Politics and society – Page 18

October 29, 2010August 21, 2016

Baby and startup? Big deal! Or, perhaps, a big deal?

This article originally appeared on Geek Feminism.

Years back I read Paul Graham’s How to Start a Startup essay, which includes this footnote:

One advantage startups have over established companies is that there are no discrimination laws about starting businesses. For example, I would be reluctant to start a startup with a woman who had small children, or was likely to have them soon. But you’re not allowed to ask prospective employees if they plan to have kids soon.

Which, well, OK, I’m not in the business of forcing Paul Graham to start businesses with people he doesn’t want to start businesses with. But it bugged me for the obvious reasons, not least because, well, you know, men have small children too sometimes. Thank goodness they don’t have to put any work into them. Phew. Lucky escape there, men. Better make sure we keep that labour division in place.

Anyway, in the last few days, Tara Brown wrote this, in response to a few posts by men about having kids and doing a startup.

I am 35 years old, I have an 8 month old child that I breastfeed full-time and I am doing a startup. Big deal. Who isn’t?

Many women start businesses after having a kid, usually because they want to stay home and have an income. This was what I wanted to do after I had Ripley. I decided I wanted to look after him exclusively for his first year and then get a job as a consultant or something where I could continue staying at home with him. My husband and I took off with Ripley to Singapore and France and during that time somehow I ended up a co-founder of Noot.

I have a 9 month old baby (breastfed a fair bit as it happens, although you should have seen him get stuck into ciabatta bread today), and… I’m not doing a startup. I wouldn’t have been a great business partner or core employee for a while after birth, because it made me sick. I wouldn’t be a great partner or employee right now either, in fact, because he brings home illnesses from daycare and so we’re sick and exhausted constantly. (Not that I’m keen to encourage Paul Graham to add to the people he won’t start businesses with, but my husband gets these too, funnily enough.) I did recover our main fileserver when he was 12 days old. Pro tip: if you have any suspicion your hard drive is failing, replace it prior to the birth of your baby. (But then, I had to do the same thing the other week. Pro tip: mobile 9 month olds get in the way of hard drive replacements more than 2 week olds. Wait, that wasn’t a tip. Sorry. Pro tip: don’t have hard drives that fail.) I work various part-time and casual things now to afford the daycare to finish my PhD.

But Tara Brown isn’t telling everyone’s story: she’s telling hers, and she acknowledges that she has some advantages:

Honestly, I never expected to write this blog post because I just figured this is what every other woman that is working and has a baby must do, not something to make a big deal out of. But when I saw that email from Jason Calacanis and Jason Roberts, I just had to speak up so that more women can tell these guys that what they are doing is not extraordinary by any means. I mean come on, Jason Calacanis is rich, his wife stays at home and they have a night nanny. Not exactly a tough situation. What’s tough is single mothers and fathers trying to raise their kids by themselves. Me and the “Jasons” have supportive spouses who are at home for big chunks of time.

So moms dads out there that are doing a startup, tell the world YOUR story. Please! I need to meet more of you for the support and inspiration.

Starting, running and managing businesses, especially small ones, has been women’s work for a long long time, and that means mothers have done it. Mothers have done it a lot. But at the same time, I’m not keen to uncritically contribute to a superwoman culture: get back behind the desk woman! Sickness, disability, parenting and family and education and money demands and life preferences, these all vary a lot more than I would be reluctant to start a startup with a woman who had small children allows for. Sometimes women need to work with small children. Sometimes they need to not. Often it’s in between.

What’s your experience, if you’ve worked as a mother young children? If you’ve been an entrepreneur or business owner, do you think that that was uniformly harder than being an employee, or in some ways easier, or generally easier?

October 25, 2010August 5, 2018

Halloween: will you be a sexy witch, a sexy bee, or a sexy girl geek?

This article originally appeared on Geek Feminism.
Take Back Halloween! costume resources showed up in the linkspam recommendations.

We love Halloween. We really love Halloween. We think it’s cool that there’s one day a year when people can dress up as anything they want. What we don’t think is cool is that increasingly women are only supposed to dress up as one thing: Sexy _____

They focus on dressing as queens, goddesses and heroines. But there’s no reason women can’t be robots, right?

