Category: Politics and society

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Reading the policies: the Coalition’s parental leave consultation document

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

My attitude to the vast bulk of elections, including the 2010 Federal election, is “I don’t like any of this, please get me out of here”. I usually intend to make an informed decision based on policies and then have trouble even following the news coverage. So, in the spirit of public acts helping enforce private commitments, I’m going to review a few policies for Hoyden.

a screenshot of the title page of the Coalition's consultation document titled Direct Action on Paid Parental LeaveFirst up, Direct Action on Paid Parental Leave, the Coalition’s consultation document: a final policy is yet to come.

This has been fairly well publicised, but the basics are that it provides paid parental leave for 26 weeks following the birth or adoption of a child. The leave will be subject to a work test, and be paid ranging from the minimum full-time wage, for any person paid at or below this rate, to a maximum of matching a $150 000 per annum salary (that is, a carer will receive somewhere from $14 000 to $75 000 gross while on leave depending on their previous earnings). The current Baby Bonus will be paid to carers who don’t meet the work test, or to anyone who chooses it over the Paid Parental Leave scheme. It will be funded by an additional corporate tax on a small set of seemingly unidentified companies.

The big news about this policy yesterday (Coalition accused of leaving dads out of parental leave plan, pressured on costings, Dads cut out of full-pay parental leave scheme) was that male primary carers would be paid their female partner’s (presumed) lower wage if they took the leave. This was quite incoherent, and evidently is going to be a change in the final policy, because in this document, fathers weren’t going to be eligible for more than 2 weeks of leave at all. The document itself is a little internally inconsistent, beginning with a nod to primary carers in general:

The Coalition’s Paid Parental Leave scheme will provide primary carers (in the vast majority of families, mothers) with 26 weeks paid parental leave…

But later, the “carers (let’s face it, probably mothers)” phrasing is dropped, in favour of:

… fathers will be able to use two weeks of the 26 weeks of Paid Parental Leave that will be available, either simultaneously with the mother’s leave or separately.

A family can lose one of its two incomes for a period of time as the mother gives up or reduces paid employment to care for the child.

The Coalition is committed to protecting and improving the well-being of families, particularly that of the mother and child, by ensuring a mother can afford to stay at home during the early stages of her child’s development… In recognising this, the Coalition’s Paid Parental Leave scheme will assist mothers to take the recommended minimum of six months leave.

I’m genuinely unclear from this about whether they originally intended provision for fathers or any other primary carers to actually take the leave.

They have quite a few nods to postpartum recovery and especially the need for mother-child contact to establish breastfeeding:

The proposed Paid Parental Leave scheme will enhance child and maternal well-being by providing financial support to mothers while they are outside the paid workforce recovering from childbirth, establishing breastfeeding and bonding with their newborns… Six months is also the minimum period of exclusive breastfeeding recommended by the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council and the World Health Organisation.

But it’s a long way from separating the idea of paid parental leave into maternity leave for recovery and establishing breastfeeding and primary carer leave for, possibly, a different carer.

Purely in terms of entertainment, we have some Labor’s-big-debt snark:

The Coalition would prefer to fund our Paid Parental Leave scheme from a Budget surplus, but this is not possible due to the large debt and deficits run up by the Rudd Labor Government.

And is this some WorkChoices nostalgia I see before me?

The [Howard Government] also supported women’s choice by… introducing more flexible workplace conditions which provided parents, particularly mothers, with the choice of working part time or flexible hours.

Observations:

  • This is a generous scheme, as the document points out, both in comparison to Labor’s scheme, which has a maximum payment of under $10 000 gross and which does not provide any option to share even 2 weeks of the leave with another carer, and in comparison to most other schemes worldwide, which mostly are either shorter or pay less.
  • It’s especially generous to carers already earning a higher income, although this is fairly typical of worldwide schemes: either you get a payment linked to the minimum wage, or you get a payment linked to your recent income.
  • The implementation of the policy in the context of any family that’s not built around a female-male couple who are both legal parents of the child is not at all clear from this document. It’s especially unclear how the payment works if the baby care is shared by more than one household.
  • I do not know why it is emphasised that a carer who passes the work test could still choose to receive the Baby Bonus. The current Baby Bonus is valued at just over $5000 tax free, and is no longer paid as a lump sum, but is also paid over 26 weeks.The only case I can come up with where that’s going to be better than the Coalition’s scheme involves higher order multiples (since the scheme will not pay multiple times for a multiple birth).
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Geek feminism as opposed to mainstream feminism?

This article originally appeared on Geek Feminism.

I broke my own Ask a Geek Feminist rules, and held back a question from the first round until I had time to dig up a few more references. I’m still not happy with it, but have run out of editing ideas, so time to throw it open. Here’s the question (I’ve added the links to it myself):

Note that throughout this post “geek feminism” is used fairly broadly: I don’t only mean “this site and its readers”, I mean spaces with a feminist focus on geekdom in general.

