Category: Politics and society

Posted on

Harassing photography and recording; ethics and policies

This article originally appeared on Geek Feminism.

We’re starting to collect some examples of photography/recording harassment experiences (still open , and some of the kinds of problems people mention there and elsewhere are:

  • photography/recording conducted in a way that is designed to hide the fact of the photography/recording from the subject both before and after the shot/recording happens
  • photography/recording that is indifferent to or careless of the subject’s feelings about being photographed/recorded
  • photography/recording that is othering: “wow, women! *click click*” or “hey, babe, smile for the camera!” or later posted with othering, sexist or creepy commentary
  • failing or refusing to stop photographing/recording on an explicit request or appearance of discomfort (eg turning away or frowning or covering one’s face, etc)
  • publishing photographs without the subject’s consent, or after the subject’s explicit refusal of consent
  • use of photographs to implicitly or explicitly endorse an event or community, eg, using pics of smiling participants from the previous year in publicity materials, without consent

Now most of these things are legal in my region (see NSW Photographer’s Rights, which as you will guess from the title is not focussed on subject’s concerns, but which is informative) and in many others. I believe the only exception (in NSW) may be the last, because the use of someone’s image to promote a product requires a model release, that is, consent from the subject. Whether/when using someone’s photo on a website is considered promotion I don’t know but that’s a side point.

For that matter, I’m not even arguing that they should be illegal or actionable (in this piece anyway, perhaps some of them are arguable). I’m sympathetic to many of the uses of non-consensual photography, even (art, journalism, historical documentation). I’m arguing more narrowly that in the context of geek events, which are usually private and which can therefore impose additional restrictions on behaviour as a condition of entry, that restrictions on photography could prevent some harassment. (As a short and possibly sloppy definition for people who haven’t seen many harassment discussions, I would define harassment as “unwelcome interpersonal interactions, which either a reasonable person would know are unwelcome, or which were stated to be unwelcome but continued after that.”)

I’m arguing that this collection of behaviours around photographs makes geek events hostile to some participants, especially women. After all, even though it’s (I think) legal to sneak-photograph a woman’s face, write a little essay about how attractive you find her and try and get it on Flickr Explore even as she emails you to say that she’s upset and repeatedly request that you take it down, that doesn’t mean it’s ethical.

Now, obviously it would be nice not to have to spell ethical behaviour out to people, but the need for anti-harassment policies (and, for that matter, law) makes it clear that geek events do need to do so.

There’s quite a range of possible policies that could be adopted around photography:

  • the status quo, obviously, which at many geek events is that any photography/recording that would be legally allowed in public spaces is allowed there;
  • photography/recording should be treated like other potentially harassing interpersonal interactions at an event, that is, when one person in the interaction says “stop” or “leave me alone” (etc), the interaction must end;
  • photography/recording shouldn’t be done in such a way as to hide from the subject that it’s happening, and upon the subject’s request the photo/footage/etc must be deleted;
  • subjects cannot be photographed/recorded without prior explicit consent; and/or
  • the above combined with some kind of explicit opt-in or opt-out marking so that one doesn’t need to necessarily ask every time if one can see the marking (in various conversations on this I have to say my main concern tends to be the need to peer closely at people’s chests to see their “PHOTOS/VIDEOS OK” or “NO PHOTOS/VIDEOS” marking on their badge, however, Skud says it works well at Wiscon).

There might be certain additional freedoms or restrictions regarding crowd photography/recording and/or photography/recording of organisers, scheduled speakers and people actively highlighted in similar formal events.

What do you think? Whether a photographer/videographer/recorder or subject of same, what do you think appropriate ethics are when photographing/recording at private geek events, and what do you think could/should be codified as policy?

Note to commenters: there are a couple of things that tend to come up a lot in these sorts of discussions, which are:

  1. “but this is perfectly legal [in my jurisdiction]”
  2. some geeks, including geek photographers, are shy and asking strangers for permission to photograph them is a confronting interaction, and thus very hard on shy people

I’m not saying that you need to totally avoid discussion of these points in comments here, but you can safely assume that everyone knows these points and has to some degree taken them into account and go from there. (My own perspective on the last one is that it’s odd at best to pay an enormous amount of heed to the social comfort of photographers at the expense of their subjects. You could, of course, consider both together.) Also if talking about legal aspects, do specify which jurisdiction(s) you are talking about: this is an area where laws vary substantially.

