misbehaving.net

Happy 2004!

Hey Girls! Make 2004 a really great year! Kick some butt! You can do it!

Remember to ask everyone for eveything you want. Don't hold back. You'll be surprised by the results. Someone once gave me the great advice, "If you don't hear NO at least three times a day, you aren't asking for enough stuff in your life."

[Misbehaving.Net is a smoke-free zone. This woman is not actually smoking, merely posing and we do not condone tobacco addiction. ]

jane pinckard on "what do women (gamers) want?"

Jane Pinckard, who runs the excellent GameGirlAdvance web site, has a great roundup of the year in video games for Salon.com this week--it's entitled "Gaming and Its Discontents". (Subscription or ad-supported day pass required.) In addition to good analysis of what succeeded and what didn't in 2003, she has an excellent discussion of women and gaming:

Girls do want to play games. Lifelong gamer Souris Hong-Porretta says she has simple requirements for what she wants to play: "Good game play, something that can be picked up by either sex and is fun to play is good enough for me."

But the advertisers aren't looking for her. Robin Hunicke, a gamer-geek-girl getting her Ph.D. in computer science at Northwestern University has been studying video games -- formally and casually -- for most of her life. "Most advertised games tend to fall into the shooter and sports categories," she noted. "I think it's a marketing problem. It certainly promotes the conventional-wisdom stereotypes about games and gamers."

It's an image problem that we run into again and again -- games are for geeks, games are for boys, games are violent. Games are not advertised in magazines that women might read, nor placed in areas where women might come across them. Games are not for women. It's less a development failure than a P.R. and promotions failure.

She sums up with a great coda:

I don't want girl games, I just want what every gamer wants -- smarter games. More meaningful games. Games that relate to other people. That relate to other things. Games that push me off the screen and off the couch.

intexticated: drunken texting

Smart Mobs blogged an article about drunken texting:

Drunken texts have replaced snogging colleagues at work parties as the biggest embarrassment of the festive season. The problem of texting under the influence is so common it has been given a name ''intexicated''. Around 60 million texts are sent every day in December. And research by phone giant Virgin Mobile said 15 million of them are sent by people who have had one too many. Virgin said that two-thirds of women who text while drunk send messages to former lovers and some text the wrong person. A public relations officer in London sent a sexually explicit message to dad instead of boyfriend Dan after hitting the wrong button.

What is interesting about this (brief) article is that it states that drunken texting is exceptionally common, but only references behavior by drunken women. Are drunken women the only ones texting the wrong people?

Liminal spaces

A friend (by my personal definition) of mine, after reading a biography of Dorothy Hodgkin, wonders about liminal spaces:

In terms of the history of science and medicine in the C20th, what we see is the emergence of new areas and disciplines, which didn't fit into accepted models (cf Hodgkin's problem of where crystallography could possibly 'fit' into the existing Oxford sciences set-up). They didn't provide safe 'jobs for the boys' so they tended to attract people who couldn't play the 'getting on in a solid career game', because they weren't, for reasons of gender, class, ethnicity, political views, educational history, or all of the above, going to be let anywhere near that playing field.

…

Then these fields become more established and start setting rules and boundaries and terms of admission and also, quite often, rewriting their histories to produce a solid patriarchal genealogy, trying to un-inscribe their complex, fluid and unorthodox origins. This process doesn't however, usually allow for the inclusion as 'the right people to be doing this' of various marginalised groups... and may even be intended specifically or by implication to exclude them.

What say ye? Is this true of today's high-tech also? Where are the liminal spaces, and are there women in them? Does high-tech have formerly liminal spaces, rewritten history? Is this part of the story behind accidental techies?

Virtual Intimacy

When Jeneane and I were chatting last night about meeting other bloggers, we started talking about whether it's fair to judge an online relationship as somehow less valid than an in-person relationship. We've known one another online and by phone for nearly two years and only met in person yesterday. Is our relationship real now and was not real when it was virtual, supported by technology? Would we be better friends if we ONLY knew one another in person and lived next door to one another? Going forward from this time, should we assume all our relationships will rely on a lot of electronic connection and a little in-person connection?

Can one have a metrics of intimacy? And if there is such a scale, are online relationships always less "real" than so-called real world relationships? I still have something Adam Curry said swirling around in my head. At BloggerCon in October 2002 at Harvard Law School, he said that perhaps blogging is a way of connecting like minds and creating a network of thought that does not require corporeal proximity (my words, his idea, I'm not sure how he put it exactly. Adam, write about it again, it was very interesting.)

I asked Jeneane that last night. Are we all practicing a new way to be intimate? Is falling in love online not real? Is it not love? Are friendships on IRC not legitimate, but an aberration supported by technology? Is it time to stop judging one way as less real and one as more real? Perhaps it's a pointless distinction.