There’s lots of feminism online that, aside from being online, isn’t particularly geeky. Or at least, isn’t tech/science/math-geek geeky. What do you think they’re missing? What issues are the big names like feministing or feministe or pandagon completely missing because of their non-geeky nature?

I remember when the whole Kathy Sierra death-threat news erupted on non-geek feminist blogs, there were a few comments specifically from self-identified geek feminists that carried the sense of “screw you, mainstream feminism, for just noticing us now and acting all shocked. We have to put up with all sorts of shit in geek spaces all the freakin’ time, and this – while awful – is just about typical.”

So… is this still where you see non-geek feminism as being? Does that sentiment reflect your present or past views of the non-geek feminism communities?

I’ve wanted for a long time to write about “why geek feminism” and I’m using this question as something of a jumping off point. We have commenters who read widely in the femiblogosphere (I only read a couple of sites, and tend to focus on the intersectional ones) and I am hoping they can more directly answer the question about what the big names there are missing.

Geek feminism, like feminism in other subcultures or feminism concentrating on intersections, draws on a set of experiences that geek women have. Some cautions about what I’m going to say here:

  • I’m not claiming any one of these issues, or even the sum of them, are limited to geek women; and
  • I’m not claiming that if these aren’t true for you, you can’t identify as a geek woman, or a geek feminist. Some of them are true for me, some aren’t.

Women as numerical minority.

One of the most major geek women experiences is that of being in a numerical minority. It’s not universal, there are many geekdoms that are majority women (many media fandoms, for example), and not coincidentally these are sometimes viewed from the outside as not very geeky. But many geek women find that their hobbies and careers place them in highly male-dominated spaces.

This means various experiences are common among geek women:

  • hearing how some men talk disparaging about women (especially about women as sexual and romantic partners) when they’re in a space where they feel like they have enough allies;
  • being used to being thought of as a woman first, and everything else a distant second; and
  • having experiences that are now thought of as “old fashioned” sexism, such as being spoken to slowly or with lots of kind references to cooking and babies, being asked by a customer if they can talk to “the technical guy now please”, being assumed to be at a geek event to accompany a husband, being asked to make the coffee or take notes, being treated as the “nanny” figure who won’t approve of drinking or swearing.

One converse about women as a numerical minority is that women in some geek professions are to some extent beneficiaries of the gender pay gap. I’ve seen a figure given a lot which suggests that women computer programmers earn about 90% of the male salary as opposed to the general norm which is more like 70%. One piece of analysis confirming this trend in IT careers at least in the United States is Daniel H. Weinberg (2004) Evidence From Census 2000 About Earnings by Detailed Occupation for Men and Women, which gives the following pay ratios:

  • Computer software engineers: 83.3%
  • Computer programmers: 89.3%
  • Computer scientists and systems analysts : 84.5%

These figures certainly aren’t unique to IT: nuclear and aeronautical engineering are listed in the top 20 most equal fields for pay, health workers feature prominently, and fields with highly standard pay scales such as postal work do too.

So women may benefit financially in some geeky fields. That said, one or two geek women have privately said to me that they are sometimes made to feel uncomfortable talking about geek feminism in some non-geek feminist spaces because if they say they work in a highly paid profession they are therefore assumed to have the least problems of any woman. Some geek women certainly have lots of privilege due to their salary, but their workplaces are not free of sexism for it, sometimes rather the reverse.

For some geek women, their strongest experiences of victimisation may be as a geek.

This is broadly going to be more true if the geek woman is otherwise privileged. To take myself as an example: I was sexually harassed and assaulted as a child and teen. I was also bullied and made an outsider for being a geek (essentially, “square” was the term used at my high school, I know it usually means rule abiding or adult-pleasing, but it mostly meant academically high achieving at my school) and it was the latter that was the focus of my teenage miseries. As an adult woman, harassment and oppression as a woman has magnified in size, partly due to not doing a lot of non-geek socialising but also because the oppression of women has become more visible to me as a feminist.

There’s a persistent reaction to this that seriously misreads it, as though up until becoming aware of this stuff I was happier, so that I would have been happier about my experiences of sexual harassment and assault if they’d never become politicised for me. I don’t agree: feminism is not always entirely pleasant of course, but dragging stuff into the open is one way for me to push back against the conditioning that that sort of thing is just part of being a woman.

But some geek women have a different relationship with feminism when their strongest social outsider experiences are related to a different part of their identity (as many other women do when oppressed on another axis).

Geeks believe themselves highly rational and independent of social influence.

Perhaps the FLOSSPOLS D16 report put this best (it was a report into gender in FLOSS, hence that specific terminology):

F/LOSS participants, as in most scientific cultures, view technology as an autonomous field, separate from people. This means that anything they interpret as ‘social’ is easily dismissed as ‘artificial’ social conditioning. Because this ‘conditioning’ is considered more or less arbitrary, in their view it is supposed to be easily cast aside by individuals choosing to ignore it… As a result participants largely do not believe that gender has anything to do with their own individual actions.