Posted on

Confession: I’ve been a girlfriend

This article originally appeared on Geek Feminism.

True story! I’m a wife now. I’ve moved up in the WAG acronym.

There’s been a lot of pushback on Cate’s guest post and with good reason, because it can be easily read as positing that geek woman are mutually exclusive from women who have a geek partner dichotomy:

  • She’s not a techie, she’s a girlfriend
  • the girlfriend… the lead user… the commenter
  • a girlfriend… rather than a genuine tech woman
  • the girlfriend, or another woman near tech
  • Sorry girlfriend, you’re not a geek.

Here’s another thing: there’s a lot of geek my then-boyfriend-now-husband introduced me to. Linux was a big one. A great deal of the C programming language. Digital music, both ripping and listening. Actual other living geeks, as opposed to Eric Raymond’s J Random Hacker. Suffice to say that his influence on the nature of my geekdom has been substantial (and vice versa, which needs to be said).

And frankly while a lot of people are introduced to geekdom or new geekdoms by partners, it’s considered rather a shameful thing in my experience, especially if it was a male partner. If a man taught a woman to do something, or a man remains better at that thing than the woman he taught is at it, it’s as if the woman doesn’t have that interest or skill at all. She is assumed to be the man’s puppet.

There is something real, in my experience, about less involved women being asked to give “the woman’s perspective” on geekdom, as if their experience is “more woman” than that of heavily involved geek women, as if very geeky women have forfeited “the woman’s perspective”. But there’s also equally difficult experiences:

  1. the assumption by geeks that a woman geek with a partner, especially a male one, is not geeky, or only geeky because of internal relationship dynamics, rather than being ‘really’ geeky (whatever that means)
  2. the experience some non-geek women or newly geek women report, of experiencing hostility from geek women for “making them look bad” and from geeks in general for being too mainstream or feminine (and hence boring or thoughtless)

We’re not going to get anywhere with the above by talking about girlfriends as if they aren’t us, or as if they can’t become us or we them. I think that adopting girlfriend as a metaphor is harmful: the primary meaning is (some subset of) women who have a partner. Anything said about metaphorical girlfriends will quickly be taken to apply to literal girlfriends, as in women who have partners, and used against them, even if it was supposed to be a metaphor for women who are granted some credibility as more woman because they are less geek (which is, I think, what Cate is using the term “girlfriend” to mean, although it isn’t totally clear to me).

We have to not feed the “femininity is mainstream and therefore not geek” beast.

Additional concerns about Cate’s post that were raised in her comments and which I share:

  • the geekiness hierarchy in which people who build things trump people who comment, use, or analyse in geekiness. If nothing else, I personally spend a lot of time writing feminist stuff on the Internet, as well as coding, and I’m not accustomed to thinking of one as the less geeky activity than the other
  • the conflation of “geek” with “programmer” or “computer geek”, which as several commenters noted we’re rightly committed to not doing around here

By the way, a little bit of background on our process: guest posts here tend to be selected by one author and put up here, we all have access to the “Guest Poster” account. So that accounts for the appearance of a guest post with a message/metaphor that I at least don’t especially like, if you are wondering! There’s no cabal, etc.

Posted on

On feeling less safe

This article originally appeared on Geek Feminism.

Over at Hoyden About Town, Wildly Parenthetical considers Tackling Misogyny: Procedures or Social Sanctions?:

But more interesting has been the discussion about formal and informal mechanisms for dealing with sexual harassment. There are lots of reasons that formal mechanisms don’t work for lots of people… So we have the suggestion of informal “shunning’. Some have, with more and less hyperbole, suggested that without the formality of systems of justice and the “certainty’ they’re meant to bring, individuals could wind up excluded on heresay; this is the “OMG WITCHHUNT!’ objection. And others have pointed out that social sanctions are applied to all kinds of behaviours that are disapproved of in our society, and why should this particular behaviour be any different? I am pretty much with the latter group, although I understand those who think that we should be putting our energies towards fixing the formal systems rather than developing shun-lists…

I left a comment that I want to re-post here, since it captures neatly a lot of my more negative feelings about discussions around anti-harassment policies and such, which a lot of people in the geek community consider informal since geeks themselves will enforce them.

