Category: Culture

Categories
Diversity Weblogging

That “Where’s the women” thing again

The folks at Misbehaving noted the lack of women in the photos from the Web 2.0 conference. As Liz Lawley wrote:

Via Anil, I just saw Jeff Veen’s post on “What do these pictures have in common?” Be sure to click on the “See what you’ve won!” button. Like the first commenter, I wish he’d write the whole rant.

And please don’t post any comments about how there aren’t any women to invite; that’s part of what our sidebar’s for. If you ask, you’ll get recommendations. (Look what happened when I posted about the Microsoft event.) Clearly, the people making the invitations see what they want to see–and they don’t see the women. We’re becoming increasingly invisible.

What’s most depressing is that in every other profession in which women have been in a minority, percentages have been gradually climbing–including technical fields like engineering. Only in computing-related professions have the numbers been dropping.

Actually, according to the NSF, women are dropping from engineering, too, and that’s in some ways the problem – a close affiliation between computer technology and engineering.

Returning to the post, I thought the title was interesting: Even the men are starting to notice. The reason why is that among the political weblogs, the running joke is that some highly ranked male political pundit will write a Where are the women post every three months and is soundly trashed for thinking that he’s invented the concept; that he is the first to have noticed. He’ll then be not so gently reminded that if he hadn’t ignored the women that existed right in front of him, he would have seen that this is a topic that’s been brought up, again and again.

And again. Like now, among the technology weblogs. Having toes in both worlds means I get it from both sides. Where are the women.

Liz and Anil may have noticed the lack of women at Web 2.0 but at least there were some women at this conference. What they didn’t notice, or at least not that I’ve seen them notice, is that there were absolutely no women speakers at Gnomedex. Gnomedex that fabulous little meeting that bills itself as the geek heaven.

I examined the speaker list several times, and found that nope, not a woman (unless CJ is a woman…). Barely any women in the audience, in fact. Is it that we only notice the lack of women when the meeting revolves around industry leaders, rather than hands-on geeks?

Odd, regardless.

Joi Ito (who was just appointed to ICANN – sympathies and congrats, Joi) noted today that whatever lack of visibility women have in weblogging doesn’t extend to all online communities. He’s found that women have a strong presence in the Wikipedia and ponders:

I haven’t conducted any scientific analysis or anything, but Wikipedia seems much more gender balanced than the blogging community. I know many people point out that ratio of men at conferences on blogging and ratio of men who have loud blog voices seems to be quite high. I wonder what causes this difference in gender distribution?

I wrote the following in comments:

Participation in the wikipedia isn’t controlled by anything other than the person’s own interests and involvement.

Studies have been made of blogging and have found that 50% or more of all webloggers, journalists or ‘bloggers’ implied categorization aside, are women; however, men are given disproportionate attention. Why? Good question, someone let me know when there’s a good answer.

In blogging, there are many different factors that generate attention, including a person’s name (how well they’re known), wealth, status, etc –above and beyond the quality or amount of participation in the weblogs. In the wikipedia, attention is based on involvement and quality, no other factor.

What we’re seeing is probably the same amount of participation of each sex in both activities, but women are getting proportionate attention in Wikipedia.

Joi asked an interesting question in his post: …is it something about Wikipedia that attracts powerful women?

I think what’s more likely is that a powerful woman can’t be shut down in the Wikipedia community, but can be effectively ignored (or dismissed as ‘bitch’) in the weblogging community.

Not good, but I will say this: this isn’t just a ‘guy’ thing. If women didn’t work against other women in this community, and actively supported each other more, we wouldn’t be as invisible as we are.

Seems to me, we all have a lot of work to do to correct the inequities.

Categories
Diversity

Bad girls must pay

I tried to watch the movie, “The Magdalene Sisters” but had to stop, not because the movie was bad but because the movie made me so angry. If you’re unfamiliar with these spots from hell, they were convents run by the Catholic Church in several countries, and devoted to the ‘penance’ of wayward women. In them, women would toil over laundry 6 days a week, usually from 5 in the morning until they went to bed at 7 at night. If this sounds like something that must have happened a hundred years or so ago, think again: the last laundry closed its doors in 1996.

The worst of these were in Ireland, but there were Magdalene convents in Australia, North America, Scotland, and England. Women were put in these, many times without their consent, because they had a baby out of wedlock, or their families felt that the girls had ’sinned’ by having sex (or they thought the girls had sex). In some cases, the were intered if the girls were Catholic orphans and the Sisters thought them too pretty and therefore wanted to save them from themselves.

At the Laundries, they were forced to strip naked once a week as the Sisters taunted their bodies: that they were fat or their breasts too big–humiliating the girls. There hair was kept short and they were dressed in coarse shapeless dresses, their breasts bound tightly so that they seem flat chested. Some were sexually abused, both by Sisters and by the Priests. Many were beaten or otherwise tortured, and in Ireland, not allowed to leave on their own, even when they reached adult age.

It wasn’t until one of the Laundries was sold in the 1990’s and 133 bodies of women were found in unmarked graves that the story of the horror of these Convents started to be told.

