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Some posts from the last year on inclusion
A sort of topic-specific collection of links from about the last year, broadly talking about inclusion in communities, online and off, especially in geek(y) spaces.
What kind of discourses and conversations do we want to encourage and have?
Nalo Hopkinson's WisCon 2016 Guest of Honor speech: "There are many people who do good in this field, who perform small and large actions of kindness and welcome every day. I'd like to encourage more of that." In this speech Hopkinson announced the Lemonade Award.
"Looking back on a decade in online fandom social justice: unexpurgated version", by sqbr: "And just because I'm avoiding someone socially doesn't mean I should ignore what they have to say, and won't end up facing complex ethical choices involving them. My approach right now is to discuss it with people I trust. Figuring out who those people are, and learning to make myself vulnerable in front of them, has been part of the journey."
"On conversations", by Katherine Daniels: "I would love for these people who have had so many opportunities already given to them to think about what they are taking away from our collective conversations by continuing to dominate them, and to maybe take a step back and suggest someone else for that opportunity to speak instead."
"Towards a More Welcoming War" by Mary Anne Mohanraj (originally published in WisCon Chronicles 9: Intersections and Alliances, Aqueduct Press, 2015): "This is where I start thinking about what makes an effective community intervention. This is where I wish I knew some people well enough to pick up a phone."
"The chemistry of discourse", by Abi Sutherland: "What we really need for free speech is a varied ecosystem of different moderators, different regimes, different conversations. How do those spaces relate to one another when Twitter, Reddit, and the chans flatten the subcultural walls between them?"
"Hot Allostatic Load", by porpentine, in The New Inquiry: "This is about disposability from a trans feminine perspective, through the lens of an artistic career. It's about being human trash….Call-out Culture as Ritual Disposability"
"The Ethics of Mob Justice", by Sady Doyle, in In These Times: "But, again, there's no eliminating the existence of Internet shaming, even if you wanted to—and if you did, you'd eliminate a lot of healthy dialogue and teachable moments right along with it. At best, progressive people who recognize the necessity of some healthy shame can only alter the forms shaming takes."
How do we reduce online harassment?
"Paths: a YA comic about online harassment", by Mikki Kendall: "'It's not that big of a deal. She'll get over it.' 'Even if she does, that doesn't make this okay. What's wrong with you?'"
"On a technicality", by Eevee: "There's a human tendency to measure peace as though it were the inverse of volume: the louder people get, the less peaceful it is. We then try to optimize for the least arguing."
"Moderating Harassment in Twitter with Blockbots", by ethnographer R. Stuart Geiger, on the Berkeley Institute for Data Science site: "In the paper, I analyze blockbot projects as counterpublics…I found a substantial amount of collective sensemaking in these groups, which can be seen in the intense debates that sometimes take place over defining standards of blockworthyness…..I also think it is important distinguish between the right to speak and the right to be heard, particularly in privately owned social networking sites."
"The Real Name Fallacy", by J. Nathan Matias, on The Coral Project site: "People often say that online behavior would improve if every comment system forced people to use their real names….Yet the balance of experimental evidence over the past thirty years suggests that this is not the case. Not only would removing anonymity fail to consistently improve online community behavior – forcing real names in online communities could also increase discrimination and worsen harassment….designers need to commit to testing the outcomes of efforts at preventing and responding to social problems."
What does it take to make your community more inclusive?
"Want more inclusivity at your conference? Add childcare." by Mel Chua and then "Beyond 'Childcare Available': 4 Tips for Making Events Parent-Friendly", by Camille Acey: "I've pulled together a few ideas to help move 'Childcare Available' from just a word on a page to an actual living breathing service that empowers people with children to learn/grow alongside their peers, engage in projects they care about, and frankly just have a little break from the rigors of childcare."
Project Hearing: "Project Hearing is a website that consolidates information about technology tools, websites, and applications that deaf and hard of hearing people can use to move around in the hearing world."
