misbehaving.net

playing dumb

While reading Erving Goffman's "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life," Joi Ito blogged a passage on performance that is worth considering:

American college girls did, and no doubt do, play down their intelligence, skills, and determinativeness when in the presence of datable boys, thereby manifesting a profound psychic discipline in spite of their international reputation for flightiness. These performers are reported to allow their boy friends to explain things to them tediously that they already know; they conceal proficiency in mathematics from their less able consorts; they lose ping-pong games just before the ending.

Joi asks whether this is true today, and i thought that this is a good fodder for discussion. How relevant is this passage to the (lack of) participation of women in technology?

history, credit and identity

Like many students of computing, i was inspired by Vannevar Bush from my earliest days. "As We May Think" and follow-up writings on the Memex helped define a century of thought and computational effort.

Yet, as Michael Buckland is uncovering, much of Bush's fame is misplaced. Bush's seminal ideas around the Memex were actually developed and patented over a decade before Bush by a Jewish chemist named Emanuel Goldberg.

Goldberg's role in history was eclipsed in part because of his identity as a Jewish German man. (The German's did not respect the thought of the Jews and post-WWII, the world did not respect the thought of the Germans.) He is not alone. Only recently has Ada Lovelace been given credit for her contributions to scientific computing; she was eclipsed by Charles Babbage because of her identity as a woman.

I wonder how many other inventions in technology are not properly credited to their creators because of their identity.

women

They must have known that I'd love it: they gave me Annie Leibovitz's Women, a book full of wonderful photographs of women, women in almost every profession you can think of, famous women, ordinary women, astronauts, farmers, race car drivers, waitresses, politicians, CEOs, show girls, mothers, activists, maids, poets, actors, writers, teachers, coal miners, soldiers, surgeons. The portraits are large and generous. Some women smile, most are serious, and each one of them looks beautiful. Not in that standard textbook manner, no no, this is a much deeper and much more important kind of beauty, a more genuine beauty, the kind of beauty you can see in the people you love. Being able to show such beauty in a fickle photograph must take great skill and generosity in the photographer.

I spent an hour leafing through the pages with my daughter. So many possible lives, for a woman. Reading out the professions for my daughter I realise that this is what we need for our daughters, for ourselves: real portraits of real women.

I'll take one chicken to go, please

Anil Dash writes about a takeout restaurant he frequents, which is less than welcoming to female customers, in Halalapalooza:

A woman who was clearly not familiar with the rules of the house had stumbled into the place, unsuspecting of the contempt that would greet her arrival. She puzzled over the inscrutable board which displayed the specials and tentatively placed her order. Though she was eventually served, the glacial pace of service, the complete lack of interaction between her and any of the men in the restaurant, and the velocity at which her meal was hurled at her when ready made certain that she'd not be returning any time soon.

Then:

I was wondering why the chicken place seemed so familiar, despite its discomfiting social mores. It is a deeply misogynistic environment, filled with people paying a pittance and begrudging that they weren't getting more for free, prone to arguing with and shouting at each other in a cacophony of languages while never bothering to even listen to the points they were arguing against. And somehow its allures were enough to keep drawing me back in. I'm realizing they probably should have named the restaurant after the place it most resembles: The Blogosphere.

New York Times Profile of danah boyd

There's a great profile of danah in today's New York Times! It's a great piece, that highlights her skills and accomplishments. A nice Thanksgiving treat...

Or is it infuriating?

Over at eWeek, Steve Gillmor took on (John C.) Dvorak's anti-blog stance by offering a list of "a few of the original blog voices who (he’s) grown addicted to over the last few years."   That list of nine names doesn’t include one woman. 

Disappointing. 

(Shelley agrees.)

SIGIS: Strategies of Inclusion

Last month, Jill asked "Why aren't more European women online?" The Strategies of Inclusion web site is a product of the EU Information Society Technologies (IST) project is attempting to answer that.

