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Yinello

Joined: 09 May 2012 Posts: 3463
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Posted: Sun Mar 10, 2013 2:22 pm Post subject: |
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I think it's hilarious how people are still claiming she's going to run off with all the money. Meanwhile, Tropes VS Men, the kickstarter that pretty much was made for and by angry men who hate feminists, has dissapeared with their 3000 bucks made. |
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WheelsOfConfusion

Joined: 09 Jul 2006 Posts: 14323 Location: Unknown Kaddath
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Samsally
Joined: 10 Jul 2006 Posts: 7534
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Posted: Sun Mar 10, 2013 6:28 pm Post subject: |
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Oh my god please let people hacking video games to be more gender inclusive be a trend please please please it makes me so happy.
That other link just makes me sad though. Like, not surprised, just bummed. _________________ Samsally the GrayAce |
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WheelsOfConfusion

Joined: 09 Jul 2006 Posts: 14323 Location: Unknown Kaddath
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Posted: Sun Mar 10, 2013 6:34 pm Post subject: |
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A lot of the negative comments in the Donkey Kong article are showing the same misunderstanding: that this is a perceived problem with any one game or with what any one guy likes to play. It's clear from this example:
Quote: | You don't see this level of objection to the sexualized portrayal of men in Twilight and daytime soap operas, and why should you? It's no one's concern. |
You have to shout back, "How would you feel about movies if they were almost all Twilights?" |
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Samsally
Joined: 10 Jul 2006 Posts: 7534
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Posted: Sun Mar 10, 2013 7:32 pm Post subject: |
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I feel a lot better about my life when I don't read the comments in articles like that. _________________ Samsally the GrayAce |
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Darqcyde

Joined: 10 Jul 2006 Posts: 11917 Location: A false vacuum abiding in ignorance.
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Posted: Mon Mar 11, 2013 1:20 am Post subject: |
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Yinello wrote: | I think it's hilarious how people are still claiming she's going to run off with all the money. Meanwhile, Tropes VS Men, the kickstarter that pretty much was made for and by angry men who hate feminists, has dissapeared with their 3000 bucks made. |
I have one issue: those earrings. I try to listen to her talk but I find myself repeatedly being distracted by them as the light occasionally glints off of them, I kinda feel like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79k3lSRwMKs _________________ ...if a single leaf holds the eye, it will be as if the remaining leaves were not there.
https://www.facebook.com/O.A.Drake/
https://twitter.com/oadrake |
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Yinello

Joined: 09 May 2012 Posts: 3463
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Posted: Mon Mar 11, 2013 2:09 am Post subject: |
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It's the shiny. No one can resist. |
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Usagi Miyamoto

Joined: 09 Jul 2006 Posts: 2262 Location: wish I was here
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Posted: Tue Mar 12, 2013 3:56 am Post subject: |
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Wired wrote: | New Study Exposes Gender Bias in Tech Job Listings
Only 11 percent of all engineers in the U.S. are women, according to Department of Labor. The situation is a bit better among computer programmers, but not much. Women account for only 26 percent of all American coders.
There are any number of reason for this, but we may have overlooked one. According to a paper recently published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, there could be a subtle gender bias in the way companies word job listings in such fields as engineering and programming. Although the Civil Rights Act effectively bans companies from explicitly requesting workers of a particular gender, the language in these listings may discourage many women from applying.
The paper — which details a series of five studies conducted by researchers at the University of Waterloo and Duke University — found that job listings for positions in engineering and other male-dominated professions used more masculine words, such as “leader,” “competitive” and “dominant.” Listings for jobs in female-dominated professions — such as office administration and human resources — did not include such words.
A listing that seeks someone who can “analyze markets to determine appropriate selling prices,” the paper says, may attract more men than a list that seeks someone who can “understand markets to establish appropriate selling prices.” The difference may seem small, but according to the paper, it could be enough to tilt the balance. The paper found that the mere presence of “masculine words” in job listings made women less interested in applying — even if they thought they were qualified for the position. |
Some of the wording used in the want ads in engineering fields may have obvious masculine or feminine connotations, but I was struck by the fact that several of the words cited were more subtle - words I would have considered innocuous and gender-connotation-free, such as "objective" and "honest" were coded as masculine and feminine, respectively. They kind of go together nicely in my mind. And I would personally find some of the words they studied objectionable in any job listing, let alone an engineering one - words coded as feminine like "whiny" or "nag" (really!?) or the masculine coded terms "greedy," "impulsive" or "reckless." It's tough to imagine an ad that either requested these traits, or said they weren't wanted, that wouldn't be grating.
Wired wrote: | In one of these studies, researchers found that participants were more likely to guess that there were more men at the companies with masculine-worded listings and more women at feminine-worded listings, regardless of the the profession. In other words, a nursing ad that included a high number of masculine words made the participants think that there were more men at the company that created the listing, and a computer programming listing with feminine words made the participants believe more women worked for the company. Participants in the study were asked what made them think a company had more men or more women, and not one of them mentioned wording of the listing. |
_________________ The reward for a good life is a good life. |
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Him

Joined: 10 Jul 2006 Posts: 4367 Location: On edge
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Posted: Tue Mar 12, 2013 7:57 am Post subject: |
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Source.
She's brave beyond words. Now I know this is the feminist thread, as opposed to my Soapbox-thread, but I'm sure you will agree that Malala Yousafzai's struggle for the right of girls to get an education, despite the threat from the taliban, is a feminist issue indeed. _________________ A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want? ~Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray |
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bitflipper