Image “Robot costume” by Rob Marquardt, Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike

And there’s no reason to let men hog the Rubiks Cube:

Man dressed in full body Rubik's Cube costume — Image “solving the cube018” by Fred Benenson, Creative Commons Attribution

And there’s no reason that a squid monster can’t have a feminine touch!

lady ika costume with squid headdress — Image “lady ika” by Hawken King, Creative Commons Attribution

Here’s your geek feminist costume planning thread. Are you going to any costume parties soon? Have you got any awesome costumes from the past to share, or inspirational links? Are you not sexy or geek sexy or don’t care for Halloween?

October 22, 2010August 22, 2016

Friday Hoyden: Ursula K. Le Guin

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

tigtog asked if someone could do a Friday Hoyden piece on Ursula K. Le Guin for her 80th birthday… last year. Le Guin’s 81st birthday was yesterday on the 21st October 2010: this is going up in time for it to still be her birthday in her hometown of Portland, Oregon.

Photo of Ursula Le Guin, 2004 (Wikipedia user Hajor, Creative Commons BY-SA)

A little capsule summary for people who haven’t read her work: Le Guin is a novelist, poet and essayist. She is best known for science fiction and fantasy, particularly the six Earthsea books (five novels and a collection of stories) set in an archipelago world with advanced magic and pre-industrial tech; and various books set in her Hainish universe, which is a future series in which Earth, among other planets among relatively nearby stars, turn out to have all have hominid species on them, established some millions of years ago by a still existing ancestral species the Hainish, in a series of biological/sociological experiments. This has allowed her to write, for example, The Left Hand of Darkness, Winter’s King and Coming of Age in Karhide, set in a world of primates with a sort of oestrous cycle in which their bodies can become either male or female, and who have otherwise no gender or sexuality; and The Matter of Seggri, about a world on which there are about sixteen women born for every man, and men are kept apart with their role in society being purely exhibition of strength, sex, and providing sperm.

Le Guin is something of a goto name for someone who wants to make sure their list of Great Science Fiction includes something, anything, by a woman: she’s white, she has by now become a big name and is award-winning and Taken Seriously (see Guest Post by Alisa Krasnostein: The Invisibility of Women in Science Fiction from June). I… do think she’s worth reading anyway! But don’t stop there, I doubt she’d want you to.

I’ve enjoyed Le Guin’s writing for years, but here is her crowning Hoyden moment for me, in a 2001 interview by Nick Gevers, a science fiction editor and critic:

[Gevers asks] Who, for you, are the finest SF authors now writing — both your fellow feminist writers and more generally?

[Le Guin answers] First I am to list fellow feminists and then… non-fellow anti-feminists? Come on, Nick, let’s get out of the pigeonholes. If feminism is the idea that differences between the genders, beyond the strictly physiological, are an interesting subject of study, but have not been determined, and so are not a sound basis for society to use in prescribing or proscribing any proclivity or activity — which is what I think it is — then I probably don’t read any non-feminist SF writers, these days. Do you?

Here’s a few selected pieces of Le Guin’s writing:

Two chapters from The Left Hand of Darkness
A Whitewashed Earthsea: How the Sci Fi Channel wrecked my books. (on a TV adaption of A Wizard of Earthsea)

Le Guin has a fairly large website with links to most of her recent online writing.

If I had to recommend a single piece of writing of hers, I would say that its the short story The Day Before the Revolution (probably easiest to find in the collection The Wind’s Twelve Quarters), which probably benefits a lot if you read The Dispossessed for context first (The Dispossessed is a fine novel, so not just for context). The Day Before the Revolution was published when Le Guin was 45 years old. She wasn’t old at the time, and I am not old yet, but it is the closest I come to understanding how it might be.

Happy 81st birthday Ursula K. Le Guin!

October 9, 2010August 21, 2016

If it’s really good, men made it

This article originally appeared on Geek Feminism.

I feel odd blogging about a movie I haven’t seen, I want to get that out of the way. But a lot of women I trust are telling me that the movie The Social Network (a dramatisation of the founding of Facebook, script by Aaron Sorkin and direction by David Fincher) is infuriatingly sexist. Men made Facebook entirely, apparently, and women granted them sexual favours for it. As is the natural order! (See the Melissa Silverstein and Laurie Penny links in our last spam for this.)

