Interesting article about Sexism in Geek Communities

[Lawnmower Boy]

Twitter CEO Admits That Trolling Is Running Off “Core Users.” What’s He Going to Do About It?

 

Thanks to my very important contacts, I've obtained the original draft of this speech:

 

"Dudes. Thanks for coming out. I know all you reporters for  major newspapers and websites had to skip your shifts at Starbucks to be here. It means a lot to me, that you, like, gave up a cool fifty and might not be able to make rent this month. I know you're burning up with anger and resentment at most everybody. Hey! I've seen your tweets!"

 

So. I know you're all, like, saying to yourselves, "Why am I even here? Social media is so, like, 2012." Plus also, "I bet if I were a woman/minority/trans, I'd have the last job at NEWSWEEK, and not that loser, Tamara." And I hear you, folks. I mean, the last time I logged on to Facebook was, like, LOL I don't remember, and it was full of whiny people then, too. Stop whining, is what I'm saying. You'd be awesomely rich, too, if you'd come up with a plan to DISRUPT ALL MEDIA like me."

 

"So, anyway, Facebook is way better than Twitter, 'cuz it's got more of those meemie things the kids love. Not as many as Snapchat, but they're working on it. We're working on that. That's totally an important part of Project HOLDING USER DECLINE RATES FOR 2015 BELOW 30%. More memes and LOLcats. That and spamming your email every five minutes. BING. Heh heh. No, tots seriously, don't bother looking at your phones. That's us, asking why you haven't been on Twitter lately. 

 

"Yeah, I know, it makes us look needy. But hey! We're needy for reals! I mean, the company is worth --just let me check my phone here-- a gazillion billion dollars right now by stock valuation. Still, someday, someone's going to ask us how, exactly, we plan to make enough money to justify a $50 stock valuation. To which my answer continues to be, uhm, I don't know, you tell me? Which is good enough for "venture capitalists," or, as I like to call them, "Morons with too much money," but not for "value investors." Or, as I like to call them, "Morons with too much money they got from their grandparents." 

 

"So, to summarise, I sold 10% of my stock six months ago. Do you know what 1% of 24 billion is? Here, let my get my phone. Holy crap, I am swimming in moron money. Like, I make more than a doctor just on interest if I hold my money in Treasuries! For doing nothing! And in America, it's taxed below 15%! So I was at, like, Twitter HQ the other day, and I'm like, I'm outta here! And everyone was, like, 'Oh no you don't. We know where your compound is.' And we decided to wait another six months or so, till everybody else had sold off, like, 1%, too.

 

"So we're going to hold on for six months. But how, you ask? Like this: 'How?' I'm hilarious. So our plan is that we're going to do something about those Gamergate arseholes. That's something you thin-skinned weenies care about, I hear. Ladies, amirite? Or, no, wait. Trolls. All the trolls. Gonna get rid of 'em. We have a plan. Which doesn't involve a compound on a lake in the Sierra Nevada you never heard of. For another six months." 

[Cancer]

OK, not sure where this really belongs, but ....

 

http://benschmidt.org/profGender/

 

Someone has gone through the Rate My Professor site and done statistics involving word use and the gender of the person being commented upon, and populated a graphical tool to look at the differences.

 

There are certainly gender differences with certain pejorative words

like "asshole" and "bitch", though it informs you the last is a really low-use word

and also less offensive words like "garbage" and "pig", some obvious bias words like "dork" and "geek", but more disturbingly, there are pretty clear biases about complimentary words like "excellent", "delight", "inspired", and "helped".

 

Then there's words like the relative use of "teacher", "professor", "instructor", "assistant", and "syllabus", some of which I have trouble wrapping my mind around (why is "syllabus" all but universally used more in comments about women than men?).

 

NOTE that the horizontal scale changes, so some rarely-used words may have large shot noise fluctuations.

 

Oh, and the word "nurturing" was used zero times about physicists of either gender.

[Sociotard]

Very interesting.  I note that "Bossy" is very much used more for women, as has been commented on earlier in this thread as one of those "its okay when men do it" things. 

 

Yet, "arrogant" is a male one.  Those two seem very similar.