So it’s common for geeks, although hardly unique to them, to analyse sexism in terms of I’m too smart for that or I was victimised [as a geek], and am therefore intimately acquainted with how bad it is and now incapable of perpetrating or benefiting from oppression of others. But it’s part of the systemic geek feminist experience, to believe ourselves and others or at least other geeks as rational actors. Geeks then divide into believing themselves not sexist, or as rational sexists (studies show that… or but it’s to my reproductive advantage to indiscriminately sexually approach women, the end.).

This applies to geek women’s view of the world too, and means that many geek women come to feminism with some distrust of any analysis that gives social conditioning real power, and that if and when we do decide that it has it, we have to talk to a lot of people who don’t believe it.

Geek ciswomen may have struggled with aspects of their womanhood in light of their geekhood.

I’m making this point about cis experiences because all of the self-reporting I know of on this subject is by ciswomen, and I don’t want to imply that cis people’s experence of, essentially, being annoyed with their gender identity can be equated with the experiences or oppression of trans or genderqueer people. Trans and genderqueer people, if you’d like to discuss whether identifying as a geek influenced your relationship with your gender identity in comments, please do, or if you’d like a new thread opened up, I’ll get on it. (Special note to cismen: I realise that geek cismen have also often been victimised as less masculine and conforming men, but this thread isn’t about your experiences. See Restructure!’s recent post for why.)

Geek ciswomen often have a slightly complicated relationship with what it means to be a woman. It’s not an uncommon experience for us to have felt more comfortable socially with geek men than with non-geek women, and to have largely been friends with geek men at times. This is particularly true for many geek ciswomen when we are teenagers. It’s fairly common for geek ciswomen to remember a period of being actively misogynist, along the lines of: “I can see why men find women so bad, 99% of women are indeed trivial and annoying” or “I get treated in a sexist way, and it’s the fault of other women, for inviting sexist behaviour.” Ellen Spertus talked about this in an interview (note, I can’t tell how she is using the term male-identified for sure, but it seems to mean something like sympathised with men and their complaints about women rather than was a man):

… I was pretty male-identified and was somewhat misogynistic. Specifically, I thought that technical fields required more intelligence and effort than non-technical fields and that women’s underrepresentation meant that they were stupid and/or lazy. I no longer feel this way.

Geek ciswomen may also have been taught misogyny, along these lines: these are my people, my clever geek friends who welcome me! If they hate women, there’s must be a reason for it, something the women did!

It’s also common for geek women to have bought into geek hierarchies: we’ve talked about that several times on this blog in fact (Girl stuff in Free Software, Metagaming: Casual vs Hardcore, Women and geek prestige) and avoided things they thought were for women and therefore easy, boring, or at least likely full of female modes of socialising which geek ciswomen feel victimised by.

So geek ciswomen may come to feminism late and reluctantly. It’s an identity that very clearly sets a geek feminist apart from most geeks, and sometimes one’s current or former dear friends.

Geek feminists often feel like feminist newbies

Geek feminists often have come to feminism in their adult life, sometimes via immersion into the deep end of feminist theory via, eg, fandom discussions with academics. This has good points, of course, if it results in a humble approach to women’s lived experiences and to providing All The Answers. But it can also mean a feeling that the tools of feminism are best wielded left to The Experts with women’s studies majors, or an activist CV, etc.

There is an experience I’m not capturing here that perhaps someone wants to comment on: only realising that you’re geeky in adult life, due to applying a geek approach to something the stereotypical (computing, science) geeks don’t recognise as geeky. It can be hard to criticise geekdom when you, or other geeks, don’t feel that your geek nature is accepted.

Geek feminists are invested in geekdom

This is important. Geek feminists see ourselves (I think) as either wanting to improve existing geekdoms by acknowledging how oppression is perpetrated inside geekdom and trying to teaspoon it out, or to build new improved ones, or both. Geek communities and geek interests simply don’t appear “that important” to many people, feminists included. (See also Moff’s Law.) It is important by definition to geek feminists.

Of course the Internet and social justice activism are big places, and not everyone has to be active on the subject of geek feminism. But we are.

Privilege

Mustn’t miss this one, although it holds for most writers and commenters at other feminist blogs too. The issues we talk about are real and should be talked about. But they are issues affecting privileged women, who are largely highly educated, employed in safe conditions with a reasonable salary, and have leisure time, among other things. As noted above some geek women are perceived by some feminists as being close to too privileged to have problems.

Geek feminists in feminist communities?

What are your thoughts, commenters? Have other feminist spaces been unsatisfactory when it comes to geekdom and its issues? What could geek feminism learn from other anti-oppression spaces?

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Another round of “real names will solve everything”, Blizzard edition

This article originally appeared on Geek Feminism.