(If you want to discuss The Social Network in particular, rather than the rest of this post, which is about geek women’s invisibility in general, I’ve set up a discussion thread for the movie.)

The erasure of women geeks from geek history is going to continue and snowball, most likely, because here are some of the factors that play into it:

what geeks do is hard! you can tell, because women don’t do it!
you might have heard geeks are not that high up the masculine status chart! you are wrong! because there’s no women doing it and that makes it Man Stuff! which is hard, see 1! (also wot Restructure! said)
s things become important in retrospect, they become men’s work.

On that last point, there was a related discussion in Australia last year about the recent history of rock music. Triple J, a youth music radio station which is part of the government funded ABC network, ran a “Hottest 100 of All Time” poll for songs its listeners like best. Triple J’s airplay is generally “alternative” and in the late 1990s (when I listened most) featured women artists such as PJ Harvey, Courtney Love of Hole, Shirley Manson of Garbage, Liz Phair and Veruca Salt.

There was some leadup criticism about the voting website:

Divided into decades, starting with the 1960s, each page shows between 9 and 15 album covers, with an accompanying note about musicians or bands that influenced the direction of rock and pop. The section on the 60s mentions the Supremes as one of the groups on the Stax/Motown label, and Janis Joplin as appearing at the Monterey Pop Festival. Then the 2000s section mentions the White Stripes. NO other female artists or groups that include women are mentioned.

And although the website was merely a memory jogger and did not restrict listener voting, it turned out it was a harbringer of what the listeners voted for. The top 100 songs contained two female vocalists, both appearing in one-offs as vocalists with Massive Attack (with songwriting credits). There were also five bands with female members. This became a big deal: Triple J was quick to defend itself by noting that it was a listener poll. One of the most interesting pieces of commentary went to air on Triple J’s own coverage, from Catherine Strong, whose PhD research was into changing memories of music (thanks to Lauredhel for this transcript):

Catherine Strong: “What happened with grunge – it’s very interesting, that in the early 1990s, grunge was seen as being a very female-friendly type of music. There were lots of women involved in the grunge. So you had bands like Hole, and L7, and Babes in Toyland. There was also the associated riot grrl movement that was happening at the same time, so bands like Bikini Kill and Heavens to Betsy. At the time, these bands were quite successful: commercially successful, and they were critically acclaimed, they were talked about as being fantastic. There was a lot of celebration in the press of “Women in Rock”, “Isn’t it fantastic to see women in rock?” But then if you look at the media coverage over time, when people talk about grunge over time, the women don’t get talked about anymore. So on the tenth anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death for instance, there were lots of magazines that came out talking about “Let’s look back at grunge”, “what was important about grunge”, “why was grunge such a great thing?”, and the women are hardly mentioned at all. So again you can see the public record leaves the women out – they just disappear, they fall out over time, as people write about it, and think about it looking back.

And the thing in rock that I think is particularly interesting, is that periodically, women are rediscovered. So every five years or so you’ll find that there’s something that will turn up in the media saying “Hey, it’s great! Women are making inroads into rock for the first time!”, when it’s not the first time. So every time those stories come up, I think we as a society, or people who like rock, feel as though progress is being made; but what’s actually happened is we’re just going round and round in circles. Women are being discovered, then they’re being forgotten, then they’re being discovered again, and they’re being forgotten again, and it’s just going round and round like that.”

And here it is, happening with geek history. To avoid one obvious strawman: no, I am not claiming that there was a woman who was more important to the story of Facebook than Mark Zuckerberg! I’m claiming that the movie is part of this pattern in geek history:

when we look back on geek history, things women worked on, and women who were involved in men’s projects will slowly vanish from the story as part of a pattern of making what geeks do important and hard and real
there will continue to be active resistance to women being visible as geeks because the presence of women takes away status points in the masculinity hierarchy and/or that geekdom is a men’s space for men who don’t want to be around women (I keep meaning to find the explicit comments I’ve seen on LWN to this effect, if the lazyweb helps I won’t object)
perhaps most worryingly of all, every few years there will be a brief spotlight on women geeks, everyone will conclude “hooray they’re/we’re here, we’ve been seen, this is the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning of the battle, thank goodness for that” and then a few years later we’ll do it all again (see an example of “but women geeks are new” here).

