misbehaving.net

Female IT workers down 21%

The BBC reports a recent Toshiba study shows that the number of female IT workers is down 21% since the 1960s.  At a debate about the study, a few prominent women in the industry commented:

"We care about this morally, but also on a practical level," said Maggie Berry from Women in Technology.

"Women do bring different skills to the table. Without women you do not have a complete team."

"There's too much testosterone in my department," added Toshiba's head of information systems, Sandra Smith.

The reasons for the decline are not clear, but this was interesting:

Many of the speakers felt women were more inclined to choose a job where the outcome of their work was more visible.

This is why many were turning their backs on the corporate sector and moving to smaller businesses, said Dr Glenda Stone, chief executive officer with Aurora.

Girly tech, redux

Rochelle Mazar elegantly eviscerates yet another story about how Those Women, They Just Don't Get Tech.

I can't add anything to what Rochelle said, really. I'm just annoyed that we have to keep repeating the same old, same old.

Open Media 100 Nominations

I'm glad Liz took issue with the "Founding Fathers" bullshit.  I was pretty much going to ignore this whole Open Media thing until someone pointed out that it would be responsible to walk my talk and actually nominate some women.  This goes against my grain because i'm not one for nominating anything. This is certainly not everyone but a small selection of kickass women and folks/tools that support subversion.   

The Pioneers: Caterina Fake (for Flickr), Meg Hourihan (for Blogger), Mena Trott (for SixApart)
The Tool Smiths: BitTorrent and Sip (for disrupting borders)
The Trendsetters: ??
The Practitioners: Rebecca Blood (for being a pioneering practitioner), Margaret Cho (for taking media heat), Barb Dybwad (for Engadget & Dykes Do Digital), Mary Hodder (for napsterization), Dina Mehta (for bridging distance through common ground)
The Enablers: Esther Dyson (for putting her money where her mouth is), Paula Le Dieu (for the BBC Creative Archive), Wendy Seltzer (for kicking legal ass), Ethan Zuckerman (for taking openness international)

I should note that i have issues with the whole "open media" thing.  Open to whom?  Openness has this magical quality to it - if you provide access, all other inequalities are washed away.  I hate supporting such fantastical utopianism.  All the same...  Besides, i don't see why all social software should be framed as open media - this makes no sense to me.  Also, i take issues with nominating "top bloggers in politics, business, technology, and media."  What the hell?  Open media to me means not having to fit into silly topical categories. I don't have any clue what trendsetters means so i've decided to ignore that category altogether. 

In my crankiness, i also realized i want a new category: The Critics.  These are the folks who've been publicly discussing open media's strengths and weaknesses and pushing all of the other folks to get out of utopian la-la-land and change the way they operate.  They are kinda oppositional to trendsetters - they challenge instead of play pied piper.  Interestingly, i would have no shortage of women to include in that category.

AOTechnorati100

systematically saying what others had preferred was unsaid

It's just part of a list of blogs, each characterised differently, but this particular item on the list is about us: "Misbehaving systematically saying what others had preferred was unsaid".

See, that's it, isn't it. All these posts about yet another conference with hardly any women speakers, they get tiring, tedious, even for those of us who write them. Sometimes I doubt their efficacy. A week or two ago I ranted at Reboot 7 for having 24 male and 1 female speaker, and having the cheek to say that that was purely due to quality, there were no other reasons for the imbalance. Like hell. I don't think much good came of my rant. Maybe a few people saw the absurdity of it. Foe and Matt posted a list of women the organiser should ask. Maybe he'll actually think of asking women next time.

The week after I tried a different approach when I noticed a large newspaper's blog on games had 20 male and 1 female writer. I deleted my angry blog post, and emailed the blog's head author instead, turning on all my charm and asking whether he'd considered asking such and such a woman to participate. He wrote back happily and through further correspondence I was able to tell him about several women who'd be great on the blog, and I think two of them are actually going to be writing there.

The second approach, of course, is the traditional female way of getting things done. My grandmother was an expert lobbyist and campaigner, you know the kind, stay at home mother, as most were then, who was involved in dozens of societies and got really important things done for the environment, for women and for the disadvantaged. She taught me exactly how to do things the traditional way. Ask questions, don't make statements. Don't get angry. Be happy when they think it was their idea so long as they do what you want. Never admit you know how to filet a fish or you'll be preparing and cooking fish after every fishing trip.

There's obviously a time and a place for each technique. Maybe my behind the scenes tactics worked better in the short term, and perhaps they'll have as big an effect as the angry approach would have. But we so need to make the inequities visible. The conference organiser I mentioned above wrote that it hadn't even occurred to him that he'd only invited one woman -- isn't that amazing? But it's exhausting being angry, and I'm not sure how much it helps, either. I was starting to think that perhaps the second approach was the better.

Until I read that characterisation of Misbehaving. Yes, perhaps Misbehaving should be a place for "systematically saying what others had preferred was unsaid". None of us can systematically do that all the time all alone. Having a collective that can do that might be really important.

Why you should look for fresh collaborations

Researchers from Northwestern University studied creative teams in the arts and sciences to determine the make-up of successful teams. The key is to choose "the right balance of diversity and cohesion -- achieving the bliss point intersection of the two."

"We found that teams that achieved success -- by producing musicals on Broadway or publishing academic papers in good journals -- were fundamentally assembled in the same way, by bringing in some experienced people who had not worked together before. The unsuccessful teams repeated the same collaborations over and over again..."