Joined: 09 Jul 2011 Posts: 728 Location: Here and Now
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Posted: Tue Mar 12, 2013 9:38 am Post subject: |
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Actually, if the study holds that words like "leader," "competitive," "dominant," "analyze," and "determine" are inherently masculine, then I'm left wondering about the gender bias of the study itself. Sounds more like it's promoting the myth rather than addressing it. _________________ I am only a somewhat arbitrary sequence of raised and lowered voltages to which your mind insists upon assigning meaning |
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Dogen

Joined: 10 Jul 2006 Posts: 11274 Location: PDX
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Posted: Tue Mar 12, 2013 9:47 am Post subject: |
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Descriptive analyses aren't intended to address an issue, only describe it. If you have two job listings that differ only in their verbs (analyze/understand), there are no obvious experimenter effects, and your sample is large enough and representative, there's no reason to disregard a study just because it's counterintuitive. A lot of things were once counterintuitive.
Not that I would mind seeing this replicated to see if the phenomenon persists. _________________ "Worse comes to worst, my people come first, but my tribe lives on every country on earth. I’ll do anything to protect them from hurt, the human race is what I serve." - Baba Brinkman |
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bitflipper

Joined: 09 Jul 2011 Posts: 728 Location: Here and Now
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Posted: Tue Mar 12, 2013 10:31 am Post subject: |
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Clicking through the article to get to the study, itself, I'm immediately struck by something far more likely than verbs in want-ads to explain the under-representation of women in these professions. "In Canada, for example, less than 20% of engineering undergraduates and only 9% of registered professional engineers are women (Engineers Canada, 2010). A similar picture emerges in the United States." It's hardly surprising we don't have a 50/50 split of engineers if we don't even have a 50/50 split of engineering students.
Still looks like women are underrepresented, though, even for the number of women students there are, but I'm willing to bet that has more to do with the traditional bullshit of "women can't do math" that's held sway over the past century than any wording of want ads; let's see how the numbers trend over the next decade and see if the ratios don't begin to come more in-line with each other. After all, it's only been since the 70s that the issue of gender-stereotyping how people allegedly think has come under question; if someone were to start then with a miraculous 50/50 split of children growing up to pursue engineering, we'd still be looking at thirty years of male-dominated beginning engineers still in the workplace versus only ten years of equally mixed beginning engineers entering the workplace.
BTW, if "registered professional engineers" means what I think in Canada, 9% isn't as bad as it sounds; less than 10% of all engineers are PLEs--Public Licensed Engineers--in the states. One doesn't need a license for the vast majority of engineering jobs, and, in fact, it can actually limit ones opportunities by pricing oneself out of the market for positions that don't require a license. If 9% of licensed engineers in Canada are women while only 11% of all engineers in Canada are women, then they're not doing badly at all for being late entries into the field.
I'm still going to read that study, though; I'm really curious about how they state their premises and what their methodology is.
edit: Well, so much for my suspicion of bias in the selection of "masculine" words; the word lists derive from earlier research by others that "is consistent with previous research that has examined gender differences in language by coding for specific words (Newman et al., 2008)." In other words, they have statistical evidence indicating that, among test subjects, "leader" implies "man." Huh. Maybe want-ads should be printed in Esperanto. (I kid; I already know that Esperanto shares specific word gender with other Latinate languages.) _________________ I am only a somewhat arbitrary sequence of raised and lowered voltages to which your mind insists upon assigning meaning |
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Usagi Miyamoto

Joined: 09 Jul 2006 Posts: 2262 Location: wish I was here
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Posted: Tue Mar 12, 2013 7:18 pm Post subject: |
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The point is not that certain words are consciously or unconsciously associated in the minds of readers with men or women - obviously they are, though sometimes it's surprising which words, and how - but that potential applicants to these jobs screen themselves based on how well they perceive they will fit in to a particular workplace based on this messaging in the want ads, even when they don't know why.
Imagine some hiring manager looking for engineers, who tells the HR person, "I'm looking for an intellectually competent person who can be assertive and grow into a leadership role, and diversity is good - women, minorities, anyone forceful and outspoken who can break us out of our old boys' club rut. What can you do for me?"
"Well, first off, you're not going to find many women applying for the job if you describe it that way, and both women and minorities like to work where they feel like they fit in as they are, not where they have to battle a headwind of 'old boys club' attitudes every day."
"Ooookay, what should I be asking for, instead?"
"You are really looking for a responsible and committed candidate you can depend on to inspire loyalty, who engages honestly with peers to build trust and interpersonal cooperation."
"Yes, that sounds like what I said."
"... right. I'll write that up, then."
"Cool. Oh, and they gotta know concurrent programming in Haskell."
"Do you know Haskell?"
"No, but I hear anybody who does is smart, curious, and has gone off and learned it on their own, and that's the kind of ambitious, dominant and self-reliant individual I want to see!"
"So, bonus points for understanding Haskell to write code that yields cooperatively to support responsiveness."
"Yeah, that's exactly what I mean!"
"I'll get right on it." _________________ The reward for a good life is a good life. |
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Thy Brilliance

Joined: 09 Jul 2006 Posts: 3661 Location: Relative
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Posted: Fri Mar 15, 2013 2:34 am Post subject: |
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A programming language that can't handle ambiguity is not fit for either men or women. |
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Darqcyde

Joined: 10 Jul 2006 Posts: 11917 Location: A false vacuum abiding in ignorance.
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