Category Archives: Ideas

Gender, Thoughtful

why the **** does everything around me assume I’m a guy (updated)

unfortunately lately i have been very angry and random passerbys have been bearing the brunt of my rage. sadly i’m also too angry to be coherent enough and calm enough that it won’t just pass over their head. oh well.

like this tv show casting company (brand removed).

ugh-tvshow-makers

sigh. the individual ad by itself isn’t sexist per se. but the cumulative weight of all these ads and tv shows and everything around me is sexist. what they say is, “you don’t exist.”

i fixed it by changing the blue to hot pink and adding in some fingernails with nail polish. not to say “since your ad was masculine instead of feminine, you’re being sexist”, but rather to point out how stereotypical they were being without even noticing or acknowledging it.

tvshow-makers-poster-fixed

probably most guys (aka most of my friends) missed the point and just dismissed it as “oh another crazy person advocating political correctness”. oh well. but especially the people who work in media, if they’re not conscious of what they’re doing — well, basically they should at least be self-aware enough to admit they are okay with perpetuating these stereotypes and publicly admit it. basically, all I want them to do is include a little line:

“we welcome all types of people even if our ad is a little stereotypical!”

There is growing hope for the media industry, though, which makes me really happy.

http://www.blackenterprise.com/lifestyle/female-macgyver-contest-reality-tv-csi/

MARCH 18, 2015 9:55 PM
Hollywood’s Best Will Pay You $5,000 To Help Find a Female “MacGyver”
White House supports effort to create programming highlighting women in STEM

oh here’s another angry lady (oops, when you tell women to stand up for themselves, be prepared, they might take you up on the offer!) who impressed me

Phoenix Perry – Female Game Developer Community http://vimeo.com/81481624 for some classy examples, like this (i removed the brand, because *** them)

ugh-gaming-ad-perry-oshw

I concluded my reply email with “but in more seriousness, if you ever want to talk person-to-person instead of stereotype-to-stereotype, let me know”.

ball’s in their court now. i’ll let you all know if they follow through on talking to me.

UPDATE 3/25/15

One of my friends was able to act as a de-anger-translator and better articulate what I meant than my snarky email.

pitmancasting

 

Note the lack of stereotypical white-male stock photo, and that they now ask for pictures of what you made, not pictures of your team (I didn’t even catch the words the first time around!). -^-^- I’m happy they were able to fix their poster without much effort at all, and (I’m told) that the casting company seemed entirely sincere. As suspected, the issues was simply that they “just pulled a stock photo to get it done quickly.” (who knows about the Major Cable Network they are feeding into…).

I do feel that visually the poster is less strong as a result of the lack of human interest. Ah well, so it goes — I guess the tricky thing to do, if you include “human interest” in visual design, is to not fall into stock-photo-corporate-blandness. Maybe that’s where a sincerely-worded short sentence could help.

I feel really happy about this outcome overall. It resulted in a lot of fruitful conversations with my guy friends who were previously avoiding gender issues and now reached out because they themselves felt confused or alienated, and the casting company updated their poster.

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Changing society is a long, slow, and frustrating process, and it’s been very gratifying to put effort in and get concrete results, however small in the grand scheme of things, out. A+ would do again.

FAQ

I confused some of my friends (who perhaps haven’t thought or listended as much about gender issues) with these pictures. They corresponded privately with me, prior to the casting company releasing their updated version.

Person A: Is your problem with the image that it depicts a white male wearing a dress shirt to reflect a hobby and industry largely dominated by males. It seems the words on all these images are the same, merely the gender or presence of the hand and the color of the background, neither of which seem relevant to me with regard to stereotyping or sexism.

Me: Yes, my problem was with that image. Specifically, the context of the picture was not “here is a reflective picture in our academic article detailing the current demographics of the industry”. They were saying, “here is an image with which we are soliciting people to represent an industry to a large number of people not currently in the industry”.

Thanks for clarifying your confusion !___!

Person B: Wouldn’t it be better to congratulate them on making an ad that is not sexist? In fact, their ad seems far more gender neutral than your suggested ad.

Me: I personally don’t want to them to be gender neutral, that’s boring… I’d rather they celebrate diversity, but in an honest way, instead of a corporate-mandated hokey way. That’s why I suggest a single well-written not-canned sentence would go far.

Gender, Thoughtful

How your “Team” pictures influence my desire to even apply

Lately it’s the “startup thing” to put pictures of your team up on your website. Now, I don’t speak for all female engineers, but as a female engineer who’s kind of sensitive about these things, fairly or not, it’s an immediate turnoff to see pictures like this

Screenshot from 2015-02-25 17:59:40

Screenshot from 2015-02-25 17:59:36

It goes roughly like this:

  • I open my email.
  • Someone forwarded me an email. “Cool drone startup that’s looking to hire!”
  • I click the link and read about it, then somewhere along the way I see a picture of the Team.
  • I get irked and leave.

Sure, you all could be a bunch of egalitarian feminist dudes, and if I just go work for companies with a lot of females already I’m exacerbating the problem in some ways, but really, just kind of a turn-off.