What do you think? How many rounds of the geek women visibility battle have you been present for? (I’ve been around for at least two major ones, I think.)

October 5, 2010August 21, 2016

When you are the expert in the room

This article originally appeared on Geek Feminism.

This is an Ask a Geek Feminist question:

This a “what should we do” question, but a fairly specific one.

Recent discussions, particularly Restore meritocracy in CS using an obscure functional language , have left me thinking “this still doesn’t say what it would be helpful for people like me (white male with computing experience starting early) to actually do about it”. Just saying to avoid the viewpoint that this reflects enthusiasm or innate ability isn’t very specific, but the discussion seemed to finish around that point.

The answers will probably be different in different contexts. For example, how about in class? The best I can think of is “don’t be eager to answer the lecturer’s questions to the class, but let someone else go first”. Would that help? Is that enough, in that context? But if you give the lecturer the impression you’re not knowledgeable, but then do well in the written exam, you can invite suspicion of cheating in the exam (this definitely happens). Or should you even make deliberate wrong answers, to lower your apparent expertise? I’d find that horribly condescending if I knew someone was doing it towards me.

And in a professional context, if you know the answer to a colleague’s question (or on a mailing list, to any question), but you hold back on it to let someone else answer, you’re holding back the asker from getting on with whatever raised the question. But is that less important than letting others answer? (I suspect it depends on the group or list concerned.)

And a branch of that one, relevant in my present job, in which part of my role in the team is specifically to be the experienced programmer who can answer people’s questions, how is it best to handle that?

And in a seminar, should you hold back in a discussion if you have advanced ideas, so as not to scare the less confident? But then, you’re not making your best technical contribution.

The most extreme suggestion I’ve seen (only once, I think) is that geeky men should get out of computing altogether, to make it more comfortable for others to get in. In which case, a big source of potential mentors would be lost.

And do the same suggestions apply to female experts?

So, I’m stumped on this and can’t contribute any significant answers, but I hope the questions are useful for discussion.

There was some discussion among the cob-loggers about whether and how to answer this question. But there was always lots of confusion about this on the LinuxChix lists while I was subscribed (I haven’t been for a few years now), men who genuinely wanted to in some way to address gender issues in computing but the only strength they saW in themselves was their expertise, and when it was suggested to them that displaying this at every opportunity was at best annoying and at worst harmful they were completely at a loss. So I think an answer is genuinely useful.

Important note: this answer is aimed at privileged people (in this context, generally men with a good technical background) hoping to check their privilege and keep it on a short leash. If you are a woman reading this, it’s entirely possible the reverse applies to you in geeky environments: you might be wanting to learn how to have more confidence in your expertise and how to inspire confidence in others. Some of these techniques might be useful to you at some times when you want to help others learn, but this answer isn’t really intended for you.

Important note 2: from here on, “you” refers to the general you, the person who want to encourage/support/etc women but is struggling to see how to do it without being dishonest about your own abilities, not necessarily “you” the person who asked this specific question. I’ve seen this a lot, so I want to try and address it in general. I’m generally going to assume that the relative expertise of the question asker is in fact a correct assessment but you should question whether you are really the expert or whether you’re partly benefiting from structural assumptions that you are.

Let me start by stating that there are at best misguided versions of this question: people who say “I want to share my expertise with women who want to get into computing! But now I’m not supposed to be intimidating. Fine then, I’ll take my expertise and go home. See how you like that, women in computing! Ahahahaha!” Don’t be one of those people. Your participation in technical and geeky groups, especially groups for learners, isn’t solely about you. If you insist on either being the top dog expert or going home… go home.

My beta reader for this suggested that much of the question is based around the assumption that in order to help build people up, you have to drag yourself down. There’s two problems with this: one is that this sort of thing isn’t a zero sum game, and the other is that not all women (or outsiders in general) are also beginners. They may be intimidated in spite of substantial ability and experience. So in many cases your role is less to try and hide your own excessive light under a bushel, and more to support the discovery of what’s already there.