A few years back I read about one woman put into the Convent for wayward behavior in the late 1960’s, and was stunned to realize that was only a few years earlier than my own ‘wayward’ behavior here in the States. I would say, “Thank God, I wasn’t born in Ireland”, except as one of the former inmates said, what kind of God exists that would allow such cruelty to innocent young girls?

The history of the Magdalenes started getting international attention when a reporter with the RTE (Irish Television), Mary Raftery, did a story on the institutions. In this country, we learned about it when 60 Minutes ran a story on it the same year. Yeah, the same ‘bad boy’ 60 Minutes of the infamous CBS documents. I guess it takes one set of ‘bad’ people to expose the truth about another set of ‘bad’ people.

The Catholic Church, of course, denounced the work as lies and fabrications, a stance it would hold through subsequent documentaries and movie release.

Categories
Connecting Diversity Political

An actual conversation

Recovered from the Wayback Machine

from today, played back from memory

“So, who are you voting for? Kerry or Bush?”

“I’m going to write in McCain.”

“Why? That’s throwing your vote away.”

“I don’t really care for either Bush or Kerry.”

“But McCain’s not running, that will throw your vote away.”

“I like McCain. I don’t like Kerry or Bush.”

“What don’t you like?”

“Normally I vote Republican. But this war in Iraq, I don’t like this war in Iraq. We don’t belong there. It’s costing us money and we’re not helping the people. I think we were lied to.”

“Is that the only thing you don’t like about Bush?”

“He seems like all he cares about is his corporate friends. He’s not for us, he’s for his friends.”

“How about the environment.”

“Oh God, he’s awful there.”

“Then why don’t you vote for Kerry?”

“I thought about it. Especially when those people said all those nasty things about him just because he went to Vietnam and then came back and told everyone what it was like. I really wanted to vote for him then.”

“Then why don’t you?”

“I’m concerned about his morality.”

“What morality. What’s wrong with Kerry’s morality?”

“He supports gay marriage.”

“That’s it? You don’t want to vote for Kerry because you think he supports gay marriage?”

“Yes. I don’t agree with that.”

“Well, first of all, he doesn’t support gay marriage. He believes that the issue is best left up to the state, or to the Supreme Court. But regardless, what’s wrong with gay marriage?”

“Gays are an abomination according to the Bible.”

“They’re a what?!“

“They’re an abomination. In the New Testament, gays are considered an abomination.”

“Where in the New Testament.”

“I don’t know where, but I know it’s there.”

“Where, I really want to know where in the New Testament it says gays are an abomination. “

“Well, I’ll look it up, and let you know.”

“Fine. But even if there were passages like you say in the Bible, isn’t this country founded on freedom of religion, and that it has no place in government? Don’t gays have full rights in this country, regardless of what some church people say? Don’t you believe in freedom of religion?”

“Yes I do, very much. I firmly believe that every person here has a right to worship God in whatever form they prefer.”

“But you’re basing this on your belief in a single God. What about religions that don’t believe in the Christian God? What about those who believe in a different God, or no God at all.”

“There is a God, and there is only one God, and he rules over all of us.”

“But what about the Jewish people, they don’t believe in Christ as the son of God. Atheists don’t believe in any God, and then there are Shinto and Buddhists, and dozens of other faiths that don’t believe in the Christian God. Don’t they have a right to freedom of religion?”

“Well..”

“Do you believe in freedom of religion?”

“I believe in God.”

“Do you believe in freedom of religion?”

“I don’t know.”

Categories
Diversity Weblogging

Exclusionary language

Several webloggers have been focusing on the use of language in weblogs and how this can form an exclusionary barrier to women (see Body and Soul, des femmes, and Feministe (as well as here)).

I remember when I brought this up as an issue with Doc Searls and got slapped down rather royally. It’s good to see the issue being raised by others, especially by people as eloquent and resolute as these.

Lately though I find myself less concerned about the use of overt terms such as ‘bitch’ and ‘babe’, or the use of phrases such as ‘real men’. I have found that, for the most part, when these are used within political writings the level of discourse is usually rather primitive and the writing rather dull, so I’m not necessarily offended by being excluded.

Atrios may say that he’s just directing his writing to the opponent using the opponent’s language:

If I say Bush “isn’t a real man,” I’m speaking the language of him and his supporters. I don’t think it’s insulting, but they do. It’s meant to be doubly mocking – hit them where it hurts and mock them for being so stupid as to be hurt by it.

All he’s doing though is coming across as a man who has run out of good arguments and has to resort to verbal pissing. No, I just don’t feel excluded by not being a part of these conversations. The danger is more to the writer then me–they may eventually get around to saying something worthwhile, but by that time lack the audience to hear it.

It is the subtle language of exclusion that worries me more. It is the language of Hemingway and Kerouac, and a society that praises such coming from men, but would condemn the same from a woman.

It is the secret handshake, the spirit of mano a mano; it is the weight placed on the origination, not the words themselves; that and not being told that one must press, ever so slightly, one’s finger on the scale to get full worth, or one’s side ends up light.

