? Can we envision new horizons of practice and possibility through a feminist critique?”
  • San Fran tech types: what you need to know to move to Oakland | Live Work Oakland: “I’d like these young dudes coming to my town to actually see ALL the people coming up in tech in Oakland around me–the many Black, Latino, queer, female, and trans folks who, like all of us, show up in so many different ages, styles, and sizes, but who have a place, just like the white bros do. And  if these new folks coming into Oakland can’t see the folks who are already here, can’t change, I’d like them to just get the F* out of the way and take one of those corporate buses right back to where they came from .”
  • Meanwhile, in an alternate universe… | Infotropism: Read Skud’s take on what google+’s announcement re: pseudonyms SHOULD have been.
  • Canceling TRUCEConf | TRUCEConf: Trust, Respect, Unity, Compassion, and Equality: “I would say that it’s with a heavy heart that I am canceling this conference, if it weren’t for the sense of relief that comes with this announcement. I have struggled with this for long enough. The time has come to let it go.” (We covered TRUCEConf back in November 2013.)
  • “Pay a heavy price for it” | rosefox: “That’s the Frenkel story. He’s supposed to pay a price for getting what he wanted–the opportunity to harass a couple of women–but all he loses is four years of Wiscon. However, anyone who doesn’t want to be around harassers loses Wiscon forever.” (See also: the Chair of the Harassment Policy Committee responds to feedback about this decision, and more general thoughts on harassment at conferences from Publishers Weekly’s Genreville: What Conventions Are and Aren’t.)
  • Free Online Game Simulates Coming Out Experience | GLBT News: “The game is based on Case’s own coming out process, and it allows the player to choose a variety of conversational choices throughout the storyline. Characters remember what you have said, and they constantly refer back to choices that were made previously in the game. The games tagline is “a half-true game about half-truths.” The game has three endings, but like it promises at the very beginning, there are no easy or clean results. Everything is messy…just like the coming out process itself.”
  • Black Girls Hunger for Heroes, Too: A Black Feminist Conversation on Fantasy Fiction for Teens | Bitch Media: “What happens when two great black women fiction writers get together to talk about race in young adult literature? That’s exactly what happens in the conversation below, where  Zetta Elliott, a black feminist writer of poetry, plays, essays, novels, and stories for children, and award-winning Haitian-American speculative fiction writer Ibi Aanu Zoboi decided to discuss current young adult sci-fi. “

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, Delicious 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.

Linkspam is the mind-killer (1 July 2014)

Facebook’s emotion study and research ethics:

  • Facebook Manipulated 689,003 Users’ Emotions For Science | Kashmir Hill at Forbes (June 28): “Facebook’s data scientists manipulated the News Feeds of 689,003 users, removing either all of the positive posts or all of the negative posts to see how it affected their moods. If there was a week in January 2012 where you were only seeing photos of dead dogs or incredibly cute babies, you may have been part of the study. Now that the experiment is public, people’s mood about the study itself would best be described as ‘disturbed.'”
  • Facebook unethical experiment : It made news feeds happier or sadder to manipulate people’s emotions. | Katy Waldman at Slate (June 28): “Facebook’s methodology raises serious ethical questions… ‘If you are exposing people to something that causes changes in psychological status, that’s experimentation,’ says James Grimmelmann, a professor of technology and the law at the University of Maryland. ‘This is the kind of thing that would require informed consent.'”
  • Facebook and Engineering the Public | Zeynep Tufecki at Medium (June 29): “I’m struck by how this kind of power can be seen as no big deal. Large corporations exist to sell us things, and to impose their interests, and I don’t understand why we as the research/academic community should just think that’s totally fine, or resign to it as ‘the world we live in’. That is the key strength of independent academia: we can speak up in spite of corporate or government interests.”
  • Did Facebook and PNAS violate human research protections in an unethical experiment? | David Gorski at Science-Based Medicine (June 30): “As tempting of a resource as Facebook’s huge amounts of data might be to social scientists interested in studying online social networks, social scientists need to remember that Facebook’s primary goal is to sell advertising, and therefore any collaboration they strike up with Facebook information scientists will be designed to help Facebook accomplish that goal. That might make it legal for Facebook to dodge human subjects protection guidelines, but it certainly doesn’t make it ethical.”