Via everyone everywhere, Blizzard’s (developer of World of Warcraft and the Starcraft and Diablo franchises) game discussion forums are the latest online forum to come up with the bright idea to make everything all better by requiring people to use their legal names.

Here’s their forum announcement:

Recently, we introduced our new Real ID feature – http://www.battle.net/realid/ , a new way to stay connected with your friends on the new Battle.net. Today, we wanted to give you a heads up about our plans for Real ID on our official forums, discuss the design philosophy behind the changes we’re making, and give you a first look at some of the new features we’re adding to the forums to help improve the quality of conversations and make the forums an even more enjoyable place for players to visit.

The first and most significant change is that in the near future, anyone posting or replying to a post on official Blizzard forums will be doing so using their Real ID — that is, their real-life first and last name — with the option to also display the name of their primary in-game character alongside it… the forums have also earned a reputation as a place where flame wars, trolling, and other unpleasantness run wild. Removing the veil of anonymity typical to online dialogue will contribute to a more positive forum environment, promote constructive conversations, and connect the Blizzard community in ways they haven’t been connected before.

Links abound:

  • Blake: Blizzard Wants The World To Know Your Name: This is an important issue, because names carry markers of gender, ethnicity and real-world relationships that may be irrelevant to someone’s game play, but open up the possibility of harassment. It also makes it easier for harassers to follow people beyond the internet, making it a matter of personal safety. I find Blizzard’s decision unfortunate in every possible way.
  • everstar: WoW Fail: That means every post you make will have the name linked with your account published. On a public forum. Where everyone can see it. If you want to ask a question in their Customer Service forum, if you want to post a Bug Report, if you want to talk to other people in your realm, the name associated with your account will be displayed. And it’s supposed to be your real name. (via hoydenabouttown on Twitter)
  • Lodur (semi-supportive), Real ID on Blizzard forums, the good and the bad (via James in the linkspam): Some are concerned for their safety. They fear stalkers and real life harassment and fallout from the forums following them into real life. As a person who has worked in internet security for a long time, I can tell you the chances of this are pretty slim.
  • Miss Medicina, And I Didn’t Even Catch Her Name… : Being a WoW gamer is not exactly a mark of prestige in my field. It would not be a hobby that worked in my favor, but in fact, more than likely the opposite… The people who work at Blizzard don’t have to worry about their future employers knowing how much time they spent on the WoW forums.
  • Apple: Real ID, RP, and why only one person gets to have mine and RealID Forums (via James)
  • Chastity, Seriously Not Okay (via James): It is a common misconception that trolling is caused by anonymity. It is not. It is caused by people being assholes. Frequently, it is caused by people being racist asssholes or misogynist assholes or various other sorts of assholes who like to target people of a particular type.

See also wot Skud said.

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Clothes and geek feminism

This article originally appeared on Geek Feminism.

I’ve been chewing over various things about clothing and geek feminism since our recent posts about clothing and grooming (Kylie’s, Terri’s first, Terri’s second). I still think I can’t address it satisfactorily, but I thought I’d lay out various angles in which we might think of clothing and grooming in geek feminism.

Notes:

  • I refer to “geek women” a lot in this essay. All of these considerations apply to other people too in varying degrees, and sometimes more acutely. But given the nature of this blog I am focussing on geek women’s interests, and pressures on them.
  • This is not intended to be a comprehensive list of factors that figure into geek women’s grooming: it’s meant to be long enough to demonstrate that a lot of us have to care about it. Undoubtedly it is a somewhat privileged list too. You are welcome to raise additions in comments.

…

Clothing as labour. The vast majority of the clothing the vast majority of people reading this wear is made in factories in the developing world, by people working in dangerous and exploitative positions.

Grooming as make-work. Naomi Wolf, for one, made this argument in The Beauty Myth, that consuming women with endless grooming related chores and insecurities is a method of oppression. (I am barely read in feminist or cultural theory, undoubtedly hundreds of names could be listed here as having addressed aspects of this.) laughingrat raised this in our comments.

Clothing and grooming as geek interest. Some geeks take a geek-style (intense, analytical, open-ended, consuming) interest in various aspects of clothing and grooming. As examples of how you might do this, there are a lot of knitting geeks; there are historical recreation geeks who make and wear period clothing using period technology; there are people who study the semiotics and sociology of fashion.

Clothing as geek in-group marker and grooming as rejection of the mainstream. John writes in Terri’s comments that someone well-groomed in mainstream corporate style can be assumed to [be] trying to cover for a lack of competence in technical matters ”” or really want to be a suit. You often can’t, in this framing, be a geek and a suit both. You have to choose, and advertise this with your grooming.

Within geekdom, clothing is sometimes a pretty unsubtle marker of your allegiances. What cons do you go to? What programming languages do you prefer? What comics do you read? You wear shirts that allow this to be determined on first acquaintance. (This isn’t unique to geekdom of course, see also fashion labels and band t-shirts.)