It is the language of Kierkegaard, who wrote:

It is the man’s function to be absolute, to act absolutely, to express the absolute; the woman consists in the relational. Between two such different entities no real interaction can take place. This misrelation is precisely the joke, and the joke entered the world with woman.

It is the same Kierkegaard who, with devestating skill, captures the essence of the language of exclusion:

History throughout the ages shows that woman’s great abilities have at least in part been recognized. Hardly was man created before we find Eve already as audience at the snake’s philosophical lectures, and we see that she mastered them with such ease that at once she could utilize the results of the same in her domestic practice. […]

As a speaker, woman has so great a talent that she made history with her own special line: the so-called bed-hangings sermons, curtain lectures, etc., and *Xanthippe is still remembered as a pattern of feminine eloquence and as founder of a school that has lasted to this very day, whereas Socrates’ school has long since disappeared…And when the rabbis forbad [women] to put in their word, it was solely because they were afraid that the women would outshine them or expose their folly. In the Middle Ages, the countless witch trials sufficiently showed the deep insight woman had into the secrets of nature.

Bloody marvelous. One almost doesn’t mind being so completely skewered when the act is accomplished by such a rapier wit. Phrases such as ‘’pussy boy’ and words such as ‘bitch’ seem crude and uninspired by comparison.

*Xanthippe was Socrates wife, and seen by him and his friends to be a shrew. He is reported to have said of her, I wish to deal with human beings, to associate with man in general; hence my choice of wife. I know full well, if I can tolerate her spirit, I can with ease attach myself to every human being else.

(Recommended reading on Kierkegaard and feminism is the paper Kierkegaard and Feminism: A Paradoxical Friendship. More on Xanthippe here, and more on the history of misogyny in literature here.)

Categories
Diversity

The common enemy is…

Excellent find this morning through the Livejournal Reader’s List (something you may want to check out):

Ampersand re-posted one of his more popular essays last week, giving a list based on male privilege. It includes among the many items listed the following:

6. If I do the same task as a woman, and if the measurement is at all subjective, chances are people will think I did a better job.
…
10. If I have children but do not provide primary care for them, my masculinity will not be called into question.
…
29. I can be loud with no fear of being called a shrew. I can be aggressive with no fear of being called a bitch.

30. I can ask for legal protection from violence that happens mostly to men without being seen as a selfish special interest, since that kind of violence is called “crime” and is a general social concern. (Violence that happens mostly to women is usually called “domestic violence” or “acquaintance rape,” and is seen as a special interest issue.)
…
36. Most major religions argue that I should be the head of my household, while my wife and children should be subservient to me.

I agree with Ampersand as I read down the list, especially with many of the items that point out the double standard when it comes to what’s ‘acceptable’ behavior for men, but not for women, and vice versa. A double standard that can, all too often, lead to violence and complete denial of opportunity.

Still, I had issues with the list, as have others as noted by Ampersand. For instance if you have a man and a women asked the question, “What is your current job” and both answer, “I’m unemployed” the respect for the man will decrease. Men who don’t ‘work’ in a given profession, who stay at home to take care of home or kids or garden or whatever, are considered lazy; women who do the same, are considered traditional, but not lazy.

As for child care, I have known men denied custody of their children just because it’s ‘traditional’ to give such to the woman. Even if the father is emotionally or financially better equipped to raise the children.

Sexism is a two-edged sword, and it cuts both ways. As effectively noted by Yuki Onna who wrote:

Sexism is not a women’s issue, it’s not a men’s issue–it’s a human issue. And to list all the things that men have going for them that women don’t is to ignore that the gender system is just as harmful to them as it is to us. The line that men must walk in order to be considered men is as tight a rope as the one we walk in order not to be considered objects. It’s this kind of separation that keeps us from transcending such a system in the first place. We should be banding together to say “fuck all of this.” Instead we snipe at each other and draw lines in the playground sand.

She offers a counter-list, with items such as:

1. If I choose not to have a career, but stay at home with my kids while my partner works, my masculinity and my worth as a man will be called into question.

2. If I choose to embrace personal hygiene and show interest in such things as perfume, lotions, body hair removal, or any remotely scented product, I will be mocked. If I prefer clothing which is anything other than conservative and earth-toned, my masculinity will be called into question.
…
7. I am the target of endless marketing of products to keep me perpetually erect, and if I am not willing to have sex at any time, my masculinity and my worth as a man will be called into question.

8. If I am raped, I am even less likely to be believed than a woman, and very likely to be derided as less than a man. If I am the victim of domestic abuse, however statistically unlikely this is, I will probably be laughed at.

9. No matter what my personal desires, the only images of women I am presented with are unhealthily underweight and surgically altered. If I am not attracted to this version of femininity, my masculinity and worth as a man will be called into question.

Of course, when compared side by side, the threat of being stoned to death for having a child out of wedlock, or forced into wearing head to toe covering and not being allowed access to education or health care isn’t quite balanced by being forced into a perpetual erection or called effeminate for wearing a pink tie. Still, if you combine both lists into one, you can see the real enemy that’s common to both is sexism; something both of these writers would agree on.

What we all need to work toward is equal human rights for all. I am amazed, though, that in this day that we still have to fight this battle–that we still have to plead for equal rights for all.