Spammy spam:

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, Delicious 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.

LEGO “Research Institute” features women in science

LEGO made a nice little splash when they introduced a female scientist figure a little while ago, and they’ve chosen to produce a pretty neat set as a followup:

We’re very excited to release Ellen Kooijman’s Female Minifigure set, featuring 3 scientists, now entitled “Research Institute” as our next LEGO Ideas set. This awesome model is an inspiring set that offers a lot for kids as well as adults. The final design, pricing and availability are still being worked out, but it’s on track to be released August 2014. For more information, see the LEGO Ideas Blog.

"Research Institute" LEGO set, including three female scientists: the Astronomer, the Paleontologist, and the Chemist

“Research Institute” LEGO set, including three female scientists: the Astronomer, the Paleontologist, and the Chemist

Here’s a link to the LEGO ideas project. But what I found even more interesting is designer Ellen Kooijman’s blog post about the design of the set:

I had been building with LEGO bricks for 10 years since coming out of my Dark Age (LEGO-devoid period), but I had never shared any of my creations online. This project was going to be the first creation I ever shared with people other than my husband. The idea for the project came very naturally and the question how I came up with it always makes me smile. As a female scientist I had noticed two things about the available LEGO sets: a skewed male/female minifigure ratio and a rather stereotypical representation of the available female figures. It seemed logical that I would suggest a small set of female minifigures in interesting professions to make our LEGO city communities more diverse.

As a geochemist I started with designs close to my own profession, a geologist and a chemist, and then expanded the series to include other sciences and other professions. Support rates in the first weeks after posting were slow, but at some point it started to pick up speed and many people left positive comments on the project, which encouraged me to expand and develop the project. I designed 12 little vignettes in total that consist of a minifigure with a 6×4 base plate and a corresponding setting to enhance the building experience and stimulate creativity. When designing the vignettes I tried to add things that would also make them attractive to people not necessarily interested in female figures. Especially the dinosaur skeleton turned out to be a real winner that is popular with a variety of people ranging from teenage boys, to parents, to AFOLs, etc. It is easy to imagine a different setting where the skeleton may come alive chasing the minifig or it could stimulate more building, for example a museum where it can be displayed.

Her other career women vignettes are also pretty awesome. I hope that some someday LEGO will consider producing those as well. Here’s a second science-y set to whet your appetites:

More scientist LEGO: Falconer with two birds, Geologist with compass and hammer in the field & Robotics Engineer designing a robot arm

More scientist LEGO: Falconer with two birds, Geologist with compass and hammer in the field & Robotics Engineer designing a robot arm

Visit the LEGO ideas page or the blog post about the sets to see the others!

Cold the Wind doth Blow (or The Unquiet Linkspam) (6 June 2014)

Announcements etc:

  • Peep Game Comix: “Attention All African American comic book creators and publishers, we are looking for original titles to add to Peep Game Comix. We are looking for current projects and even back catalogs of books.”

Several submissions on the “hurricanes with female names” thing:

  • The study is Jung, Shavitt, Viswanathana & Hilbed. 2014. Female hurricanes are deadlier than male hurricanes. PNAS http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1402786111.
  • Hurricanes with women’s names more deadly: study | Joan Cary at Chicago Tribune (June 2): “According to a recent study by University of Illinois researchers, hurricanes with women’s names are likely to cause significantly more deaths than those with masculine names — not because the feminine-named storms are stronger, but because they are perceived as less threatening and so people are less prepared.”
  • Why Have Female Hurricanes Killed More People Than Male Ones? | Ed Yong at National Geographic (June 2): “Jung team thinks that the effect he found is due to unfortunate stereotypes that link men with strength and aggression, and women with warmth and passivity… But Jeff Lazo from the National Centre for Atmospheric Research disagrees. He’s a social scientist and economist who has looked into the public communication of hurricane risk, and he thinks the pattern is most likely a statistical fluke, which arose because of the ways in which the team analysed their data.” (Study authors respond at comment #7.)
  • Do Female-Named Hurricanes Need To Lean In? | Beth Novey at NPR (June 3): “We’re also worried about what this trend means for the career advancement of female storms. We’ve seen this before. We know where this is going. So to get ahead of the curve, we’d like to offer some advice to all the girls out there hoping to become fearsome natural disasters when they grow up.”