When you’re the expert at work

In terms of your workplace, an approach I like is one that some activist groups make explicit: if you are the only person who knows how to do something that the organisation needs, you should make it your top priority to train at least one other person to do it. You could do some of the following:

presumably part of your role as designated expert, or something that you can make part of your role, is keeping a sort of list (mental or physical) of areas of expertise other programmers have, and referring questions to the other experts.
if something should be documented, ask the person who consults you if she can document it as she learns it. Then you can refer future questioners to that documentation, or get them to improve it. And you can credit its authors when you point people to it. And by having people teach others and write for others, you are turning them into experts.
if something should be automated (for example, you are consulting on a fiddly manual process) ask the person who consults you if she can automate it as she learns it.
when you get too busy (and this sounds like the sort of role where you are constantly in more demand than you can satisfy) decide that someone else needs to be the expert on some subset of the organisations knowledge base, and come up with some kind of handover process in collaboration with her, so that she is confident in being able to handle that set of problems and people know to go to her without even involving you.
consider that your own expertise is unlikely to be all-encompassing. If there’s a task that takes you half a day and a colleague half an hour, ask her for her help with it. (No need to go on and on about how she’s the expert here yay for her, just get her help.)

Note that those aren’t specific to women colleagues despite my choice of pronoun. The idea is to change the environment such that expertise is being built everywhere, not to go out of your way to make women into experts, unless you are in an environment specifically focussed on women (like LinuxChix is).

Similarly, in teaching roles, it is important to know when someone is thinking out loud on their way to the answer and when they are genuinely stumped and starting to get too frustrated to make progress. In the former case, just let them think and give them some time to put those thoughts into action.

When you’re the expert in class

Some of the question about classroom behaviour does seem a little excessively fearful. I guess there might be some classes that are structured as lectures and a final exam, but all my classes at university involved submitted assignments throughout the course in which you can demonstrate knowledge without taking up class time. A class in which people must ask questions to demonstrate their knowledge, as opposed to asking questions because they need the answer sounds like it must be terribly tedious for everyone involved. And they must be awfully small classes, or really long ones, if everyone who doesn’t regularly participate but still does well in the class is then investigated for cheating. In general, if you are required to demonstrate expertise solely in order to pass, see if you can do so in a way that isn’t public.

In terms of being part of classes or seminars, it is situation dependent. Is the class or seminar or discussion a bit introductory for you? Perhaps you should absent yourself or remain silent while the others get the hang of things, or at least wait for one-on-one approaches from other students for help rather than taking up teaching time demonstrating your knowledge. Is it genuinely challenging for you too? Well, make it visible that you’re being challenged. Be that wonderful person who asks the lecturer half way through the class “uh, I don’t think I really understood that first set of hypotheses, can we slow up?” when everyone else thought it was just them. Throw a few ideas against the wall before you think you have the answer. If someone else has a good idea, give them space to express it, thank them, and then see if you can extend it, especially in a collaborative way with the original proposer. Watch the tendency to try and set up a you-and-me-the-smart-ones dynamic with the teacher by speaking up only when you’re totally confident.

It may help periodically to actually try and measure (by making notes of who speaks when, assuming you can do it subtly) whether you are the most talkative person in the class. If you are, take a break from talking: it’s unlikely your ideas are so uniformly superior as to need that much airtime, and if they are, perhaps you need a more advanced class.

My beta reader also suggests that if you find a classroom is centred around you and other confident students and generally being a little self-congratulatory and that other students are floundering and suffering, that perhaps you should have a word to the teacher about how you feel the classroom environment is letting most of the students down.

When you’re the expert in a women-centred geek forum

In situations like mailing lists, at least places like LinuxChix which have a specific mission to be encouraging and a good place for learning, here’s some tips:

Have a look at the average turnaround time of the discussion. Is it common for someone to wait 24 hours to have a question answered? Well, people asking for help are probably aware that they may need to wait 24 hours (unless of course they say something like “ARGH HELP NOW DON’T DELAY FIRE FIRE FIRE IN THE THEATRE”). So make that your delay. Wait 24 hours (say), and see if they got a decent answer yet. If not, then post.
Very important: before you post an answer, read the other answers. It’s a common problem to have a self-appointed expert insist on re-explaining the whole thing from scratch, rather than seeing that Suzy already sorted out Jane’s compile error, so you just need to help Jane work out how to get the info she needs out of the core dump.
If an answer worked, but is missing a nuance, or isn’t precisely how you would have done it, consider carefully if you need to point that out. Is it actually harmful in the long run to do it the other suggested way or is it a matter of taste? Is this a good time and place to evangelise on matters of taste? It usually isn’t.

