Entries Tagged 'women' ↓

A Taiwanese lingerie firm celebrated Camisole Day on the 21st of November: more than 90% of their 500 female employees wore only camisoles and knickers while at the office that day.

So when is briefs day? And which will be the brave company to celebrate it?

(found via Neatorama)

The Swiss tourist office has released another TV ad that uses Swiss men as the primary reason why you should visit the country.

Last year’s World Cup ad suggested that women abandoned by their football-obsessed husbands should come and spend some time with healthy alpine men. The ad for this year’s winter campaign suggests that Swiss ski instructors are hot enough to warrant a visit.

Sadly, I haven’t spotted any of these hotties on the streets of Zurich. Maybe I should go up to the mountains more often.

A Brazilian firm is running a campaign which is pretty much the opposite of Dove’s Campaign for real beauty. The tagline: “Forget about it. Men’s preference will never change. Fit Light Yogurt.”

The photos that accompany the campaign are interesting. I suppose they are intended to scare us poor girls with the evil fate that will befall those that dare eat non-skimmed yogurt. And of course, they don’t quite manage it: the women in the pictures look quite sexy, despite not being anorexic-looking. Imagine.

Have a look at the pictures in Shakesville’s This Woman is Supposed to Disgust You post (found via Anarchaia).

Catching up with my feed reading, I see that lately there’s been some buzz in the ’sphere around Let’s All Evolve Past This: The Barriers Women Face in Tech Communities. It is indeed a very insightful article.

In particular, I am pleased to see someone talking about the differences in handling sub-optimal communication and how it affects the whole ‘women in tech’ issue. The bit under the heading Men are generally very good at ignoring bad behavior is spot on.

But even though the article gives some good advice on building communities with better communication patterns, it does not give any advice to women as to how to help themselves to better cope with difference in communication modes. For example, it would help if more women were aware of these differences and would try to contemplate harsh things said by their colleagues in the context of the colleague’s overall behavior and character, and avoid over-analyzing these comments.

Quite a few of the problems faced by women in tech could be addressed by working on women’s self-efficacy. Among other things, people with higher self-efficacy are more comfortable taking harsh criticism, are more likely to voice their opinions, have higher motivation, and are more willing to take some risks and experiment. So maybe we should all be working on that. I, for one, will try to work on mine.

For the outstanding female engineers-in-the-making out there, here is a snippet from the website for the Google Europe Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship 2007:

Through the scholarship, we aim to encourage women to excel in computing and technology, and become active role models and leaders.

Scholarships will be awarded based on the strength of candidates’ academic background and engagement within the technology community. A group of female BSc, MSc, and PhD student finalists will be chosen from the applicant pool. The scholarship recipients, selected from the finalists, will each receive a €5,000 (or equivalent) scholarship for the 2007/2008 academic year.

In May 2007, all finalists will be invited to visit Google’s European Engineering centre in Zurich for a networking retreat. It will include workshops with a series of speakers, breakout sessions and social activities, and will provide an opportunity for all finalists to meet and share their experiences.

Application form opens next Sunday, 1st of October. More details here.