Everything else!

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, Delicious 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.

Proposed guidelines for the ethical use of Twitter data

Background to this article: Twitter is releasing its historical archive of public tweets to selected researchers. See Introducing Twitter Data Grants and Twitter #DataGrants selections.

Scientific American says “A trove of billions of tweets will be a research boon and an ethical dilemma.” Indeed. We’re thus reproducing part of Caitlin M. Rivers and Bryan L. Lewis’s article Ethical research standards in a world of big data for comment.

Proposed guidelines for the ethical use of Twitter data

The objectives, methodologies, and data handling practices of the project are transparent and easily accessible

This information should be published in manuscripts, published on the web for the public to access, and provided to IRB (when relevant). Going forward, collaboration between the research community and Twitter to provide information to users about ongoing research and relevant results may also be beneficial. Transparency regarding uses of Internet data for research purposes is needed for fostering ‘privacy literacy’ so that the users can make informed decisions about participating in Twitter.

Study design and analyses respect the context in which a tweet was sent

A tweet author discussing his mental health, for example, does not do so with the intention of sharing that data with researchers; he does it to communicate with his digital community. Qualitatively analyzing these communications as if they are offered for research consumption does not align with the context in which the tweets were created. Twitter participants can reasonably expect to rely on some anonymity of the crowd to manage privacy.

The anonymity of tweet authors is protected, ensuring that subjects should not be identifiable in any way

To preserve source anonymity, direct quotes or screen names are not publishable, nor are any details that could be used to identify a subject. Any and all information that could be entered into a search engine to trace back to a human source should be protected. A composite of multiple example tweets may instead be used for illustrative purpose. Geolocations in particular should be scaled to a larger geographic area in order to avoid violating the privacy of those tweet authors. The Title 13 of the Data Protection and Privacy Policy, the federal law under which the Census Bureau is regulated, expressly forbids publishing GPS coordinates; researchers should adhere to this guideline as well.

Tweet data are not used to harvest additional information from other sources

Focused collection is also important for preserving anonymity. It is possible to use data collected from Twitter to discern the identities of tweet authors, which can then be used to find and collect additional information from additional sources. For example an author’s username, identifying details provided in tweet texts, or geolocations could all be used to collect data about that individual from other sources like Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, or public records.

Twitter users’ efforts to control their personal data are honored

Researchers may not follow a user on Twitter in order to gain access to a protected account. Doing so would violate that user’s efforts to control his or her personal data.

Researchers work collaboratively with IRB just as they would for any other human subject data collection

There is not currently an expectation that researchers engaging in research using Twitter will interface with their IRB. As discussed above, studies that could be conceived as individual-based should require IRB approval, whereas research designs that use data in aggregate (e.g. counts of keywords) may proceed without explicit consent. In turn, review boards should keep abreast of social network mining methodologies and corresponding ethical considerations in order provide informed guidance to researchers.

Geek Feminism readers: what do you think?

Article source, licencing and citation notes:

This post is an excerpt of Ethical research standards in a world of big data by Caitlin M. Rivers and Bryan L. Lewis as allowed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence. We suggest that anyone quoting or reproducing this article copy from the original source to ensure accuracy.