Avoiding overtly female-marked grooming. Women in male-dominated workplaces often desperately want to avoid anything that might cause them to be (even more) othered because of their gender, especially since caring about grooming is frequently trivialised.

This may need to be balanced by expectations in some groups these same women move in by choice or necessity in which interest in grooming is required.

Grooming in order to own/celebrate your gender. This is important to many trans people. Conversely to the above about avoiding overt gender marking, quite a few geek women also choose to do this in order to point out that there are women RIGHT HERE in geekdom who can bring the geek.

Grooming as a marker of striving to “fit in” generally. If you have unusual grooming, or grooming that is marked as “other” or of a lesser group, people with power over you will read this as likely to be trouble or not one of us. Conversely, dressing like those people, or like their other subordinates, signals will do what it takes to fit in, won’t make waves.

Unusual grooming as marker of power. Alternatively, if you have power over other people, you can mark this by unusual grooming, or grooming usually disdained. Ingrid Jakobsen raised this in comments.

Grooming as marker of a ‘healthy, competent’ woman. For women especially, being groomed and striving to meet beauty standards is considered an informal indicator of mental health. Being considered poorly groomed or lazy about grooming can invite assumptions about being depressed or similar. (This is especially othering of women who do have mental illnesses, who continually receive the message that they shouldn’t have them, mustn’t display them, and will be in big trouble if they do, all while they quite probably have less energy to deal with the whole mess.)

And of course, a privileged woman might get annoying concerned questions, whereas a less privileged women might find, for example, that assumptions about her mental health play into questions about her ‘fitness’ have access to society, to care for her children and so on.

Grooming for self-esteem. Partly due to internalisation of the above, many women in particular feel happier, more confident and more powerful when they’re “well groomed” by mainstream standards.

Grooming which others female bodies. See the thing about conference t-shirts. Many don’t cater for curvy bodies. If they do, they often cater only for small curvy bodies. And they almost always assume a gender binary of curvy women who want curvy shirts, and square men who want square shirts.

Sexualised grooming. Women are expected to present their bodies in such a way as to be conventionally attractive.

Overly sexual grooming. At the same time as needing to be attractive, women are expected to present their bodies in such a way as not to be “asking for it”. (There is, of course, no middle-ground, see Rape Culture 101.)

Grooming for fun. Geek women may enjoy applying shiny, bright, matching, creative or cherished clothes and decoration to their bodies.

Grooming to get things done. Geek women may need to lift things, fit clothing to a prosthetic or mobility assistance device, run, avoid having a baby pull painfully at their hair, all kinds of stuff.

…

There are a great many intersectional things I have not addressed here, as a white, wealthy, abled cis-woman. A very very incomplete list would be: considerations about grooming to match your gender identity, considerations about grooming to satisfy people policing your gender identity, minimising grooming in order to preserve your spoons, grooming to honour and be part of your ethnic identity, grooming to meet beauty standards designed for white bodies and white faces, trying to find cheap clothes that won’t be judged in job interviews.

This huge list is just a set of things you could possibly be trying to signal or adhere to or avoid with your grooming. Hopefully this illustrates some of the tensions for geek women: for example, they are called upon to dress in both the feminine, careful style that signals “healthy and competent” but also in the masculine-coded casual style coded as “knows what the hell she’s talking about when it comes to [say] science” and also in something that won’t get them hassled as being unattractive in the street but also not hassled as too attractive…

I hope this has helped break down grooming and clothing as a geek feminist issue, or rather, massively multidimensional tightrope, a bit more. When women, and members of other marginalised and othered groups, consider their appearance, these are the kind of factors that go into it. Of course, in order to be accepted as geeks, we’re supposed to do all that and not care about clothes, right?

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“Hey Baby”: virtual violence against harassers

This article originally appeared on Geek Feminism.

Whenever I go through the linkspam, there’s often a news item that becomes a linkswarm of sorts. This time it’s the game (note: violent imagery at link, although hardly extraordinary by game standards) Hey Baby by LadyKillas.

Here’s some perspectives on the game, which has a woman protagonist able to shoot men after verbal harassment. Many players read it as more of a teaching tool or conversation starter about harassment than an entertaining game:

  • Leigh Alexander, You Look Nice, Miss: My favorite catcall in the ‘Hey Baby Game’? “Smile for me, baby.” It fills me with rage that a stranger on the street feels at liberty to demand that I smile. I smile when I feel like it, and I sure as shit don’t want to do it for you, buddy… So someone’s made a game that’s an outlet for that rage, that wants us to discuss that rage.
  • Jessica Wakeman, “Hey Baby”: Women Kill Men Who Sexually Harass Them In New Video Game: Is the idea of women shooting at sexual harassers in real life disturbing? Sure… But “Hey Baby” the game is peanuts compared to the violent, misogynistic video games that people have been playing for decades, so I’m more upset about that than this.
  • Kieron Gillen, The Proposition: So, Hey Baby Then”¦: Okay: the game isn’t about mowing down men. It’s about male privilege and what male privilege feels like.
  • Seth Schiesl, A Woman With the Firepower to Silence Those Street Wolves: Yet over several hours my initial alienation and annoyance gave way to a swelling appreciation of Hey Baby, not as a game but as a provocative, important work of interactive art as social commentary… The men cannot ever actually hurt you, but no matter what you do, they keep on coming, forever. The game never ends.
  • Sarah, Hey Baby Hey Baby Hey: … what Schiesel said resonated: would a non-interactive medium have been able to translate to men as viscerally what it’s like to feel unsafe in the streets at all times?