My response (very slightly edited here) was as follows:

I am a fan of social sanctions in an ideal world. There tend to be two problems with introducing it in practice:

  1. Some people at either the level of instinct or the level of rational analysis find it almost impossible to distinguish from bullying (see the Geek Social Fallacies, especially ) and refuse to participate or actively attempt to defend the person sanctioned or decide to sanction the sanctioners, causing a lot of internal community conflict.
  2. It often turns out (at least in communities that I’m a part of) that not as many people are opposed to sexual harassment as one might hope. So a substantial fraction of participants oppose social sanctions or vow to not enforce them because it turns out they like sexual harassment just fine.

Option 2 is always a really distressing conversation to have in a community you felt safe in; you seldom feel safe after it turns out that a loud minority feel that sexual harassment is the effective/normal/desirable (at least, but not exclusively) heterosexual mating strategy.

How is everyone else feeling about the geek community after whatever their latest local round of feminist discussion was? I’m far from entirely negative, but there are definitely whole new places I don’t feel safe from harassment and indeed assault now.

Posted on

More on the Lib/Nat coalition and the CDP

As per my previous post, the Christian Democratic Party, headed by Fred Nile, did rather well in the State election for the Legislative Council (the upper house, for which this was a half election, ie, half the seats vacant).

Per Jo Tamar at Hoyden About Town, the Lib/Nats nominated the CDP as their Second Preference Group, meaning that in a situation where someone had to be removed from the Lib/Nat ballot due to death or disqualification, all Lib/Nat preferences would flow to the CDP unless the voter had specifically directed otherwise.

In addition, and with, I think (I’d have to remind myself how preferences flow in that counting system from a successful party, but I believe they do flow) considerably more influence on the result, per Tally Room, the Lib/Nats also directed their voters to actively (ie, not just in case of emergency) direct preferences to the CDP, per for example these election leaflets: How to Vote Liberal for Goulburn, How to vote Liberal for Strathfield. Under “Step 2 (larger ballot paper)” these leaflets show a large “1” against GROUP A LIBERALS/NATIONALS and a smaller “2” against GROUP F CHRISTIAN DEMOCRATIC PARTY (FRED NILE GROUP).

In at least some seats, see Shellharbour for an example, the CDP directed both lower and upper house preferences to the Liberals/Nationals.

Posted on

Election commentary: the day after the mega-wipeout

I find elections immensely stressful: the outcome seems high stakes (likely to impact dramatically on me in all sorts of ways), and yet both impenetrable and unalterable. Erg. And I’m also wary of armchair campaigning on the Internet. Everyone speaks so confidently! Everyone gets stuff wrong so much!

Also NSW State politics, so discouraging. At least at the Federal level there’s been one major party who I would only mildly dislike in government, in elections to date. For the last two NSW elections that hasn’t been so.

However, I found a few comments interesting in the followup to the NSW State election yesterday, in which the conservative Liberal/National coalition nearly wiped the unions-and-left-or-centrists-depending-on-where-you-stand ALP off the map. Note again when I say “interesting” I have no idea if they are actually correct.

First Liam at Hoyden About Town:

The bad bad news of the morning is the high Christian Democrat vote in the [Legislative Council]; that’s potentially very frightening indeed.

Indeed.

Fran Barlow at Larvatus Prodeo on the under-performance of the Greens (who received very little of the disaffected ALP vote after much expectation):

Just up the road from us was a Liberal sign which read “Make NSW Number 1″ but which, partially obscured by a shrub, read “Make NSW Numb”. That’s certainly how those voters who weren’t viscerally angry seemed. Standing on a polling booth yesterday, lots of voters didn’t even bother taking [how to vote cards]. They’d made up their minds as to for whom they weren’t voting and couldn’t give a proverbial over what else people were saying.

If we Greens were seen as a credible chance of forming, or even supporting, a new government, our issues would have been moderately useful. In any election where there are no issues beyond the integrity of the existing government itself, our brand and our issues are of almost no marginal use at all. Accordingly, much of our mediocre performance was a consequence of this election being in practice more like a plebiscite.

Kim at Larvatus Prodeo, also on the Greens:

It may be that the concentration of resources and energy on winning lower house seats comes at the expense of a state wide strategy designed to increase the vote incrementally everywhere, and have a better shot at winning more upper house seats. And it may be that The Greens’ lower house vote has reached a plateau in inner city suburbs. Now that the Liberals have eschewed preferencing Greens, lower house representation in single member electoral systems may be a bridge too far. (Adam Bandt will have a mighty fight on his hands in Melbourne, Tanya Plibersek and Anthony Albanese can sleep more soundly.)