The original article can be cited as: Rivers CM and Lewis BL (2014) Ethical research standards in a world of big data [v1; ref status: approved with reservations 1, http://f1000r.es/2wq] F1000Research 2014, 3:38 (doi: 10.12688/f1000research.3-38.v1)

When a link and a spam love each other very much (26 March 2014)

A couple of quick announcements to start us off:

  • applications to attend AdaCamp Portland (June 21–22, ally skills track June 23) are open
  • the call for submissions to another issue of Model View Culture is out: the Abuse issue. “This issue explores themes of harassment, microaggression, boundary violation, assault, discrimination and other forms of abuse in the tech community”.

Onto the spam you’re waiting for:

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, Delicious 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.

Sexist or Insensitive? Either way – It’s just lazy, and it is keeping women from taking part.

This post is by a guest blogger who wishes to remain anonymous.

I recently received an invitation to attend a guest lecture in my research institute entitled: “Tits struggling to keep up (with climate change)”. Is this funny? Is it a clever pun? Is it sexist? Is it insensitive?

I have seen many cases of scientists trying to make their topics more inviting with a ‘sexy’ title to a paper or talk, and, if followed through properly, it can be a very effective way of engaging an audience who might otherwise be bored by the topic. This example, however, does not qualify in my mind as an effective tool for communication. Instead, I would say that this is exactly the kind of lazy title-tweaking that makes up some of the subtle sexism that continues to pervade the higher education research environment.

I call this lazy for two reasons: first, because it cashes in on the sexist structures which are widespread in our society, and the assumption that simply linking an idea to female sexual organs will be enough to make it interesting to the masses; second, because in order for a ‘sexy’ title to be truly effective, it needs to be placed in the context of a larger theme within the paper or talk, which will continue to highlight the ‘fun’ side of the research while presenting the relevant data. I hardly think that the presentation is peppered with pictures of the breasts of aging women instead of birds.

Recently it was mentioned to me by (male) senior members of staff that the institute is trying to encourage women to enter and remain in research. So, a female colleague and I discussed the sexist/insensitive attitude of the title and decided to comment. The institute’s response? “There is no pun.”

Now, I find this hard to believe, considering the construction of the sentence. If there were no pun, the use of parenthesis would be unnecessary. However, it is just barely possible that the scientist in question has a poor understanding of parenthetical usage. It is also possible that the title was meant as a joke, which we were meant to find mildly amusing, and enticing enough to attend the lecture.

In the end, it doesn’t matter; whether the title was meant as an ‘inoffensive’ joke, or was simply insensitive, these are the small pin-pricks that jab at female scientists on a daily basis. To be reminded that your worth as a human being, in a societal context, is still largely based on your appearance and adherence to strict sexual and social norms, despite your ground-breaking research, and to have this happen while you are at work, and to be expected to laugh at this reminder, rather than mention how unwelcome it is, is not acceptable. It is this laziness and this insensitivity that subtly reminds women of ‘their place’ in even the most prestigious labs and universities.

Auld Lang Linkspam (1 January 2013)