Note that none of this is denying your interest, expertise or talent: it’s not about pretending not to have it, it’s about genuinely putting it at the service of other people, and about developing similar expertise in other people.

I think it’s also important to interrogate your motivations in being the expert in women-centred groups. All of these approaches are not uncommon in tech groups with a lot of women:

assumptions that you, a man, must surely be the only expert in such-and-such who is part of the group, because, really, how likely is a woman to be a such-and-such expert? (There were certainly subscribers to the LinuxChix lists who believed that this was true of all of Linux systems administration, to the constant chagrin of women members who had spent 20 years in the field.)
assumptions that women geeks, unlike men geeks, will properly acknowledge you and respect you for your expertise, finally, the admiration you deserve!
the good ol’ not having enough women in your social circle thing, and being there to make friends.

The last one is tricky: here’s my take. Nothing wrong with having friends or wanting more! But, when you aren’t in a social group, attend to the mission of the group first, and the socialising a distant second.

September 28, 2010August 19, 2016

Sydney University colleges: after “Define Statutory”

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

Last year, it was revealed that the residents of St Paul’s College at the University of Sydney, who had formed a “Define Statutory” Facebook page that described itself as “pro-rape, anti-consent”. There was a lot of heat around it, and initially a lot of words and not a lot of action. Lauredhel and I wrote about it here last year (University colleges: nurturing a rape culture, More on St Paul’s College “Define Statutory” facebook page).

I’ve been meaning to find out what happened next for ages. Here’s what seems to have happened.

In February 2010, the University Vice-Chancellor Michael Spence announced that the sexual harassment and discrimination policy was being extended to all student residences. (The colleges’ residents are almost always enrolled students of the University, but the colleges are independent institutions.):

[Spence] said his handling of the website scandal… had been hampered by the old policy, which excluded the legally independent colleges, leaving them free to conduct their own investigations without guarantees of an independent inquiry.

”It is fair to say our old harassment policy gave us no teeth as far as the colleges were concerned,” Dr Spence said. ”However, under the new system we definitively would be able to discipline those concerned.”

The vice-chancellor’s office has called for the residential colleges to review their sexual harassment and assault policies as well as student initiations and unofficial activities.

In an email on Tuesday [February 23], Dr Spence told all students that they ”had the right to be treated with dignity and respect, irrespective of their background, beliefs or culture”.

Heath Gilmore and Ruth Pollard, Sydney University expands sex-assault policy, The Sydney Morning Herald, February 25 2010

The new policy (dated 11 February) is here.

Ruth Pollard, who wrote the Herald‘s original stories, wrote in February that she regarded St Paul’s response as continuing to be highly unsatisfactory, especially in light of the administrations of the other colleges being willing to criticise their own culture:

We received another email from Dr [Ivan] Head [warden of St Paul’s], describing St Paul’s as ”one of the most exciting and stimulating places to live, brilliantly in the heart of the university, fully engaged with every aspect of student life, punching above its weight, moderated by wise and astute scholars”.

Oh yes, and all forms of sexual assault are abhorrent.

Since then, Dr Head says there has been an investigation which included ”interviews with the [Facebook] site administrator who is a former college resident, and a small number of current college residents who had agreed to become members of the site”, but he refused to release the results of the inquiry.

Ruth Pollard, Time to wake up: St Paul’s must stamp out its misogynist culture, The Sydney Morning Herald, February 25 2010

I am not surprised to find though, that there are reports that St Paul’s residents have closed ranks around their college:

First, some history. In 1977, a group of St Paul’s College students at Sydney University held an awards ceremony in which a student who raped a woman was applauded for committing “the animal act of the year”. Then last year St Paul’s made headlines again after a Herald journalist, Ruth Pollard, exposed a “Pro Rape/Anti Consent” Facebook group run by students at the college…

While the scandal has made the students more media cautious, it does not seem to have affected their attitudes towards women. Earlier this year, a number of St Paul’s students planned a musical dance revue number titled Always look on the bright side of rape. The number was canned for fear that it might invite media coverage.

In the end, the villain of the revue was called “Ruth Pollard” and students hissed, booed and threw objects when the character appeared…

Nina Funnell, Contrition trumps sexism cover-ups, The National Times, September 22 2010.