Liberals drink lattes too. In Sydney, as in Brisbane, demographic change and changes to land use have made the Tories competitive in the inner city.

I have no idea if these are more right than anyone else (well, aside from Liam, I’m willing to go with that) but so far they’re what I’ve found interesting.

Posted on

Polling place accessibility and the NSW state election

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

I get the impression that the NSW election sees a slight improvement over the Federal election in polling place accessibility information.

Here’s some sample information provided from my electorate:

A— Public School: “Fully Wheelchair Accessible”
B— Public School: “Assisted Access: Building has lips and/or steps, No designated disabled parking spot, No disabled toilet, Path of travel from car park may be difficult”
C— Public School: “Assisted Access: No designated disabled parking spot, No disabled toilet”

You can find out this for any electorate by going to Polling Places and finding the electorate. Note that information comes up in a pop-up page, and it is embedded in a Google Map by default, unless you select the link that reads “Text” next to the name of the electorate.

In addition to wheelchair information the main accessibility page has some information for provisions for vision impaired people:

Luminance contrast design on election furniture

Certain cardboard furniture, such as the ballot box, used at State and Local Government elections have luminous contrast markings to assist electors with depth perception.

Hand held magnifiers and user friendly pencils

All polling places and pre-poll voting centres have hand held magnifiers and maxi pencils and voting instructions in large print, available to assist electors who may have difficulty reading the ballot paper or marking the squares. If you require either of these items, please ask an election offical [sic].

Information off the top of my head that isn’t provided:

  • information about provision of seats in waiting/queuing areas
  • information about distances from parking or entrances to the voting area
  • information about non-wheelchair mobility aids

In my state electorate, I count 26 polling places (including Sydney Town Hall, which is located away from my electorate and is a polling place for every electorate in the state). Of these 7 are listed as fully wheelchair accessible (including Town Hall), and another 10 as assisted access. My nearest polling place is 200m away, assisted access 500m away and fully wheelchair accessible about 1km away, although as I live very close to the local business district we have a high density of nearby polling places.

How does your electorate look? How many fully wheelchair accessible polling places, how many assisted access, and how close are they to you? What information is missing from the descriptions?

For more on polling accessibility check:

Posted on

Life at 1, 3, 5: general discussion

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

Background: this post is about the Life series that just finished airing on the ABC and which is affiliated with Growing Up in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children. Life at 1, Life at 3 and Life at 5 are available on ABC iView for a little while longer for those with Australian IPs and to whom it is accessible.

Now that I’ve done the specific posts, does anyone have thoughts about the Life series in general? Here’s a few thoughts on individual scenes:

  • In Life at 1 I love the super-serious newborn shot of Shine looking out at the world grouchily.
  • Jara’na was awesome in Life at 3, it was a real shame there was so much focus on his separation anxiety rather than his inventive play and sense of the dramatic.
  • My favourite Life at 5 scenes were both from the Marshmallow Test. One was Anastasia looking directly into the camera and popping the single marshmallow straight in her mouth for immediate gratification, and the other was Shine delicately stepping around the room, not looking at the marshmallow. (Actually, Wyatt was pretty cute too, testing himself by putting his mouth around it but not lifting it from the plate!)

On the series as a whole:

  • I wish we could see more of the eleven children meeting each other, which they have clearly done several times now, but it’s only been shown for the purposes of very brief cut shots of birthday parties and racing through parks. As the series goes on age-peer relationships will grow in importance, it would make sense, although it wouldn’t be totally representative of their social interactions, to begin to show them interacting with each other.
  • Judging from the birthdates of the children on the website, they’re the six year old cohort this year. It sounded as if there are definitely plans for Life at 7 to film next year and presumably air in 2013, and the print version of the Sydney Morning Herald suggested that the film-makers would like to go through the teenage years, although they don’t have funding yet and perhaps would plan less frequent updates. (Perhaps only one or two during high school.) I think the series would be improved if they could go out to three or four episodes from Life at 7 onwards.

Speaking of more content, I haven’t gone through the website‘s content, anything good there?