"Conference access, and related topics", by Emily Short: "This is an area where different forms of accessibility are often going at right angles."
"SciPy 2016 Retrospective", by Camille Scott: "SciPy, by my account, is a curious microcosm of the academic open source community as a whole."
"Notes from Abstractions", by Coral Sheldon-Hess: "Pittsburgh's Code & Supply just held a huge (1500 people) conference over the last three days, and of course I'd signed up to attend months ago, because 1) local 2) affordable 3) tech conference 4) with a code of conduct they seemed serious about. Plus, "Abstractions" is a really cool name for a tech conference."
"The letter I just sent to Odyssey Con", by Sigrid Ellis: "None of us can know the future, of course. And I always hope for the best, from everyone. But I would hate for Odyssey Con to find itself in the midst of another controversy with these men at the center." (This is Ellis's post from April 7, 2016, a year before all three of Odyssey Con's Guests of Honor chose not to attend Odyssey Con because of the very issue Ellis discussed.)
"The realities of organizing a community tech conference: an ill-advised rant", by Rebecca Miller-Webster: "…there's a lot of unpaid labor that happens at conferences, especially community conferences, that no one seems to talk about. The unpaid labor of conference organizers. Not only do people not talk about it, but in the narrative around conferences as work, these participants are almost always the bad guys."
"Emotional Labor and Diversity in Community Management", by Jeremy Preacher, originally a speech in the Community Management Summit at Game Developers Conference 2016: "The thing with emotional labor is that it's generally invisible — both to the people benefiting from the work, and to the people doing it. People who are good at it tend to do it unconsciously — it's one of the things we're talking about when we say a community manager has 'good instincts'."….What all of these strategies do, what thinking about the emotional labor cost of participation adds up to, is make space for your lurkers to join in."
"White Corporate Feminism", by Sarah Sharp: "Even though Grace Hopper was hosted in Atlanta that year, a city that is 56% African American, there weren't that many women of color attending."
"You say hello", by wundergeek on "Go Make Me a Sandwich (how not to sell games to women)": "Of course, this is made harder by the fact that I hate losing. And there will be people who will celebrate, people who call this a victory, which only intensifies my feelings of defeat. My feelings of weakness. I feel like I'm giving up, and it kills me because I'm competitive! I'm contrary! Telling me not to do a thing is enough to make me want to do the thing. I don't give up on things and I hate losing. But in this situation, I have to accept that there is no winning play. No win condition. I'm one person at war with an entire culture, and there just aren't enough people who give a damn, and I'm not willing to continue sacrificing my health and well-being on the altar of moral obligation. If this fight is so important, then let someone else fight it for a while."
"No One Should Feel Alone", by Natalie Luhrs: "In addition to listening and believing–which is 101 level work, honestly–there are other things we can do: we can hold space for people to speak their truth and we can hold everyone to account, regardless of their social or professional position in our community. We can look out for newcomers–writers and fans alike–and make them welcome and follow through on our promise that we will have their backs. We can try to help people form connections with each other, so they are not isolated and alone."
"Equality Credentials", by Sara Ahmed: "Feminist work in addressing institutional failure can be used as evidence of institutional success. The very labour of feminist critique can end up supporting what is being critiqued. The tools you introduce to address a problem can be used as indicators that a problem has been addressed."
"Shock and Care: an essay about art, politics and responsibility", by Harry Giles (Content note: includes discussion of sex, violence and self-injury in an artistic context): "So, in a political situation in which care is both exceptionally necessary and exceptionally underprovided, acts of care begin to look politically radical. To care is to act against the grain of social and economic orthodoxy: to advocate care is, in the present moment, to advocate a kind of political rupture. But by its nature, care must be a rupture which involves taking account of, centring, and, most importantly, taking responsibility for those for whom you are caring. Is providing care thus a valuable avenue of artistic exploration? Is the art of care a form of radical political art? Is care, in a society which devalues care, itself shocking?"