[Hermit]

Very interesting.  I note that "Bossy" is very much used more for women, as has been commented on earlier in this thread as one of those "its okay when men do it" things. 

 

Yet, "arrogant" is a male one.  Those two seem very similar.

Men are more often called Bullies I think when they are bossy... and that's hardly the worse thing they're called. So I'm not sure it's more acceptable when one gender or another does it, it's just slammed under different but also negative terminology. 

[Zeropoint]

Hmm. "Sexy" is consistently used more for male teachers.

[Markdoc]

Also interesting - there is a clear gradient across courses for negative language. Descriptors such as "Bad", "Awful", Horrible", etc all sort with the highest use being in Physics, Economics, Engineering, Mathematics, Chemistry and Computer Science. The precise order varies, but these six are almost always at the top, in terms of frequency (Engineering being the star, appearing most frequently at the top of the list – and I don’t mean that in a good way).  Perhaps not coincidentally, these words are more frequently associated with female teachers, both across the board and particularly in these subjects.

 

It could be that teachers in these subjects are just rubbish, but – speaking as a former engineering student – I suspect it reflects a fairly aggressive, highly competitive culture, where putdowns are par for the course (ho ho) and the language directed at females (both students and professors) can be cruel and crude. Certainly it was like that in my time: I hope it’s improved, but these results suggest it has not changed totally.

 

Cheers, Mark

[Cancer]

Something you do not know is the population that is making the comments from which the results are drawn: other than claiming to have taken a course from an instructor, there's no data on the gender, age, major, etc. of the respondents. If you look at the comment page linked from that page, there is a comment about making guesses from lexical analysis of the comments themselves, but the page owner seems to think the data are too limited for that to be of use.

 

If you go through the mental exercise of positing assumptions about the make-up of the responding population, you probably will find it colors your thinking considerably. For example:

• 90% female, 10% male
• 10% female, 90% male
• 90% 18-year-old freshmen, 10% other classes
• all comments come from people taking a class outside their majors
• 55% female, 40% male, 5% various other bins, which seems to be the composition of entering freshmen in US colleges the last several years

[Markdoc]

There's going to be self-selection bias in any study of this kind. I'd be wary about reading too much into it.

 

But given the size of the corpus, the data are likely reliable, and given what we know about student and university makeup, we can make some assumptions. In Engineering (most STEM subjects, for that matter), for example, we can assume that the overweight of negative descriptions associated with female lecturers in those fields is not due to an overweight of female lecturers. NSF data only goes to 2006, but that was indicating rates in the range of 5-20% for female faculty across various STEM subjects - what I've seen from less comprehensive surveys indicates that not much has changed since.

 

So given that basic assumption there does seem to be a correlation with more hostile characterizations of female faculty in subjects with smaller percentages of female faculty. That's not proof of causation, of course - but it's certainly consistent with it.

 

cheers, Mark

[Cancer]

Anyway, this caused me to go back and read the comments about me in ratemyprofessors.

 

At least no one was nuts enough to give me a hotness bump.

 

[Cygnia]

Teachers Give Girls Better Grades on Math Tests When They Don’t Know They Are Girls

 

When it comes to explaining why women are underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and math, it’s not enough to point to discrimination in hiring, even though that is a real phenomenon. It’s also true that STEM fields have a “pipeline” problem, where not enough girls are choosing to pursue education and eventually careers in science and tech. New research suggests that part of the problem is that girls are being discouraged at very young ages from thinking of themselves as capable at math.

[Cancer]

That linked story doesn't say so, but I have read studies that indicate it happens even when the teachers giving the grades are female. I will see if I can retrace where I read that and post the links.

[Sociotard]

I can believe that.  Much like that infamous test for subconscious racism. I've read several articles from black people who tried it and were surprised they were prejudiced a against black people too.  Or the studies that black cops are prone to shooting black people too.

[Sociotard]

Here's a curious outlier for that ratemyprofessor site: "Gross".  I looked at a few "appearance" words, since women are held to such a harsher (and usually irrelevant) standard here. Gross was more often applied to men than women, with a few field exceptions.  Computer science though, stood out, not only as an exception, but an extreme exception.