And a conversation about introversion/extroversion from comments:

blue milk:

But there is much to feel concerned about, even in this small segment you have highlighted here, and I found others when I was watching the series too, like the ways in which introverted babies versus extroverted babies were discussed in terms of their performance during some of those classic experiments about attachment and seperation.

Me:

But on that subject I was also rather surprised by the interpretation of the separation experiments. I was under the impression that they were usually interpreted the other way around; that a child should show distress at separation from their primary carer, not that a approx 12mo child should be able to cope with that. (Both “shoulds” have their problems!) But Ben’s separation anxiety, and the anxiety Jara’na develops later as a toddler, are both portrayed as extremely worrying.

We view my own son as moderately extroverted, and his reaction would have been more anxious than any of those shown except Ben’s.

They said something at some point about all personality types being valuable, and my husband (who is extremely introverted) said something like “just because a personality type exists, doesn’t make it valuable!” The show doesn’t really back up this claim with a discussion of the values of introversion, or for that matter of caution about carer separation or strangers! The only Life at 1 claim about introversion is that it exists, basically.

There’s also been talk on Twitter at #lifeat5.

Feel free to use comments here to address any aspect of the series.

See other Life posts at Hoyden: Life at 1: breastfeeding, Life at 3: obesity, Life at 1, 3, 5: disability

Posted on

Life at 1, 3, 5: disability

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

Background: this post is about the Life series that just finished airing on the ABC and which is affiliated with Growing Up in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children. Life at 1, Life at 3 and Life at 5 are available on ABC iView for a little while longer for those with Australian IPs and to whom it is accessible.

It’s not uniformly positive, but I was a bit more impressed with the handling of disability on Life than I was of breastfeeding or obesity. It’s quite possible I’m not as sensitised though.

As one would expect statistically, when you select eleven families and follow them for four years, there are several families with members who have illnesses or disability. Sofia’s father Anthony was treated for lymphoma just prior to Life at 1, so that’s only briefly treated and shown in a few still shots of baby Sofia visiting Anthony in hospital. Anthony is shown in hospital again briefly in Life at 5, receiving test results after a false recurrence scare. But the families who have members with disabilities during the series most prominently are Loulou’s and Daniel’s.

Daniel is the second child of Rodney and Kathryn, and in Life at 1 he is shown visiting his brother Jamie in hospital. Jamie was about three at the time and had a brain injury recently acquired in a near-drowning. He was almost always shown in Life at 1 and Life at 3 seated in a slightly reclined wheelchair, with little or no limb movement shown (in Life at 1 he is also shown in Kathryn’s arms in a couple of scenes, and once in bed with Daniel touching him). In Life at 3 he was described as also experiencing high levels of chronic pain, and at the end of the episode, there is a second segment returning to Daniel’s family for Jamie’s funeral (which was filmed and broadcast), as Jamie had died of pneumonia aged four and a half.

I was pleased that the circumstances of Jamie’s accident weren’t dwelt on very much (other than the fact that it occurred in a backyard pool, no details of the accident are given), it would have seemed trite to insert a long pool safety lesson. At least to me, the narration seemed generally to portray Jamie as a person in a family as did Jamie’s parents, although Rodney has a piece to camera in Life at 1 in which he discusses avoiding Jamie.

The main concern in Life at 1 with the treatment of Jamie was, to me, the extent of “what about Daniel?” about the portrayal. There’s quite a bit of “what about [child]?” in the discussion of the families generally. In this case it’s playing into a cultural narrative of concern about a disabled child focussing mainly on their abled sibling. The family themselves express some similar concerns, Rodney and Daniel’s grandmother more than Kathryn.

Kathryn is herself disabled, with a vision impairment. This is treated fairly neutrally: there are small sequences in Life at 1 showing her dressing Daniel by feel:

[Kathryn is pulling a red t-shirt over Daniel’s head.]

Narrator: Daniel will not only have to adapt to life with a disabled brother. His mother is completely blind in one eye.

Kathryn: Where’s your head?

Narrator: Over the past two months a cataract has formed on Kathryn’s good eye. Her sight is now extremely limited.

Kathryn: I can see but most of it is feel. Most of it’s my hands, knowing what to grab.

In Life at 5 she is shown teaching Daniel to help her with crossing roads and with bus travel. As is shown a little in the segment above, it’s again almost entirely considered in light of Daniel: is it a good challenge for his development, or too stressful?