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged accessibility, anonymity, art, childcare, comics, community, community standards, conferences, cons, diversity, fandom, Gaming, harassment, intersectionality, Linkspam, names, online abuse, online harassment, Open source, pseudonymity, research, science fiction, sexism, SF fandom, twitter, wiscon on 2017/04/18 by brainwane.
Interview: Authors of the paper "Women's Representation in Mathematics Subfields"
Right now, you can read a preliminary draft of a paper analyzing women's representation in subfields of mathematics. The abstract:
We use data from papers posted to the Mathematics section of the arXiv to explore the representation of women in mathematics research. We show that women are under-represented as authors of mathematics papers on the arXiv, even in comparison to the proportion of women who hold full-time positions in mathematics departments. However, some subfields have much greater participation than others.
The authors, Dr. Abra Brisbin and Dr. Ursula Whitcher, are both scientists at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire. I interviewed Dr. Whitcher about their methodology, findings, and further hypotheses, and about the additional burden of doing diversity work in the sciences.
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged academia, academics, arXiv, gender binary, math, mathematics, names, research, stem, women in mathematics, women in science on 2016/02/25 by brainwane.
My linkspam brings all the boys to the yard (30 April 2014)
In memoriam: Wikimedia remembers two women who contributed hugely to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects: Adrianne Wadewitz (died April 8, see also New York Times and Los Angeles Times, and the memorial edit-a-thon in Los Angeles in May) and Cynthia Ashley-Nelson (died April 11)
Audrey Tang spoke to TEDxTaipei on Programming Languages and RailsGirls Taiwan (程式語言與軌道女孩) on April 27. Slides (primarily in Chinese) and an English language translation of the transcript are up.
The Anti-Nerd: Fear of a Black Time Traveler | Rafael Martinez at Black Girl Nerds (April 16): "It is something I have noticed. A lack of us being in the Time Traveling profession. I then Googled 'Black time travelers' and closest I got was, I kid you not–black traveling shoes."
Dealing with name changes in publication records for scientists | Savannah at lgbt+physicists+blog (April 21): "The basic idea here is that if one is assigned, for example, a female-typical name such as Robyn O'Troodle at birth, then publishes several papers under this name before transitioning to Jonathon O'Troodle, this would result in a jump from a female-typical name to a male-typical name that might appear awkward (or simply distracting) on one's publication record."
Lady She-Woman: Female Superheroes, Codenames and Identity | Andrew Wheeler at Comics Alliance (April 23): "Identity is central to superhero fiction. It's a genre that gives us heroes; big, broad, iconic modern gods that lift us up out of the uncertainties of our own lives to a place where who you are and what you stand for is known… For a lot of female heroes, owning a superhero identity presents an almost insurmountable challenge. A significant number of DC's female heroes are based on other heroes, from Batgirl, Supergirl and Wonder Girl through Stargirl, Mary Marvel and Ravager."
Sex, Sexy & Sexism | Storify (April 24): a PAX East 2014 panel on fixing gender inequality in gaming. Featuring Susan Arendt, Brianna Wu, Tifa Robles, and Duane de Four, moderated by Ken Gagne
No, I Don't Work for Free | Julie Pagano (April 26): "Asking someone to come do professional work for your for-profit company for free is incredibly problematic. I would argue in many cases it is downright exploitative. I doubt they'd have asked me to come code for them for a few hours for free. They'd recognize how unacceptable that is. Why is it that other work is seen as valuable enough to ask for, but not valuable enough to pay for?"
Dragon Age Goes Gender-Neutral! | Brad Baron at Gay Gamer (April 23): "Dragon Age: Inquisition… due out this fall, features a figure on its cover that could be any gender. The best part — the character's gender is totally irrelevant!"
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.
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged Comics fandom, FOSS, Gaming, in memoriam, invisibility, Linkspam, names, pax, ruby on rails, superheroes, time travel, trans, wikipedia on 2014/04/30 by spam-spam.
