Feminism because why not make a thread for it?

[Yinello]

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.

[WheelsOfConfusion]

It's time for another Good Idea, Bad Idea.
Good Idea: hacking a Damsel in Distress game to swap the gender roles of the subject and the object so your daughter can identify as the hero.
Bad Idea: This thing.

[Samsally]

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.
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Samsally the GrayAce

[WheelsOfConfusion]

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:

[Samsally]

I feel a lot better about my life when I don't read the comments in articles like that.
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Samsally the GrayAce

[Darqcyde]

[Yinello]

It's the shiny. No one can resist.

[Usagi Miyamoto]

[Him]

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.
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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

[bitflipper]

[Dogen]

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.
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"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

[bitflipper]

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.)
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I am only a somewhat arbitrary sequence of raised and lowered voltages to which your mind insists upon assigning meaning

[Usagi Miyamoto]

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."
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The reward for a good life is a good life.

[Thy Brilliance]

A programming language that can't handle ambiguity is not fit for either men or women.

[Darqcyde]

Anyone hear about the Swedish mannequins?


http://shine.yahoo.com/healthy-living/swedish-mannequins-cause-a-controversy--192108535.html
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...if a single leaf holds the eye, it will be as if the remaining leaves were not there.
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