I can’t honestly think anything other than that it will be a long long time before college culture changes a lot. There will be a lot of social pressure on and additional harassment of students who attempt to go through the university’s procedures as outlined in their policy, just as there has been of students who have gone through the legal system in the past. College songs, folklore and culture will continue to very explicitly promote sexual harassment and assault. I will be interested to hear if the efforts of the administrations of some of the other colleges are serious, sustained and effective over the next few years.

September 27, 2010August 22, 2016

If you can’t defend yourself, you shouldn’t be allowed to speak

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

Blogger Grog’s Gamut‘s legal name and position in the public service were today published by James Massola writing in The Australian. Media editor Geoff Elliott wrote:

IF you are a public servant and blogging and tweeting, sometimes airing a partisan political line, do you deserve anonymity? No.

… if you are influencing the public debate, particularly as a public servant, it is the public’s right to know who you are. It is the media’s duty to report it.

Note the get-out-of-free card in that: “if you are influencing the public debate, particularly as a public servant… it is the media’s duty to report it.” That is, I note, “particularly”, but not “only”, as a public servant. If you are “influencing the public debate”, an action not otherwise defined by Elliott, The Australian is apparently reserving the right to publish your legal name.

I am not entirely sure that Elliott meant my reading, which is that The Australian believes it is ethical and in the public interest not only to out pseudonymous public servants, but probably pseudonymous anybodies, but given the impact of outing, I think the more alarmist reading is sensible: that is, The Australian will out public servants who are writing about political matters (perhaps broadly interpreted) and will at least seriously consider it in other cases.

Institutional power accrues to people who are willing to open most, or increasingly all, facets of their lives to media and public scutiny: their words present and past, their name, their face, their body, their clothes, their family. Who can’t do that? Well, most of us. I doubt even many of the most powerful relish it, but the less powerful cannot withstand it.

But, let’s take it from the top, shall we? As coffeeandink, who was the victim of repeated outing attempts (not by journalists), writes:

Reasons people may prefer pseudonyms or limited personal disclosure on the Internet:

Because it is a standard identity- and privacy-protection precaution

Because they have experienced online or offline stalking, harassment, or political or domestic violence

Because they wish to discuss sexual abuse, sexuality, domestic abuse, assault, politics, health, or mental illness, and do not wish some subset of family, friends, strangers, acquaintances, employers, or potential employers to know about it

Because they wish to keep their private lives, activities, and tastes separate from their professional lives, employers, or potential employers

Because they fear threats to their employment or the custody of their children

Because it’s the custom among their Internet cohort

Because it’s no one else’s business

Nobody’s business, unless The Australian thinks you are successfully influencing public debate that is. Can’t let the less powerful do that, can we?

As pointed out in Tim Dunlop’s comments, journalists are generally supportive of at least some right to identify pseudonymous writers.

Annabel Crabb of the ABC (from three tweets, here, here and here):

I don’t think anonymity should be a right. Disclosure of identity would be a rebuttable presumption in my ideal world… Rebuttable presumption – ie, you should ID yourself unless there is a good reason for not doing so… @TudorGrrrl I totally think there is an argument for anonymity in some cases. I just think anonymity should be reserved for extreme cases.”

Because of course explaining your “extreme case” somewhere where journalists can find it and in sufficient detail that they agree with it is never going to in and of itself identify you sufficiently to put you in danger.

Ben Packham of the Herald Sun (from two tweets here and here):

If you set yourself up as a critic whose opinions are worth listening to, you owe it to readers to say who you are. It’s about disclosure… Identity disclosure also disclosing who you are NOT. ie. not a member of the executive, senior official, someone with an axe to grind etc.

I think that something that is not often recognised in these discussions is the advantages that many people who are able to write using their real name have. Packham is partly right: identifying yourself as being or not being someone with an axe to grind, or party-affiliated, or an infamous scoundrel or a beloved Australian living treasure may well give your words more power or get your argument taken more seriously or at least read more widely. It is not unreasonable to be cautious about the stance of a pseudonymous writer, or any writer who conceals related facts about themselves, but in fact this disadvantages writers using pseudonyms, including those who are not intending to deceive their readers about their interests. The bias is applied already.