Quick hit: "Microsoft's 'Chuck Norris'" thinks trans people are liars
In a blog post from last December on the Microsoft Developer Network web site, Raymond Chen (described on another Microsoft site as "Microsoft's Chuck Norris") accuses people who change their names on their birth certificates of "lying". (Content warning: cissexism and inquiry-resistant dialogue, particularly in the comments section.)
It'd be like asking the church to go update its registry to change your birth name. "Yes, I know that I was born with the name Amélie Bernadette, but please change your files so it says that I was born with the name Chloë Dominique. Thanks."
The church isn't going to do that because that would now be lying. You were born with the name Amélie Bernadette. You are welcome to change your name to Chloë Dominique, but that doesn't change the fact that you were born with the name Amélie Bernadette.
First, in my country, the US, churches aren't responsible for keeping track of vital records — state governments are.
Second, infants are not born with names; adults (usually their parents) assign them names. If I have a baby today and name hir "Dale", my act of naming is not a logical proposition that can be true or false. The baby was not born "Dale"; I would be assigning that name to hir. It's a speech act — it has effects in the world. As we know in the world of programming languages, we can't apply the same reasoning to programs (or speech acts) that mutate state as we can to purely functional programs (or assertions of truth and falsity).
Third, calling people who amend their birth certificates "liars" disregards the very real burden of administrative confusion that people like me who have different forms of identification bearing different names deal with. This confusion steals time that we could be using to do productive things. Having a consistent name on all of one's papers makes life easier. It's easy for people whose lives have always been easy in this regard (which is to say, cis men who don't face any need to change their names, aren't expected to marry and take their spouse's surname, and so on) to sneer at people who lack the privilege of having a single name that others recognize. That denial of one's own privilege doesn't change the truth, though, which is that social structures make it difficult to go through life with identification that carries a name that isn't appropriate for you.
Fourth, I think we would all agree that it's okay for people to amend their birth certificates to correct errors (for example, if your birth certificate says you were born on January 1, 1980 when it was actually January 1, 1979). Usually, it's assumed that these errors are administrative. But giving a masculine-coded name to a girl, or a feminine-coded name to a boy, is effectively an error on the parents' part. So why treat parental errors differently from bureaucratic ones?
Fifth, one can imagine a response to the third and fourth points saying: "I recognize incorrect birth certificates might be inconvenient, but it's important for birth certificates to reflect the first name that a person was assigned and the first sex that a person was assigned. That's more important to me than convenience." Belief in and faith in the concept of an error-free historical record is a privilege. (And anyway, what historical record was ever free from errors? People make records.) The privilege here is the freedom to believe in an abstraction (that is, a certain construct of historical accuracy) so strongly that you put the ostensible purity of that abstraction ahead of the needs of real, living, breathing humans. Some of us don't have the luxury of sacrificing our dignity and respect for the sake of an abstraction — we're just trying to survive.
When you call people who amend their birth certificates "liars", you're calling those of us who are transsexual, transgender, and/or genderqueer liars, since we are a large percentage of people who need to amend their birth certificates (for reasons other than recording errors). And what you're really doing when you say that is saying that cis people (people who were assigned the right sex at birth) are more honest and trustworthy than trans people — that the acts of naming that we perform on ourselves are somehow less true than the acts of naming that cis people perform on us without our consent. Thus, what you're really doing is asserting power, but pretending you're making a logically true or false statement.
While Chen doesn't use the example of changing one's sex marker to illustrate his point, the same reasoning applies, since a sex or gender marker is just another kind of name (one that happens to be shared by many people — but so are the names "John" and "Jane"). Like a person's name, their sex is assigned; the difference is that no one has an inherent sense of what their name is, but many of us do have an inherent sense of what our sex is. Most people are assigned the correct sex at birth, and never need to think about it again — but sometimes, as with the people who assumed I was a baby girl when I was born, people make a mistake.
Why am I writing about this here? Because it illustrates the kinds of microaggressions that those of us who aren't cissexual, heterosexual men have to endure every day when working in the tech industry. We can't even read an innocent-looking technical blog post without being unexpectedly told that our lives are lies.