For a long time there has been a concern that women are excluded from computers and thus from the information society. Still, women are relatively absent from computer science and the design of ICT products. However, there are important changes going on: the transformation of ICTs and their penetration into the home, education and the workplace means the level of use of computers, the internet, mobiles phones and other systems by women and men is converging. Moreover, in many European countries this is the result of explicit public and private initiatives to include women.

This project has analysed 30 such initiatives and related processes of inclusion, partly to study the strategic features, partly to learn from relative successes, and partly to provide a knowledge base to support and encourage development of new inclusion efforts. This is needed to safeguard the development of an information society for all, but it is also an important prerequisite of commercial success of many new ICT projects.

The site includes case studies and analysis, as well as reviews of literature and statistics on the topic. They've also got a symposium coming up in January that looks quite interesting. (The same page has information on some recent conferences and calls for papers.)

Gadgets or communication tools?

The Pew Internet and American Life Project issued a report on the Consumption of Information Goods and Services in the United States yesterday. The report concludes that "There is a trendsetting technology elite in the U.S. who chart the course for the use of information goods and services." Within this elite group of techies, "wired women like tools to communicate, not gadgets to show off."

Techie women are more likely than techie men to say that it would be very hard to give up email, by a 52% to 44% margin. By contrast, when asked whether it would be very hard to do without the Internet, 49% of techie women say this, while 60% of their male counterparts do. For phone calling, cell or wireline, there are some cross currents. Fully 70% of tech women said it would be very hard to do without a telephone compared with 56% of tech men. For cell phones, half of tech men say it would be very hard to do without one while 46% of tech women said this. Techie men and techie women are about as likely to have cells phones (82% and 81%, respectively). Techie women are less likely to have the hardware gadgets that one might clip to the belt (excepting cell phones), than techie men. One-quarter of techie men have pagers, versus 16% of techie women, and about one-third (31%) of techie men have PDAs compared to 15% of their female counterparts.

thank goodness for fathers

I'm defending my Phd today and tomorrow. I've been working flat out for weeks, I'm sheet-white with anxiety and this morning as I was crawling out of bed, having lain awake for hours, my daughter's father rang. "She's got the flu."

He and I have shared custody of our daughter, amicably so, but this was supposed to be my week. I'd worked out how she could spend the afternoon at a friend's house, how I'd pick her up this evening after giving my trial lecture, how she could hang around helping organise the celebratory party tomorrow night. But she's sick. She can't go to school. It's my week, her father already stayed home with her last Friday. The guilt I felt on the phone, saying "can she please stay two extra days with you?" was horrid. A mother is not supposed to ditch her sick child, you know?

I'm fortunate enough to have a wonderful co-parent who does his share of parenting. He always has, from those early changes of nappies and the waking in the middle of the night. He's looking after our daughter for two extra days, cancelling a score of meetings at work, just as he took far more than his share of childcare five years ago when I was finishing my MA. I've done my share too, when his job's necessitated weeks of travelling.

It would have been extremely hard to finish a PhD while being a mother if I had not been sharing parenting with a father who really does his share of the work. Thank goodness for fathers.

One small step

I helped my husband with a presentation at a local library last night. The schmoozing afterwards proved quite lively.

One woman came by with her son (maybe ten) and daughter (about fourteen). When she asked my profession, I told her that I was working on a library-science degree in hopes of working with electronic-text technologies. Apparently I look superannuated to be entering a high-tech field, because she immediately started assuring me that anyone, age no object, could do it.

She then told me proudly that her daughter had won a scholarship to college in information technology, while the daughter looked faintly embarrassed.

I looked the daughter straight in the eye and said, “That’s excellent. Really fantastic. Congratulations.”

And what do you know, she held my gaze and actually smiled as she thanked me politely.

I do hope I get to say “Ah, yes, the eminent Ms. X. I met her when she was fourteen...” someday. In the meantime, I’m satisfied with my one small step toward inviting another woman into the profession.