  • Game Changer: “In the virtual world, there is a clear, aggressively policed distinction dictating the boundaries of both cyberspace and its social practices. In online gaming spaces in particular, this distinction is similar to the difference between “play” and “nonplay.” As child psychologists have long recognized, the act of saying “this is play” makes the real seem unreal, and thus malleable and less threatening. It allows for experimentation and learning, as well as simply finding out who you are. But in online gaming spaces, when combined with a culture of zero accountability and prejudice, it becomes a way of denying the impact of one’s words and actions—putting no limit on how nasty they can be.”
  • I’ve been programming since I was 7: “I’ve told stories like the above to many of my programming colleagues. Often they trigger similar yarns, involving equally or even more antiquated technology. Us programmers love bragging the development tales of our youth!… In reality though, we’re not as talented as we think. When we tell a story like that, what we’re actually indicating is we were incredibly privileged.”
  • Rita Levi Montalcini: “Yesterday, at the age of 103, Rita Levi-Montalcini died the longest lived Nobel Prize Winner in history, the tenth woman to be elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the co-discoverer of nerve growth factor, and a woman who refused to let her father’s ideas about gender or a state’s ideas about race keep her from doing some pretty great science.”
  • Links debunking the pseudoscience of alpha status and social dominance: “In summary, dealing with the science of how what we understand about various hierarchies in different animal species, including our own, debunks the simplistic self-help alpha/beta mythology which originated from a study of captive wolves in zoos (which the original scientists have long since repudiated as not having adequately considered the pathologies of non-related subjects in captivity versus the norms of family groups in the wild).”
  • My bustle’s stuck!: Women vs. Victorian values in ‘The Snowmen’: “Part of the point of putting the Doctor in, say, a Fifties pencil skirt is to visually demonstrate that she would be ill-equipped to, as the Ninth Doctor said to Rose and then immediately demonstrated, run for her life. People wear what society expects them to wear, and if your society sticks you in a corset and bustle, then your society has assigned you the role of “monster food”, not “hero”.”
  • Dear Hacker Community – We Need To Talk.: “I know a lot the community doesn’t want to talk about this stuff. I know I didn’t personally try to build a bridge between wannabe-crypto-users and hackers so I could deal with shitful sexism, misogyny and down-right crappy behavior. I know most people would rather just delete a sexist webpage or image, apologize for the offensive comment, or shitty behavior and move on. Again. But things aren’t changing for the better. And pasting anti-harassment rules on conference wikis doesn’t seem to be making a dent in obviously unacceptable behavior of some arseholes.”
  • But honestly: “The one thing, however, that’s been on my mind for a while now is what Moss-Kanter refers to as “fear of retaliation”. This is something I’m always aware of, and I try my best to keep in the background. I’ve spent countless meetings biting my tongue and trying not to stand out. Unfortunately, one of my less charming traits (or maybe my most charming trait) is that I say what I think. I’ve been in teams where I’ve not been noticed, yet pulled quite a bit of weight. Occasionally, I’ve cleaned up after klutzes who couldn’t do their jobs. But I try not to call attention to this, or to myself. Because, as Moss-Kanter says, there’s a problem with double standards. On the one hand, I should be more aggressive (I’ve been told, many times). And on the other hand, I get sighs, eye-rolling, etc when I am more aggressive and try to solve problems. In short: I’ve felt like a problem for trying to solve problems.”

—

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.

I have no mouth and I must linkspam (18 December 2012)

  • On Software Startup Culture: “So how do startups come to be even more white and male than even the general software industry? And should they be as celebrated and glorified as they are in software culture? I can only speak of my experience as a white trans woman working for a small ~6 employee startup but for me it comes down to risk and the way privilege mitigates those risks.”
  • The Woman Charged With Making Windows 8 Succeed: “As the head of Windows product development at Microsoft, Julie Larson-Green is responsible for a piece of software used by some 1.3 billion people worldwide. She’s also the person leading the campaign to introduce as many of those people as possible to Windows 8, the dramatic redesign of the iconic operating system that must succeed if Microsoft is to keep pace with a computing industry now shaped more by phones and tablets than desktop PCs… An expert in technical design, she also led the introduction of the novel, much copied “ribbon” interface for Microsoft Office, widely acknowledged as a major improvement in usability.”
  • Sexual and Gender Diversity in Physics: Discussion of a session on gender and sexuality issues at the American Physical Society March Meeting.
  • Tide of history must change to swim with Nobel penguins: “The locals call it Penguin Mountain. Each year, on December 10, on the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death, residents of Stockholm witness the awarding of the world’s most prestigious prizes in physics, chemistry, physiology, medicine, literature and economics to rows of men in tuxedos. Rows of grave looking, exceptionally clever men in penguin suits. It’s a sobering, thrilling spectacle. But since 1901, only 44 of all 861 Nobel prizes have been given to women.”
  • NASA Johnson Style (Gangnam Style Parody) – YouTube: Replaced “sexy lady” with “Science daily ” and “It’s amazing”. Hilarious and catchy.

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Thanks to everyone who suggested links.