Life at 3 Part One also describes disability. Both of Loulou’s parents have had depressive illness between Life at 1 and Life at 3, Louise’s is described as having grief following from miscarriages after Loulou’s birth and then post-natal depression and Shannon’s as an acute episode in a chronic condition related to a motorcycle injury.

There’s a moment of problematic framing in the discussion of Louise’s depression, in which a decision about medication is framed as the “brave” choice:

[A close-up of a cake being cut is shown.]

Narrator: By the time Loulou was one, Louise had been assessed for post-natal depression.

[Louise is shown in front of the cake, look around at adults attending Loulou’s birthday party.]

Louise: Everyone for cake? Yes?

Narrator: She was borderline, and the doctors recommended medication. But Louise bravely tried to soldier on and said no to the drugs.

Later, after Loulou begins childcare:

Narrator: The depth of her anxiety made it clear Louise needed help. She took her doctor’s advice and went on to anti-depressants. By the time Loulou turned two, Louise was back on track and emotionally stable.

Shannon’s acute depression episode occurred shortly after, and the narration leaves that alone more so that Shannon can himself consider the impact of his illness, although again at least the portion shown is largely “what about Loulou?”:

[Shannon, a pale-skinned man with close-cropped dark hair is shown speaking to camera inside a brick walled building with light coming in through the windows and surrounded by vehicle parts, where earlier he has been working on a motorbike.]

Shannon: That was a big step for me. “You have a mental illness, a depressive mental illness, that you will need to deal with and be conscious of and shield your daughter and your partner and and anyone else who could be collatoral damage from for the rest of your life.” That was tough. That was really tough.

What did you think? I think this could have been worse with either a more tragic air or the Fighting Fat episode’s constant refrain of “risk” but that this is still a particularly problematic area for the show to be keeping its tight focus on the particular impact on the abled child when talking about family members with disabilities.

See other Life posts at Hoyden: Life at 1: breastfeeding, Life at 3: obesity

Posted on

Impostor syndrome and hiring power

This article originally appeared on Geek Feminism.

This is an Ask a Geek Feminist question:

What are some ways in which I can avoid rejecting people who suffer from impostor syndrome when they apply for a job?

I’ve recently been promoted to a position where I’m somewhat responsible for hiring people. I would like to increase the diversity of new hires, and so I’m more likely to put applications from women through to the interview stage.

Following that though I don’t want to lose out on quality applicants as they are modest about their achievements and abilities, due to impostor syndrome or otherwise.

Giving an automatic “+10 kickass” to every female applicant as they may suffer from impostor syndrome seems to be a strategy without much merit. Getting everyone to exhibit their full potential is clearly the better solution.

Can you suggest interview strategies that would create the environment in which women (and indeed anyone) will be better able to convince me of their suitability for the role?

I don’t have so many specific interview strategies, but I’ve got plenty of ideas for hiring strategies in general, I hope you can adopt some of them and perhaps our commenters can talk about the interview.

First, a should be obvious: a +10 kickass bonus may be illegal discrimination in your geographic area. If it is, definitely don’t do that.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about soliciting applications. Now, there’s a couple of things that stop some women at this point. First, there’s a tendency to regard themselves as underqualified for perfectly suitable jobs. Next, there’s concern that they needn’t bother, as a woman’s name will cause you to discount their resume. Some suggestions:

  1. get your signalling right. You want to say “women friendly employer” in your advertisements without discriminatory pro-women statements. This at least gets you past the “I’m not a man” part of impostor syndrome. Here’s some things you should be doing:
    • advertising all relevant open positions on a women’s job list such as, say, LinuxChix’s jobposts for open source jobs. This at least shows that you aren’t actively avoiding women applicants.
    • including on your full ads the “equal opportunity” boilerplate you might be able to find on other local job ads
    • including information on the “Careers” section of your website about your carer leave, your retirement contributions, your shared sick leave pool, your friendliness to part-time employees if any of these hold

    Not only are these things attractive to many women (and yes, some men as well) in and of themselves, they also signal in various ways that when you picture your new hire, the picture isn’t young, white, able-bodied, male, etc etc.