See: Dream teams thrive on mix of old and new blood (via Boing Boing)

gender and linking practices

Somehow, i missed Shelley's Guys Don't Link post when it first came out (March 7). OMG it's *HYSTERICAL* and an absolute must-read.

“Shelley, to a woman, a link is a way of connecting and being connected. To hearing and being heard. But not so for a guy. Guys see links as power, and therefore something precious, and to be protected. They hold on to their links as tightly, and as lovingly, as a thirsty drunk holds onto a bottle.”

In this essay, Shelley "converses" with various people about linking habits. I've always suspected that male bloggers on average link more than female bloggers and that this contributes to the disparity in ranking between them. Of course, i have no data to prove it. Still, this essay captures that issue so well.

Costume consciousness

I just got back from a major conference, and my gosh, what I saw people wearing!

If you think I'm going to continue on that theme, sorry to disappoint. I expect you rather thought I would, though, because practically every major conference anywhere draws posts like that. Geek conferences, MLA, library conferences like the one I just got back from—it doesn't matter. Somebody always writes the Fashion Post.

And "somebody" is invariably a woman. And "somebody" is invariably writing about women. And "somebody" invariably has nothing good to say, either.

Why is this necessary? Why is it proper? Why is it a good idea? Don't we have enough people running us down for superficial reasons? Don't we have enough appearance anxiety as it is?

Another thing I notice about Fashion Posts is that the posters of same attribute what they judge to be poor sartorial choice to character flaws. She didn't care enough. She wasn't trying. She's stuck in the (insert decade of poster's choice; varies by age of poster). There is no humor in these judgments (as, I note, there usually is in the rare cases when Fashion Posts also treat of men), no sympathy, no fellow-feeling, no allowance for differing taste.

At its worst, the Fashion Post disputes its victims' right to be in public at all, Dressed Like That. This is bad enough; we have a lot of nerve bemoaning our relative scarcity at conferences when we ourselves add a fashion gauntlet to all the other gauntlets involved in getting to a conference. What's worse, though, is that it isn't always about dress. "Dress" can be code for "she's too fat," or "she's too old," or "she's too butch," or "she's too femme." It's not just a fashion gauntlet any more; it's an all-over image gauntlet.

I'm a fat, scarred, homely, aging woman with unfashionably long ("hippie") hair and a decidedly off-center sartorial sense. I can think of plenty of blogging women I frankly don't ever want to see at a conference, because I don't want to endure that laser-like visual inspection, don't want to think about the mockery with which I'll be spoken of in private later. Definitely not what I go to conferences for.

I challenge all my fellow misbehaving conference-goers to forego the Fashion Posts for the next conference they go to. Further, I challenge us to change the Fashion Post genre. Hey, I saw this unbelievably cool outfit at ACRL, a gorgeous swirly tan dress with a net shawl tied at the waist and let drape...

Where did the anti-porn feminists go?

The Boston Globe asks a question I've been wondering about, as much of the blogosphere I see defines porn as 'not worksafe', but otherwise perfectly mainstream, entertainment.

Perhaps it's porn's very ubiquity that has most weakened the anti-pornography case, feminist and conservative. Thanks to the growth of home-video pornography in the 1980s and the more recent shift to the Internet, far more people have access to X-rated material than ever before. As Linda Williams [a film studies professor and leading porn theorist] puts it, ''In a way I think MacKinnon and Dworkin were able to invoke the kind of horror that they did at pornography at a time when not as many people had seen it. For better or for worse, now it has become part of the vernacular of our way of talking about picturing sex to ourselves.''

MacKinnon agrees, though she sees the shift as more insidious: ''The data just show that pornography sets community standards, so the more pornography there is, the less will be seen to be wrong with it. It's just its own intrinsic dynamic.''

speakers within 4000 kroner of Bergen?

It's tough trying to arrange a speaker series on a budget. We're running a seminar on web design and interaction design, mostly for students at the university and at the art college, and we're looking for excellent women speakers on these and related topics - web standards would be good, or even design of social websites or interface design or information architecture. I was thinking of someone in Helsinki but the flight's too expensive. Do you have any suggestions for women who know a lot about these areas, who would accept a standard (sadly modest) university guest lecturer fee (about $250 with the current low dollar rate) and who live in a big enough, close enough city that the flight wouldn't be too expensive? That means someone who lives in Norway, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, London, Nice, Paris, New York (if willing to put up with jetlag and economy flight) but not most of Scandinavia, it seems. Even if we can't afford them (you) this round I'd love to hear about them (you!)

And do you think this is a good or appropriate use of a blog like Misbehaving? Hunting for a speaker, I realise that we really do need better ways for connecting people. In this case I really would like someone different from me, I'd love to find someone I didn't already know about.

Decline in Women in IT

Fewer Women in IT than in 1983. I can't find any conjectures from the Commission about why this may have happened:

A study released yesterday by the US Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology found a decline in the share of computer science jobs held by women over the past couple of decades.

In 1983, women held 30.5 per cent of the jobs in the category of computer systems analysts and scientists, programmers and postsecondary computer science teachers, according to the commission. That figure declined to 27.2 per cent in 2002. "

Also another sameoldsameold article from the arriere-garde New York Times about how there are not a lot of women in the games industry, games are too violent, women like the Sims because it is social, yadda yadda. What do Women Game Designers Want?. (BTW the old riff on the catchphrase "What do Women Want?" -- like we're incomprehensible aliens and the assumed voice is male -- is really nauseating.)