There are many ways that the less powerful are silenced, and conflating having something to hide or keep private with being not worth listening to is one of them, and insisting on identity disclosure is another. Not all pseudonymous writers are using pseudonyms to ethical ends, this is abundantly clear to anyone who has ever been on the Internet. But insisting that only those who name themselves and state their interest to everyone who lives in the country can speak is far worse.

Elsewhere: eGov AU has a roundup of posts.

September 10, 2010August 21, 2016

Geekspiration of the fictional kind

This article originally appeared on Geek Feminism.

Here’s an Ask a Geek Feminist question for our readers (questions still being taken):

Reading Rudy Simone’s Aspergirls prompted me to crystallise this question: where are the female role models for young geek women?

I’m thinking of characters who have genius-level IQs, coupled with a lack of social skills and, for whatever reason, an absence of Significant Other. There are plenty of characters like this: Sherlock Holmes, Rodney McKay, Greg House, Spock … but where are the women?

Where are the isolated geniuses who are married to their work? Where are the women whose ‘problem personalities’ are forgiven because of their talents / gifts / abilities / focus? Where are the women who are single and don’t give a damn because they have better things to do?

I’m probably missing some obvious examples: I’m not a big media consumer. Remind me, enlighten me! TV, movies, comics, novels all welcome.

A few possibilities, from a fellow consumer of not very much media:

Dr Susan Calvin, in various short stories by Isaac Asimov. She’s the leading research roboticist on fictional near-future Earth, and a key employee of US Robots.
Unfortunately Calvin is one of those fictional characters who is a little better than her writer: Asimov lumps her with some unfortunate embarrassing romantic and maternal feelings occasionally, and the song and dance other characters make about their immense forbearance in forgiving her ‘problem personality’ gets a bit wearing. But nevertheless she’s a key fictional influence on the development of robotics, and the main character in any number of the stories.

The character Dr Susan Calvin that appears in the 2004 film I, Robot is young, movie-pretty, sarcastic and really resembles Asimov’s character very little, but I quite like her also and still think she’s a fictional geek role model if you accept that she’s very loosely based on the Asimov character: she’s abrupt, literal-minded, a high ranking research scientist and, something I really liked, she’s not shown as having any sexual or romantic interest in the lead character at all. (Shame she isn’t the lead character.)
Dr Temperance ‘Bones’ Brennan in the Bones television series; if, crucially, you can ignore or don’t mind (or like!) the multi-season plot arc about her mutual attraction with Seeley Booth.
Bones is a forensic anthropologist prone to social mistakes or at least idiosyncrasies, but key to criminal investigations due to her unparalleled anthropological skills. The writers apparently think of her as having Aspergers, but haven’t said it in the script because you can’t have Aspergers on Fox, or something like that.

I’m actually not an enormous fan of this show for reasons that are irrelevant to this entry, so I’ll point you to Karen Healey’s guide, since she is an enormous fan and that’s only fair if you want to try it and see.

Who would you recommend?

August 6, 2010August 22, 2016

Laws requiring early electoral roll closure ruled unconstitutional

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

From SMH, news just in:

The High Court have ruled that Howard-era laws which close the electoral rolls on e day that writs for an election are issue are invalid… Activist group GetUp! brought the constitutional challenge, arguing the laws effectively disenfranchised young people.

Great work by GetUp!: the closing of the rolls on the day the writs were issued have never been explained as anything other than simple disenfranchisement of young people: Australians cannot be on the roll before 17 and only tend to enrol for the first election they are eligible to vote in, so this has very effectively locked new voters out of at least their first election.

They may also seek a ruling to allow electronically signed enrolment forms: at present the AEC insists on having a physical signature made with a pen, or facsimile thereof (ie, as produced by a fax machine or a scanner).

Update: the AEC has a statement about the decision, and will now inform voters who submitted enrolment forms on or before July 26 that they are eligible. However they will have to make a declaration vote, because the printed books will not include their names:

… voters affected by today’s decision who attend a polling place on election day (or early voting centre) will have to cast a declaration vote and provide an accepted form of evidence of identity. The AEC therefore urges those electors to carry their driver’s licence or other accepted form of identity with them when voting to easily meet these requirements…

Other acceptable forms of ID are given in the statement.