  2. if your employer has recently had a similar (especially perhaps slightly more junior) position available, get the resumes of the people who were considered the better applicants from the hiring manager, HR person or recruiter, and re-consider them for the new position (probably there would need to be some kind of process of tracking and perhaps re-application here, but I’ll handwave that problem to you).
  3. consider internal employees in more junior positions as potential applicants. Depending on the size of the company, other managers might be able to recommend people to you who are overqualified for their position (or possibly not, if they are getting good work from them)
  4. consider whether you really need experience that skews very very male. For example, does someone have to have open source development experience? Are there alternative ways that someone could have learned the skills you need?

And now for considering applications prior to interview:

  1. you may not be able to say you’re doing this, but in order to avoid bias on the basis of gender or other demographic characteristics, for as long as possible in the process keep names off resumes. Have names and addresses scraped from resumes by someone before you see them, and do as much ranking as you can prior to finding out the names and details of the applicants.
  2. avoid judgements about cultural fit at this stage.
  3. there are reasons companies rely on the recommendations of existing employees, but for each open position, try and select some applicants for interview who didn’t come in via the company networks in order to avoid duplicating your company’s present demographic by hiring all their friends

In the interview itself here is a strategy for getting people to talk about their successes when they are susceptible to impostor syndrome (note that any candidate might be part of an oppressed group, so don’t limit these to women candidates): ask about something the candidate did that benefited someone else. How did they save their company money or helped a team member learn what they needed to know? Present them with cooperative scenarios where they need to help you or your employer do something as well as or instead of competitive scenarios where they need to prove they are the single right person for the position. If anyone can flesh this out to specific example questions in the comments, that would be useful.

I strongly recommend reading Women Don’t Ask by Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever for good solid information both about women’s negotiation and self-promotion strategies and why they use those strategies, namely, that competitive and aggressive interpersonal strategies are simply not effective for most women because of negative responses to perceived aggression in women.

Posted on

Life at 3: obesity

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

Background: this post is about the Life series currently airing on the ABC and affiliated with Growing Up in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children, specifically the episode Life at 3, Part One: Fighting Fat. It is presently available in full on iView for those with Australian IPs and to whom it is accessible.

Ooo boy. It probably wasn’t ever going to be good, was it?

Let’s start with the basics:

Headless fatties. (Recalling that headlessness is a major obesity risk factor!). Headless fatties are shown at:

  • 3:06–3:44: Camera pans horizontally past a blurred very slightly rounded pale-skinned bare abdomen, a blurred shape that might be a pale upper arm outside a black sleeveless top, a second pale abdomen with arms crossed at the top of it, a fatter pale abdomen with (probably male?) breast tissue resting on it, and then cuts to two presumed women’s bodies shown neck to knee and wearing black bra and panties. Both women are pale skinned and one is fatter than the other. They spin around simultaneously from presenting their front to the camera to presenting their back. There is a close-up of them joining hands, some of their upper leg and buttock flesh is in the shot. The camera cuts to a male torso like the fatter one shown previously, and he turns around too, showing his torso from every angle.
  • 32:24–32:50: a brown-skinned fat male torso in black underpants spins to face the camera. It shifts its weight over each leg and spins again. It is joined by a pale slightly rounded woman’s torso in black bra and underpants, a pale fat man’s torso (probably the one from the previous sequence) and a second pale, fatter woman’s torso. They turn simultaneously to have their backs to the camera. The nearest torso, that of the pale man, shows some buttock cleavage.

Headless fatties. CHECK.

[Stephen Zubrick, Chair, Advisory Group, Longitudinal Study of Australian Children appears, as he does throughout the series, in a headshot, looking slightly to the left of camera. He is a late middle-age pale-skinned man with short dark hair.]

Stephen Zubrick: Our data is showing us that one in four toddlers is overweight or obese.

The Life series doesn’t push back much on the science at any point. For example, in Life at One, saliva cortisol samples were taken from the babies and it was assumed without proof that high cortisol equalled a stressed individual baby. Now, I have no medical/biological background at all, but I do have an experimental background, and I spent the whole time mentally screaming “is that a valid assumption? or does cortisol correlate with stress only across a population?” And in fact they had to back away from the automatic interpretation when Joshua, who they didn’t seem to want to interpret as stressed, had very high cortisol. Perhaps… he was just sick! Likewise, the limits of the psychological tests they run on the children in terms of cultural assumptions, edge cases, controls, error margins are never discussed. Obviously there’s a limit to the extent to which this can be done in a TV episode, but in general I wish the series was less “the experts have worked their magic! this child is fat/stressed/extroverted/determined! The end!”

