A couple of quick announcements to start us off:
- applications to attend AdaCamp Portland (June 21–22, ally skills track June 23) are open
- the call for submissions to another issue of Model View Culture is out: the Abuse issue. “This issue explores themes of harassment, microaggression, boundary violation, assault, discrimination and other forms of abuse in the tech community”.
Onto the spam you’re waiting for:
- Cloaking device | shonias at Hoyden about Town (March 23): “The moment I arrived [at Cisco Live!], unbeknownst to me, my cloaking device had been deployed. I stood waiting to register, and when a position was free, the bloke on it gestured to the man who had arrived after me. I just wasn’t there.”
- Silicon’s Valley’s Brutal Ageism | Noam Scheiber at New Republic (March 23): “‘Young people are just smarter,’ Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told an audience at Stanford back in 2007. As I write, the website of ServiceNow, a large Santa Clara–based I.T. services company, features the following advisory in large letters atop its ‘careers’ page: ‘We Want People Who Have Their Best Work Ahead of Them, Not Behind Them.’ And that’s just what gets said in public.”
- Iconic Girls in Pop Culture: Miyazaki’s Female Characters | Raizel Liebler at The Learned Fangirl (March 21): “…one of the elements I most appreciate is the focus on girls in that frequently awkward age between eight and twelve – too old to be little and cute, but too young to be a teen – with the freedoms and heartbreak of teenagehood.”
- Game designer cracks through myths about women in the games industry | Megan Farokhmanesh at Polygon (March 21): “[Game designer Elizabeth] Sampat… covered myths such as there are no women to hire, or female candidates not fitting company culture, suggested that companies use recruiters to draw in new candidates. Recruiters should stop looking for a dedication to gaming, she said, and find candidates with curiosity and current interest.”
- Why I’m Excited About !!Con | Sumana Harihareswara at Cogito, Ergo, Sumana (March 20): “Some get-togethers turn into dominance displays… Whenever possible, Hacker School culture assumes abundance rather than scarcity; attempts to rank projects or people would defile our ecology. And now we have a conference, !!Con, with that same philosophy.” !!Con is May 17–18 in New York City.
- Not buying sexism: How inclusive games show hope for gaming culture | Katherine Cross at Feministing (March 20): “…at least in the world of roleplaying gaming, the idea that sex and sexism sell is taking another hit from the opposite direction: we now have proof that games that resist sexist caricatures and that prominently feature women as strong and fully human characters can actually succeed where games more mired in outdated thinking have failed.”
- Male Superheroes in Female Superhero Poses | Brian Cronin at The Line It Is Drawn (March 21): A big collection of comics fanart with the male superheroes in the awkward and submissive poses and setups given to female superheroes.
- A Day of Honors for Women in the Video Game Industry | Laura Parker at New York Times ArtsBeat (March 20): “Female video game designers, producers and directors were honored at Microsoft’s Women in Gaming Awards here on Thursday in an event that has grown substantially in short order.”
- Self-Citation Gender Gap | Rina Shaikh-Lesko at The Scientist Magazine (March 18):
“A study commissioned by The Chronicle of Higher Education shows that women in academia are much less likely than men to cite their own research. Because citation counts are now critical to many decisions about hiring and promotions, citations are becoming one more area where women are falling behind their male colleagues.” (The Chronicle‘s coverage is paywalled.) - Mean Little Girls: Thoughts On Indie Game Journal | Becky Chambers at The Mary Sue (March 22): Chambers reflects on a game featuring a girl protagonist and childhood bullying in a problematic but interesting way.
We link to a variety of sources, some of which are personal blogs. If you visit other sites linked herein, we ask that you respect the commenting policy and individual culture of those sites.
You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on Pinboard, Delicious or Diigo; or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).
Thanks to everyone who suggested links.