I have to confess, my reaction has more than a dash of “but won’t this just alienate men?”, but I’m examining that reaction with my “feminism isn’t a PR-friendly outreach movement to men” cap on as well. What do you think? (No denying or diminishing other people’s experiences of harassment please.)

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Don’t mention the war

This article originally appeared on Geek Feminism.

Over at Livejournal, angelbob is gathering anecdata:

A friend recently said… that as a woman working in technology, she wouldn’t recommend that other women enter the field. She’s a system administrator… I’m not going to repeat her reasons here. Rather, I’d be very curious whether other women working in technical fields, especially system administration and/or programming, felt the same way. Anybody care to comment?

I find this is a bit of an elephant in the room in “women in technology” discussions, and so I (bravely! like John Tierney, no doubt) want to talk about it. It probably applies to “women in science” discussions and so on, I just don’t follow them as much.

There are women, quite a few in fact, in technology careers who suggest other women don’t enter them. They usually find this is a unpopular opinion in the harming the community direction. Often some of their major critics are other women, especially women who are running recruitment and outreach for the field. The argument generally goes like this: the major thing that will fix sexism in this field is more women! So if we stay silent and take the sexism bad with the geeky good for long enough, sexism will solve itself. By encouraging women to stay out, you are basically furthering sexism in this field. QED.

Let’s pick this apart. First, purely as a practical matter, even in the forthcoming geek feminist utopia, some women will be talented programmers or engineers or mathematicians but will choose to spend most or all of their life in a different field. The human endeavour is not a zero sum game, we have not “lost” someone when she becomes a nurse or a musician.

Second, we don’t want to be denying women’s experiences. If a geek career was hard, unpleasant and not ultimately worth it for her, she should say this, and if it was related to her being a woman, it makes sense to recommend against it for other women. It’s hard to hear this if you are among the women who passionately love their geek work and want to share the good news, but those of us who are more in the advocate line surely do not want to spread the message that if women so much as hear negative experiences about geekdom they’ll all flee. If women’s interest in geekdom comes at the expense of lying to them and denying other women’s negative experiences, then the cause of women in geek careers isn’t worth it. Women can listen to passionate detractors, passionate advocates and people somewhere in between, consider their own experiences, and make up their own minds.

And lastly, women do not in fact bear the responsibility of ending geekdom’s sexism, and even if we did, we couldn’t. It is, in fact, ultimately down to the most powerful people to bear the bulk of the burden for changing the social environment. Having a field become 50 or 75% women has some effect on the stereotype effect, but it is not a magic de-sexist-itising measure.

How about you? If you left a geekdom or a geek career, or are a passionate critic of it (and aren’t we all, since pretty much any criticism is subject to the tone argument) have you been told not to discourage women, or that you are undermining the work of advocate women?

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The latest essentialism go-round: do we dare to discuss?

This article originally appeared on Geek Feminism.

Showing up on our Linkspam radar this week is John Tierney’s article for The New York Times, Daring to Discuss Women in Science, which is another round of “I am going to challenge the groupthink and be the one person who dares to make gender essentialist arguments about women in technical fields [well, me and that army over there]”. It argues from a finding among very high performing high school students, the top 0.01 percent of the population as sorted by the SAT and ACT standardised tests in the US, from which the researchers concluded that there’s distinct gender differences among students with that sort of performance.

Tierney writes:

The boy-girl ratio has also remained fairly constant, at about three to one, at the right tail of the ACT tests of both math and science reasoning. Among the 19 students who got a perfect score on the ACT science test in the past two decades, 18 were boys.

Meanwhile, the seventh-grade girls outnumbered the boys at the right tail of tests measuring verbal reasoning and writing ability. The Duke researchers report in Intelligence, “Our data clearly show that there are sex differences in cognitive abilities in the extreme right tail, with some favoring males and some favoring females.”