And so, it’s no surprise to find out that this is how obesity is treated. How is obesity in toddlers measured? How strong is the link with childhood or adult obesity? How strong is the link between those and adult disease? And, most elementary to me, how many children are supposed to be overweight or obese? Measures of ‘healthy’ weight are often population based, where the top X% of weight, or BMI, or weight-for-height is defined as overweight, but yet, it is by definition expected that X% of people will be found in that top X%. I’d definitely like to be convinced that their measure of “overweight or obese” does not define overweight to be the top 25% of the population somehow.

There’s fairly standard fatphobic language about food: “good”, “bad”, and some tsking at the parents for using what the show’s writers seem to consider a euphemism, “treat food”. Then there’s this odd little sequence:

[Visuals of Ben and a sibling eating.]

Narrator: When we asked parents why they introduced their child to treat food the most common reason given is to reward them for good behaviour.

[Visuals of Daniel eating from a yoghurt container while his mother Kathryn watches.]

Kathryn: Finished?

Daniel: No!

[Visuals of Wyatt eating a sandwich at a table and looking at his father Glen.]

Narrator: But for our parents [note, here they seem to mean “the parents featured in the documentary”, not “the parents of the viewers”], unhealthy treat food was hardly ever offered up as a reward.

[Headshots of individual parents.]

Kylie [mother of Ben]: Aw crap I can’t even remember what we were given. [Rolls eyes.] Probably Vegemite sandwiches.

Michelle [mother of Jara’na]: Yeah we didn’t sort of get a lot of rewards when we were kids. There was too many of us.

Paul [father of Ben]: I don’t think there actually was a lot of time I did actually get a reward for doing anything good or anything like that. I kinda just had to do it.

Bernadette [mother of Sofia]: I think I got to stay up late and watch TV with my Dad as a reward! [laughs]

Steffi [mother of Joshua]: Maybe go to the park. Maybe go to the zoo. Or maybe my mother make me a new dress.

Kathryn [mother of Daniel]: My reward was actual praise. I didn’t get any food or anything like that. So once in a while you’d get, I’d get maybe a treat, but much of it was just mainly praise.

Narrator: Over one generation we are seeing a massive cultural change in the way we use and view food. Unfortunately, this shift has coincided with a dramatic reduction in how much physical activity our children do.

The statement about physical activity appears to be driven by the study’s data, but it seems that the “food was never used as a reward in 1975” hypothesis was one the writers came up with themselves based on interviewing parents of three year olds about how they believe they were rewarded as, say, eight year olds (since they mostly won’t remember being three). Aggravating in a series that is supposed to be informed by the study.

Another problem with this episode is a structural problem with the entire series. There are two episodes for each age group, each loosely focused around a specific issue. Life at 3’s two episodes are Fighting Fat and Bad Behaviour. Each of the children is allocated to an episode and their development and family situation is partly discussed for its own sake and partly discussed with relevance to the topic at hand.

For Fighting Fat this means that the primary interest in each of the toddlers it focuses on is “will it make them fat?”

So we have Joshua, who is among other things a toddler, of Chinese ethnicity, a younger brother, the child of an immigrant mother and the child of a father who downsized his career for his family and wants a low-pressure environment for his children. What’s the most interesting thing about Joshua at age three? Apparently that children of recent immigrants might get fat.

We have Ben, who is among other things a toddler, of unmentioned ethnicity (the cultural identity of most of the pale-skinned children is unremarked on), a survivor of a quintuplet pregnancy and a premature and very low weight birth, a brother to his quintuplet siblings and an older sibling. What’s the most interesting thing about Ben at age three? Apparently that children with low birth weights might get fat.

We have Shine, who is among other things a toddler, of unmentioned ethnicity (in Life at 5 her father meets his birth family, who are Irish), a child living in poverty, a youngest sibling in a larger family, and the biological child of an adoptee. What’s the most interesting thing about Shine at three? Apparently that children in poorer families might get fat.

It probably had to happen in some form. Could you get a childhood study funded right now that didn’t have a major obesity focus? But the television treatment is very uncritical, and moreover appropriates several potentially interesting standalone stories.

See other Life posts at Hoyden: Life at 1: breastfeeding, Life at 1, 3, 5: disability, Life at 1, 3, 5: general discussion.