 

Another huge margin: Male engineering professors are Stinky.  By an even bigger margin, Female engineers are Smelly.  Bizarre. I don't think of those as gendered words.

 

Oh, I tried Dull, Boring, and Tedious.  Guess what was at the bottom of the list each time?  Mathematics.  So, if you don't want to be bored in college, there's your major.

[BoloOfEarth]

Teachers Give Girls Better Grades on Math Tests When They Don’t Know They Are Girls

 

I'm thankful my daughter's high school was (and hopefully still is) an exception.  When she was in middle school, she was one of five students in her class tested early in the school year and moved ahead a grade in math.  Everyone in the group was female.  That group of students stayed a grade ahead in math throughout the rest of their schooling; they were joined by two boys in high school who were similarly skilled in math.   It was interesting watching how the group all supported and challenged each other to excel. 

 

FYI: my daughter is currently pursuing a degree in environmental engineering and considering a double major with mathematics.  Wish I could claim some credit, but she's the one with all the focus and drive.

[Cygnia]

Creator as Critic: Why Gaming Needs More Feminist Criticism

 

If a female designer wants to succeed, her best odds involve getting male support. Most men are turned off by feminism — or least, any feminism that directly involves criticism of something that might affect them.  Sure, feminism in the abstract is fine, but if you tell them that their favorite video game might have sexist elements, then, well, we all knows what happens.  If you’re a feminist in game design, you will need to downplay your ideas — “I’m not one of those feminists!” — and you will need to tell the men that they are great (which, to be safe, involves not pointing out any sexist influences in their work).   This means that feminist criticism of the scene (especially the indie scene, which is by no means immune to this) is pretty weak.  Most feminist critics are also creators, and nobody wants to sabotage their professional relationships.

[NuSoardGraphite]

Everyone should be free to criticize whatever piece of work in whatever way they wish just as creators should never be restricted as to what they can put into their works.

[Cygnia]

 

5 Insane Things Comic Books Believe Women's Bodies Can Do

[Sociotard]

The TV show Trolljägarna (Troll Hunter) looks interesting.  Tracks down and exposes online trolls, including those who harass women.

[Cygnia]

Switching Positions: Fear, Gender and Privilege in Gaming

 

Thus, the fallacy of the “bias free review” is ultimately about maintaining privilege. It’s about ensuring that a specific sect of gaming has their desires and motivations unnamed as neutral, so that they can continue to “experience their daily life and identity as routine, all encompassing, normal, neutral and universal.” By adopting the language of bias and objectivity, the desire to maintain privilege is falsely displayed as heroic, defensive act.

[Sociotard]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVO3sNcJ7A8

[bigbywolfe]

I love Adult Wednesday Addams.so glad she is finally doing a second season.

[Cygnia]

The Harassment Game

 

This isn’t yet another article about Gamergate. It could be, but even as the anti-Gamergate conversations unfold on Twitter, and celebrities take sides (such as there are sides in a discussion over who has the right to exist and speak), the thing is that we’ve done this before, and we will do it again. Every few days another discussion of online harassment and stalking is unfolding in some circle, fandom or literature or tech or some other subculture. We’re in what seems like year twenty of discussing online harassment and cyber bullying as a problem that needs a solution.

 

What we’re not doing is talking about actual solutions.

[Cygnia]

Spoilers for NSFW.

 

 

 

[Cygnia]

Trolling female gamers in the name of satire isn't funny—it's abusive

 

A video appeared recently that that reawakened fears about Gamergate. It caused game developer Brianna Wu to file a restraining order against the man in the video. It was also a factor in her reasoning to pull her company, Giant Spacekat, out of gaming festival PAX East, fearing for her employees’ safety. It scared Wu, it scared other female developers and writers, it scared a lot of people who were against Gamergate, and it even scared me.

 

And according to the video’s creator, it was all a joke. The stunt claims to be  in the name of comedy, but it fell somewhere between legitimate commentary and unbelievable ignorance.

[Cygnia]

 

How men use the word ‘drama’ to win fights against women