Here’s a roundup of feminist/women-in-science-o-sphere responses, many via SKM at Shakesville:

  • Anna N., 3 Problems With The “Women In Science” Debate: If boys and girls, men and women had truly equal opportunities, we might be able to conclude something about their “innate abilities” ”” or at least stop worrying about gender inequality in various fields. But we’re still very far from that point. Tierney finds fault with programs to eliminate bias at the university level, and says, female scientists fare as well as, if not better than, their male counterparts in receiving academic promotions and research grants. But girls may be implicitly or explicitly discouraged from pursuing science long before they actually become scientists…
  • Caroline Simard, “Daring to Discuss Women in Science:” A Response to John Tierney: The problem with the biology argument that “boys are just more likely to be born good at math and science” isn’t that it’s not “politically correct” — it’s that it assumes that we can take away the power of societal influences, which have much more solid evidence than the biology hypothesis. Tierney makes the point himself in his article…
  • Christina Agapakis, Adventures of Women in Science: The irony here being that this article is a very clear example of some of the social biases women in science face every day, just one of the countless attacks and indignities that make it that much harder for women to get up and go to lab every day, to achieve great things in math and science.
  • Janet D. Stemwedel, John Tierney thinks he’s being daring: On the general subject of claims for which there does not does not exist relevant empirical evidence, are there any published studies (or any research projects currently underway) to explore the connection Tierney, Summers, et al. seem to assume between being in the extreme right tail of laboratory measures of mathematical and scientific aptitude (like the math section of the Scholastic Aptitude Test) and having the chops to to get a doctorate in science or to win tenure at a top university?
  • SKM, Daring to Discuss Women and… *Yawn*, which also includes several links from the Larry Summers debate and earlier: For that matter, I think the “daring” idea that women are innately inferior to men at various Important Things–and indeed the preposterous notion that the idea is “daring” to begin with–has been answered quite competently in the past
  • Gretchen Keller, Women in Science: 2+2=?: …one of my least favorite, yet thought-provoking questions is “How does it feel to be a woman in science?”. Usually I reply that it feels the same as it does for a man: frustrating, time-consuming, invigorating and mostly like a bird flying repeatedly into a window desperately hoping that one of these times that pane of glass will turn into thin air.
  • Amy E. Slaton, Erring on the Side of…Exclusion: I know, I know: sarcasm is petty and unattractive. So before I lose any remaining credibility, let me defer to Troy Duster’s brilliant historical discussion of biological understandings of intellectual capacity. For almost 20 years, editions of his book, Backdoor to Eugenics, have laid out the very worrisome political and cultural implications of our pursuit of biological bases for intellectual and behavioral differences.
  • Clara Raubertas, “daring” to draw unscientific conclusions from statistics: Of course, his conclusions aren’t very scientific. Here are a few of the unfounded assumptions he has to make to draw the conclusions he draws… The assumption that science is so hard that it’s really only suited for people with extremely high scores (in the top fraction of a percent among a group of students who are already in the top fraction of a percent among their peers)
  • Melissa, The never-ending discussion: biology or bias?: What I find most frustrating is that there are myriads of studies, and everyone can cite their favorite study to support their viewpoint ”” be it that bias is the dominant factor keeping women out of sciences or that biology accounts for the paucity of women… I found what may currently be the best, though still imperfect, antidote to the never-ending, go-nowhere discussion of this topic, namely Stephen Ceci and Wendy William’s book, The Mathematics of Sex: How biology and society conspire to limit talented women and girls.
  • FemaleScienceProfessor, But I Don’t Want to Write about John Tierney Again: Thanks for all the e-mails and comments with links to the New York Times commentary by John Tierney, but what he wrote is just more of the same of what he’s written before: i.e., many women don’t want to be scientists or engineers, others can’t because they aren’t as good at math as the guys. Oh yeah, and Larry Summers made some reasonable statements in a speech that was misunderstood by hysterical females.
  • Hannah (in reply to FemaleScienceProfessor), Daring to Discuss: While I do understand this fear, how else are we going to convince the scientific establishment, many of whom likely share Tierney’s views, that gender bias is real and actually does keep women from succeeding in science careers? Clearly, just waiting for the old guard to pass on isn’t working, because I’ve met plenty of young male scientists who are just as biased as the old ones: they just hide it better.
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The lamb roast roundup: Mums and censorship

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

Feminist criticism of the “It’s Time to Tell Mum” anti-filtering campaign has shown up on several blogs:

ZDNet Australia writer Josh Taylor picked up the story and contacted myself and Geordie Guy, vice-chair of EFA’s board, for comment in his article EFA apologises for ‘sexist’ anti-filter site.

[Geordie] Guy told ZDNet Australia the responses he received to his blog forced him to delete the entry.

“A couple of the comments that came in response to that were really abusive and I didn’t want to start or continue a fight, which is why the article was removed,” he said.

“We sincerely regret that the campaign offended some people,” Guy said, explaining that his personal musings on the blog were superseded by the apology from the EFA board. He said it was inevitable that the different approach to the censorship debate — and getting a comedian involved — would offend a few people.

“Needless to say, we didn’t set out to upset anyone and we don’t think mums are stupid — we think some mums are being treated as such by the government, who is playing on their fears without giving them the full story,” he said.

