Wednesday Afternoon Links
posted by clara Jan 27, 2010 @ 5:01 PM • 3 comments
in barbie be counted brain drain clay shirky danah boyd dreamwidth feminism geek feminism links news role models stereotypes women 2.0
- danah boyd responds to Clay Shirky’s rant
- Geek Feminism commenters talk about what they’ve learned from feminism and how they’ve used the tools of feminism in their geek lives
- mamealoney posted here on Stemming recently about Computer Engineering Barbie; while we still think that’s a step in the right direction, Sociological Images points out that Barbie’s many careers have an “a woman can do anything, as long as she’s hot!” attitude
- A psychology study shows that worldwide, gender differences in math ability essentially disappear when other factors (like gender equity overall in a particular country) are controlled for
- Another study suggests that gender stereotypes keep women out of scientific disciplines, but that having more female role models in their departments might help
- A graphic from the National Center for Women and Information Technology explains the “brain drain” of qualified women out of IT and why this hurts everyone
- Radengineer posts about why women leave engineering (and I love her tagline — “Pushing the radical notion that engineers are women”!)
- LinuxPlanet talks about the advantages Dreamwidth had from encouraging diversity in their development team (they’re one of the few open-source projects with a majority-female dev team)
- Sarah Blow at Girly Geekdom analyzes a decade of news about women in technology
- Be Counted is a web app that aims to track the gender balance at technical conferences based on user-reported data
- Women 2.0 posts their female founder successes of 2009 — and maybe I’m a little biased because Stemming got a mention! :)
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about • contact • terms of use + privacy • stemming's code is free software — email clara for a copy of the code
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at 6:03PM 01/27/10 mamealoney said:
Re: “a woman can do anything, as long as she’s hot!”.
There are two negative assumptions at play here:
1. Women need to be hot. Only hot women have social value, and hot women are taken seriously.
2. In order to participate in STEM fields, women must sacrifice both beauty and social life.
In a previous post, Clara described the phenomenon of school-age girls getting discouraged from participating in STEM subjects, because of Negative Assumption #2 above. Computer Engineer Barbie is one solution to this discouragement, and speaks to any girl who wants to be pretty AND program.
But as Clara points out in today’s post, Negative Assumption #1 is also at work. Girls come to feel that they MUST be beautiful in order to be taken seriously, since the only positive examples of women doing awesome shit emphasize those women’s looks just as much as the awesome shit they’re doing.
Is there any way to counteract Negative Assumption #2 without simply reinforcing Negative Assumption #1?
at 10:39PM 01/27/10 rhdaly said:
It seems like assumption 2 is tied pretty strongly to some of the STEM fields (CS in particular) regardless of gender. For example, there’s a joke that getting an education at MIT is like taking a drink from a firehose, or that you can have
A, good grades; B, a social life; C, sleep. Pick two.
I think that women are especially hard hit by this perception of STEM, as lisa at SocIm points out, because of the Second Shift they are expected to work, different societal standards for success, etc.
STEM, as an endeavor, may need to address its reputation of work/life imbalance.
at 7:30PM 01/30/10 clara said:
I definitely agree that the “you can’t have a life” meme associated with STEM fields is part of this problem — it’s a problem for men, too, but it affects women disproportionately. (Similar to some of the issues raised here.) We’re definitely losing out on a lot of potentially talented people of both genders by maintaining this culture of requiring school/work to be the only important thing in your life for you to succeed.
Ideally, I’d like to see lots and lots of role models of women in STEM — both attractive and not-so-attractive women. Show girls that they can be hot, but don’t have to be!