Thanks to Sumana and Liz for their comments!
Edited to add: I'll be deleting any comments concerning Chen's intent. If you're inclined to make such a comment, consider how you would feel if you were told that somebody didn't mean to dehumanize you — you just weren't important enough for them to even bother to think about the effect of their speech on you.
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged gender, gender essentialism, microagressions, names on 2013/01/24 by Tim Chevalier.
More horrible than your worst linkspam (18th July, 2011)
Black and WTF: photographs of suffragettes. In 1912, Scotland Yard detectives bought their first camera to covertly photograph suffragettes.
A bit of an oldie, but relevant to our recent Google+ discussions: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names: So, as a public service, I'm going to list assumptions your systems probably make about names. All of these assumptions are wrong. Try to make less of them next time you write a system which touches names.
Great 101 comment from karenm77 about why it was creepy to proposition Rebecca Watson at 4am in an elevator. (Via tigtog.) Yeah, in case you missed it.
Sheryl Sandberg & Male-Dominated Silicon Valley: an interview with Facebook's COO. You can't come [into space], [Sandberg's son] said. I've already invited my sister, and there's only one girl in space. At first, Sandberg laughed. And then it dawned on her that there is only one woman in these movies.
Debunking the Top 5 Myths About Lady Scientists: So, people of the universe, when I tell you that I am a scientist, the only conclusion you should draw is that I like science. Â Not what I look like or how I dress. Â Not what I like to do in my free time. Â Not how I interact with other people. Â And real world, get used to me because I am your average scientist and I am not at all who you try to say I am.
A linkspam of a linkspam: Meanwhile, Back in SFland: While I was off enjoying the company of several thousand women ( and an increasing number of men, as Sharon Sala graciously noted while accepting her lifetime achievement award) in Romanceland, the gender wars seem to have broken out in SFland again.
You can't fight sexism with sexism: So, please, before you write about getting women into the game industry, first check and make sure that you're not perpetuating the very attitudes you're arguing against before you publish.
Are the Open Data Warriors Fighting for Robin Hood or the Sheriff?: Some Reflections on OKCon 2011 and the Emerging Data Divide: Cogent criticism of the demographics of the open-data movement.
You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the "geekfeminism" tag on delicious, freelish.us or pinboard.in or the "#geekfeminism" tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged atheism, facebook, Gaming, gender gap, Google, harassment, history of feminism, Linkspam, names, photos, science fiction, sexism, SF fandom, skepticism, Tech industry, women in science, women's history on 2011/07/17 by spam-spam.
Open Thread: A rose by any other…
Today's Open Thread is hosted by the newly named baby elephant from Taronga Zoo:
A tiny baby elephant is hiding under his mother's belly as they frolic in water. His trunk is raised and his mouth open in a cheery expression akin to "IT'S GOOD TO BE ALIVE :D !!1!"
Minister for Climate Change and the Environment, Frank Sartor, today announced that Taronga's new elephant calf will be named Pathi Harn (pronounced 'par tea harn').
"The people of NSW and zoo keepers have chosen Pathi Harn – the Thai word for miracle – as the new name for Mr Shuffles," Mr Sartor said.
The little darling has been called a miracle since his birth, as zoo vets had given up hope that he would be born alive after they ceased to detect signs of life.
Anyway, during an IRC conversation earlier today Mary noted that we really don't have a name for our beloved commenters:
<mary> You know, geekfeminism.org doesn't have a name for our commenters.
<mary> I mean, like Twisty's Blamers, or Shakesville's Shakers.
We figure, what the heck, why not let you name yourselves. In a similar fashion to how the adorable bundle of ubercute above was named, we'll take ideas and poll the suggestions we like most in a future thread.
So, Open Threaders: What do you, our geekfeminist.org community, wish to be nicknamed?
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged names, open thread on 2010/03/25 by melissagf.
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