The EFA though have explicitly disclaimed any apparent apology in their own blog:

So contrary to reports elsewhere, like [Taylor’s piece], we aren’t apologising for the campaign – we’re happy with the way it turned out. Of course, we’d rather nobody was offended, and sincerely regret it. But offending nobody is only possible without any risk-taking, and a risk-free campaign is unlikely to break any new ground.

I’ve also transcribed the the Akmal Saleh video that’s part of the “It’s Time to Tell Mum” campaign.

Continue reading “The lamb roast roundup: Mums and censorship”

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So simple, even your mother will be opposed

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

My four month old has explained a lot of things to me. To date it’s been things like “it’s been four months and you still can’t tell the difference between tired and hungry? HERE LET ME SHOW YOU.”

But I confess that I was surprised last night by his cogent explanation of reasons to oppose the Federal government’s proposed Internet filtering scheme, thanks to Electronic Frontiers Australia’s It’s Time to Tell Mum campaign, which enabled him to simply explain things like even mums want an internet connection that’s faster, cheaper and more secure, if mums begin to rely on the filter to keep their children safe, rather than monitoring their children’s internet use themselves, children will actually be less safe than before the filter was in place.

And I have to thank him, and Electronic Frontiers Australia, because that was a lot clearer than the confused mother-logic authored by some mummy bloggers I know around these parts.

Seriously, is there some kind of bingo card for “getting mothers involved” yet? Here some squares to get you started, thanks to “It’s Time to Tell Mum”: mothers are late technology adopters, mothers are uninterested in technology and toys for their own sake, mothers are solely responsible for the moral welfare of children, (which is lucky because) mothers are pretty much only interested in the moral welfare of children, (which is also lucky because) fathers and co-parents might as well not exist. Any more?

See also discussion in the previous Open Thread.

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Tinkering

This article originally appeared on Geek Feminism.

Mark Pilgrim’s post Tinkerer’s Sunset laments the increasing tendency of Apple devices to be locked for development unless you have a Mac, XCode, an iPhone simulator, and $99 for an auto-expiring developer certificate. He goes on to write about his introduction to programming as a child:

But you don’t become a hacker by programming; you become a hacker by tinkering. It’s the tinkering that provides that sense of wonder. You have to jump out of the system, tear down the safety gates, peel away the layers of abstraction that the computer provides for the vast majority of people who don’t want to know how it all works. It’s about using the Copy ][+ sector editor to learn how the disk operating system boots, then modifying it so the computer makes a sound every time it reads a sector from the disk. Or displaying a graphical splash screen on startup before it lists the disk catalog and takes you to that BASIC prompt. Or copying a myriad of wondrous commands from the Beagle Bros. Peeks & Pokes Chart and trying to figure out what the fuck I had just done. Just for the hell of it. Because it was fun. Because it scared my parents. Because I absolutely had to know how it all worked.

I was something of a tinkerer as a tween and teen too, although at a more superficial level. I liked to change the colours of the desktop, I set up a different boot sequence because our 486 didn’t have the memory to run both Windows 3.1 and Doom II, and so on. But Pilgrim’s throwaway line about “scared my parents” struck me, because this did scare my parents.

My parents weren’t scared of a loss of control over me in the way that, I think, Pilgrim is implying. They were specifically scared: scared I’d make our family’s shared computer, which they’d barely been able to afford, unusable for everyone (and I did on a few occasions). And they certainly didn’t know, and neither did I, that tinkering with it was any kind of investment in getting jobs in the future. That’s what university is for, and the computer was an investment in me having the computer literacy I’d need to pass university. (The web was in the public eye by then, this was the 1990s, but at the time “computer literacy” meant word processing skills.)

That kind of tinkering isn’t accessible unless you can do it to a device you own, whether because it has no other user, you don’t especially care about those other users, or because you’ve been specifically told that you’re more important than those other users. I didn’t have any gadgets that met those criteria. It requires money, leisure time, and people who recognise the value of you having such a relationship with your toys. I don’t have brothers, so I can’t say whether or not a brother would have been implicitly granted the ability to break our shared gadgets for his own education in the way I wasn’t: some women do report this.

One of the early things I did when I started earning money above my basic living needs (in 2000 some university students could get computing jobs that met this criteria) was buy my very own computer, and it was worth it many times over for all the Linux installs, Windows installs, SMTP config and similar I did to it.

What about you? Did you have a tinkerable toy (in the broad sense of ‘toy’) as a child that you were granted licence to tinker with? How about as an adult? How about now? Or alternatively, have you been put in second place while your useful tool was given to someone else to take apart and put together at their own leisure? And how has this influenced your geek journey?

Update: If you want to discuss the general issue that Pilgrim raised in a way that isn’t either (a) your personal tinkering experiences or (b) a feminist discussion of tinkering, can you put it on your own blogs or in Pilgrim’s comments please? It will derail this thread otherwise.