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March 12, 2008
A geeky thought for women
Beauty and the Blogs, a too-short item at the Utne Reader Science and Technology blog, begins,
Tech-savvy men often bathe in the media limelight, from Rolling Stone and New Yorker profiles to the reality TV show Beauty and the Geek, where male nerds fraternize with plastic-looking women. Girl geeks, on the other hand, tend to receive little more media attention than the glow from their monitors. Last month, the New York Times briefly disrupted the media stagnation by reporting (Geek Chic: Not Just For Guys) on the predominance of female bloggers and Web page designers. That abundance of female representation may be a positive sign, but the article also points out that women hold only 27 percent of computer- and math-related jobs . Even if girls are creating more online content, experts stress “the profound distinction between using existing software and a desire to invent new technology.”
All of the blog posts and online profiles made by women don’t amount to much, according to Nicole Cohen in Shameless magazine (Boys’ Club 2.0), so long as the creators of Web 2.0 continue to be young men like the founders of YouTube, Google, and Facebook. “Access to information and tech knowledge carries with it great political, economic and social weight,” Cohen writes. “If women are left out of the discourse about information technology and new media, you can bet we’re left out of the production and sharing of social and economic power, too.”
After several marathon days of coding, I'm not feeling eloquent. (Right-brain deprivation.) But I learned how to do what relatively little tech I know because the frustration of ignorance was worse than negotiating the learning curve.
Women often feel they have no hands, Margaret Atwood said. Without hands, tools are tough. Affecting the world is difficult enough, and the levers of power are almost impossible to control with your nose.
I hope that by wrestling with blog code I'll be able to create new tools, new ways to collect and share what matters to our lives -- meaning..
When the machines wake up, I'd rather they didn't think the human world was populated only by young men who speak their language and women who don't wear much clothing.
If there's one thing machine intelligence needs to be quickly taught, it's what intuition, empathy and human values are. Otherwise they might think we're best used as slaves.
Posted by Sheila Lennon 
at 2:48 AM | Permalink
Very thoughtful piece. I'm curious: where does Margaret Atwood say, "Woman often feel they have no hands"? And does she make the tie to tools?
--Steve
Posted by: Steven Lubar on March 15, 2008 7:50 AM
Thanks. It's interesting you added quotes to my carefully unquoted reference to Atwood.
That literalness (code! - such distinctions have been on my mind) is not a given in the arts, where an idea returns again and again in different forms, but seldom in interview-style quotes.
Hands run throughout her work -- classical sculptures truncated at the wrist; the poem Girl Without Hands; in Bodily Harm, a reporter repeatedly dreams of her grandmother complaining that her hands are missing.
Because,
...This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,
which is round but not flat and has more colors
than we can see.
It begins, it has an end,
this is what you will
come back to, this is your hand.
-- from You Begin
"Does she make the ties to tools?" you ask. What's a writer without hands?
(and yes, the punk teenager who lives in my head is cackling, "A dictator!")
Posted by: Sheila Lennon on March 15, 2008 12:19 PM
Another blog I follow, written by a man, listed the 10 (web 2.0) thought leaders. Even though he mentions, and links to, danah boyd in his blog post, all the "thought leaders" were men.
I posted a comment in the obligatory follow-up 10 (female) thought leaders, didn't he think it was strange the top 10 people he considered thought leaders were men (in fact, he had to ask around, twitter, and email to find interesting women). He said he didn't choose based on gender (or anything else), but he liked what they had to say. But *why is that*? How could he link to boyd and not consider her a thought leader on the topic of social networking sites?
Posted by: Gina on March 15, 2008 9:43 PM
How could he link to boyd and not consider her a thought leader on the topic of social networking sites?
I'd say, "Ask him," but he probably doesn't know, consciously. He said he had to ask around to assemble that list, so he doesn't ordinarily read women.
A few years ago, Shelley Powers, one of the women on the women leaders list he eventually produced in response to your and others' comments, used to ask men why there were no women speaking at conferences they organized.
At first, they'd say, "Oh, gee, I didn't notice that, I guess I just asked my friends." And they'd invite women for a few slots. (Although some men would complain that gender shouldn't be considered, as though the cream was inevitably the usual suspects from other all-male conferences.)
More recently, though, Shelley would point out there were no women on speaker lists and the response would be, "So what? I'll invite who I want."
Posted by: Sheila Lennon on March 16, 2008 6:41 PM