Better Read This

I've been reading this new book by Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever called "Women Don't Ask" and it's pretty amazing. Thanks to Betsy Devine for bringing it to my attention. Here's Amazon's synopsis for starters:

When Linda Babcock asked why so many male graduate students were teaching their own courses and most female students were assigned as assistants, her dean said: "More men ask. The women just don't ask." It turns out that whether they want higher salaries or more help at home, women often find it hard to ask. Sometimes they don't know that change is possible--they don't know that they can ask. Sometimes they fear that asking may damage a relationship. And sometimes they don't ask because they've learned that society can react badly to women asserting their own needs and desires.

By looking at the barriers holding women back and the social forces constraining them, Women Don't Ask shows women how to reframe their interactions and more accurately evaluate their opportunities. It teaches them how to ask for what they want in ways that feel comfortable and possible, taking into account the impact of asking on their relationships. And it teaches all of us how to recognize the ways in which our institutions, child-rearing practices, and unspoken assumptions perpetuate inequalities--inequalities that are not only fundamentally unfair but also inefficient and economically unsound.

With women's progress toward full economic and social equality stalled, women's lives becoming increasingly complex, and the structures of businesses changing, the ability to negotiate is no longer a luxury but a necessity. Drawing on research in psychology, sociology, economics, and organizational behavior as well as dozens of interviews with men and women from all walks of life, Women Don't Ask is the first book to identify the dramatic difference between men and women in their propensity to negotiate for what they want. It tells women how to ask, and why they should.

If I Had It To Do Over

I like to believe that women in their 20's and 30's are actually reading this. I like to pretend I'm writing this for my friend Liz who's just starting her career (graduated from Duke last year) and is so smart and funny and ambitious and I'm whispering in her ear, telling her if I had it to do over, what I'd do. Actually, when I think of Liz, there's not much I would tell her. She's got it way more figured out than I ever did. But there are a few things I'd tell her.

I'd tell her this. Rush, don't walk, rush to any opportunity where you can learn to get up in front of a group and do some (DREADED) public speaking. I did do this myself, by joining Dale Carnegie and later becoming a Dale Carnegie teaching assistant, but not until another woman boss ... Betsy Ashton I believe -- thanks Betsy ... forced me to do it in my mid-30's.

What else would I do? This is so hard to say. In my 20's and 30's I thought being in love and following a man to another city and putting his career ahead of mine and love ahead of learning was a good idea. I'm sure no other women out there ever did anything so dumb as that. I thought the big story was love, family, romance. So I guess if I had it to do over, I would have stayed in school as long as humanly possible. After I finished an MFA in Writing at Columbia, I thought about getting a PhD in English, but decided against it. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

I should have stayed in school, some way or another. I just didn't get it then. The more school, the more opportunities I would have had, the more authority I would have had, the more choices I would have had, the more interesting people I would have met. I thought then I wanted my freedom -- to be free of school, to be done with it. Little did I know the more school I did then, the more freedom I would have NOW when it really matters.

And what kind of school would I have done ... more IT, more Finance, more languages for starters, maybe law. There was a JD/MBA program at Columbia I thought about but decided against. Wish I'd decided to stay there and apply.

One other thing. If you ever get the chance to work in sales -- do it. And I don't mean marketing, I mean sales. Everyone turns their nose up to sales, but try it before you judge it. It's hard as hell. In good times and bad, it's the best training ground for running a massive company, or starting your own one-woman shop. Also, it's full of men and you can learn a lot from men who know how to sell. You'll also see a company from the most powerful place in the organization, only second to the executive suite. The person who drags in the meat for the other cavedwellers to dine on, calls the shots. Even if you find you LOATHE sales, it's really good to know it from the inside.

And what about babies? I had one -- when I was 39 and had been in software and information services sales for a long time. If I had to do it over again. I'd have more babies earlier. Jeez! Did I say that?!?! I'd also keep working through my pregnancies and kid raising. I would NOT stop working. All the statistics show you lose enormous ground as a woman if you step out of the workforce. This means you MUST have a good husband who will share the childcare. How do you figure that one out in advance ... another post for another day ... but you might start by watching him with other kids, nieces, nephews. Also watch women who are happily married and have really helpful husbands and ask them how they found them.

our first review

People have certainly expressed their opinions about Misbehaving before, but I think this is our first review.

Define "software developer"

Ben Trott's post, Software Development and Usability, over at SixLog:

Movable Type (and TypePad) is, and has always been, jointly developed by Mena and me, and she is every bit as much a "software developer" as I am... it's much easier to see "programming" as driving a product than "usability" or "architecture", but in reality, a poorly-designed product is just as unusable as a buggy one... one of the reasons that Movable Type is so popular is because the product combines element from both Mena and me. And I don't know if it's a female-male combination or if it's just the combination of our personalities, and frankly it really doesn't matter.

women internet researchers

Nicola Döring's list of women researching Internet-related topics has links to a lot of interesting women doing interesting work. Great place for a random browse every now and then.