If you at all care about getting a more diverse team, here’s two simple solutions:

1) Just don’t post pictures of your all white-male founders / leadership / engineering team. No pictures are better, then I can’t form preconceptions (yes, I recognize the irony here) about your team. Also, the more people you have, the more I’ll look specifically for females in engineering leadership positions. Mixing in your female HR / support department does not help you.

2) Or, just put a simple statement to the effect that you’re aware that your team is very white and male and that you’re working on it.

That’s enough to let me know that you care, which is a big deal to me. Working in a place where no one cares about feminism or feminism is an awkward topic would make me bitter and unhappy (and I’d leave) within months. You’ll have to word your statement to overcome people’s jadedness (“yea, right, that’s probably just their HR talking.”) and show that your statement reflects your company culture.

Oh! Ladies, one thing I’ve discovered is that older guys are pretty alright. Something about marrying and having a family… My current co-workers are almost all older white males, but it’s in some ways a lot more comfortable than hanging out at MITERS, because feminism isn’t a dirty word or somehow less important than the latest in kilowatt lasers.

Today, I am a 41-year-old father and husband whose feelings on this issue have changed. I have come a long way since being a single, 26-year-old state senator, and I am not afraid to say that my position has evolved as my experiences have broadened, deepened and become more personal.

—Congressman Tim Ryan

(Source: Rep. Dillon, Rep. Ryan)

p.s. This also goes for conferences… I’m looking at you, NERC.

nerc
nerc speakers
Gender, Thoughtful

poll: diversity in STEM: why do you give a ****, or why not (informal MIT survey)

HI INTERNET

poll

recently I was feeling grumpy so as usual I expressed my grumpiness by collecting data about the topic from my friends.

(Here is one poignant article that really articulates some of the current issues about diversity in STEM:

https://medium.com/thelist/the-other-side-of-diversity-1bb3de2f053e

I was surprised by how much I identified with this).

The written responses I compiled and sorted alphabetically (to remove ordering information), and are now displayed on this site:

http://mit.obio.me/ (created by Ned Burnell — it’s open-source, source on github ^^)

Screenshot from 2014-12-13 19:30:12

Anyway, I keep meaning to mine the data sometime to pull out some statistically insignificant yet interesting conclusions (I don’t know how to science, sadly).

The basic question I am curious about is

do the people who are most likely to be in power in the future (standins: grades and income, gender and race) care the least about diversity (standins: talk to people about it, rate it important, read about it, think about it).

(see appendix for more thoughts)

Mostly, it’s a little irritating sometimes to always be talking to the same people about these topics, and I am uncertain about what the cause for that is. Do people feel uncomfortable talking about these issues, do they not care, or what?

Another interesting anecdote is that a lot of my female friends don’t care about this problem.

Happily, what I learned from getting over 120 responses to the survey in 24 hours (from just three or four mailing lists: pika, EC, MITERS-keyholders, and some friends) is that a lot of people do care about this topic. 

IAP

I decided to run an IAP class — hopefully some people will sign up for it.

http://student.mit.edu/searchiap/iap-9289af8f4a299dfd014a2d29af2200ff.html

Diversity in STEM: How racist and sexist are we, and why should we care?

This workshop aims to be a fun, productive, and provocative introduction to issues of diversity in STEM. We’ll start out with a no-holds-barred discussion about what we personally think about diversity in STEM (is it worth it? do we need it? should we care? why or why not?), examine where our beliefs come from (share personal experiences), and then review the scientific literature on this subject. From there, we will begin work on concrete project(s) to showcase diversity at MIT, as well as compile a report to MIT’s Institute Community and Equity Officer. On the final day, we’ll present our projects to each other, so make them fun and interesting!

The goal is not to push an agenda; the goal is to relate to and engage with each other, even if we have very different beliefs, as human beings who developed our beliefs though our experiences.

Possible projects:

* Cookies that visually display the statistics about diversity at MIT (statistical food)

* Short film about people’s experiences at MIT, about diverse people at MIT, or about what MIT people think about diversity

* Compelling website displaying a collection of quotes from the MIT community or results of polling MIT

* Game explaining recent scientific research into this topic

STEM

 

Other Internet

three other interesting data visualization projects that I thought were well-done

The latter I thought was better done than the first, in the sense that it provided a guided walkthrough of how to explore the data and what interesting conclusions we might draw from it instead of just dumping it in front of the user. See this article (Tell, Don’t Show) for some interesting thoughts on this.

appendix

other hypotheses to look at in the diversity form data:

  • gender, race, and income, controlling for age
    “Do white males get paid more”
  • grades and income, controlling for age and major
    “Do people who do well academically get paid more”
  • age and importance of diversity
    “As people enter the workforce, do they care more about diversity”
  • gender, race, and importance of diversity
    “Do white males care less about diversity”
  • gender, race, and grades
    “Do white males do better in school”
  • grades and importance of diversity
    “Do people who care about diversity do more poorly in school”
  • gender, race, comfortable
    “Do white males feel uncomfortable talking about diversity” and that’s why it’s hard to engage them in dialogue, or do they just not care about it
  • gender, race, talk to in person or online
    “Are there systematic biases in who is talking online or offline about diversity” as opposed to just reading about it (engaging in dialogue)

income, importance of diversity
“Do the people who get paid more care less about diversity”