Category — women

1952: It's front-page news when George Jorgensen Jr. is reborn as Christine Jorgensen, gaining international celebrity and notoriety as the first widely known person to undergo a successful sex-change operation.

Jorgensen, who grew up in the Bronx, in her words, a "frail, tow-headed, introverted little boy who ran from fistfights and rough-and-tumble games," was drafted into the Army just after World War II. Military service only reinforced Jorgensen's belief that she was, in fact, a woman trapped inside a man's body.

Dec. 1, 1952: ‘Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty’

And women really do feel the cold more than men, but this is because they are better at conserving heat than men. Mark Newton, a scientist at W.L. Gore, the company that makes Gore-Tex, and a researcher at the University of Portsmouth, explains: “Women have a more evenly distributed fat layer and can pull all their blood back to their core organs.”

However, this female heating system means that less blood flows to their hands and feet, and as a result they feel cold. So there is literal truth in the old saying cold hands, warm heart. One theory as to why women have evolved this system, says Newton, is to enable them to survive freezing temperatures. Women carry less fat and muscle mass than men, and so need a more efficient technique of protecting their core body temperature.

Why do women always feel colder than men? - Times Online

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.

Joi Ito has a post about gender of World of Warcraft characters, where he asks if anyone has studied this issue academically. The comment thread is very interesting.

One of the gold nuggets from the comment thread is Nick Yee’s Daedalus project, where he explores the psychology of MMORPGs. Among other things, on Nick’s site I find some interesting data on World of Warcraft Character Race Demographics. Nick writes that night-elves and gnomes significantly more likely to be played by a female player. This is a particularly interesting thing to me, as I started playing WoW last week, and I chose a night-elf as my first character. When I have some more experience I will see how do people treat my character, and if it matters that is female.

I have watched this video twice in search of what is so wrong about it. Conclusion: it is a perfectly ok video. The video is part of Google’s campaign for recruiting female engineers, and according to others it is ’slightly off-key’, and it is also worth this very funny parody.

Really, the video is not that bad. Actually, I would say that it is not bad at all. Although it could be better, of course. But hey, room for improvement is always stimulating, isn’t it?

The worst of the video are definitely Brin’s high heels, and the bit about ‘Google is so cool they paid me 75% of my salary during 12 weeks I took off after giving birth’ is simply appalling for those watching from other countries (countries with better social systems in place). Geeks stealing each other’s undies from the laundromat is also an interesting idea… which will probably give me nightmares tonight…

There is one thing in the video that has me confused, though. Google’s women don’t look anything like the PSP users featured in the new PSP publicity campaign. Might it be that Google is getting all the plain female geeks, and Sony all the gorgeous ones?

(found via Misbehaving; PSP ad found via Pixel y Dixel)

From BBC News - Female chromosome has X factor:

[...] They found that female mammals, who possess two copies of the X chromosome, express more genes than males, who only have one X and a Y chromosome.

They also said that females were protected from many diseases because of their double dose of the X chromosome. [...]

This means that female mammals contain over 1,000 more genes than males. To compensate for this, the female body switches off one X chromosome - quite randomly - in each cell, thus evening up protein production between the sexes. [...]

“It turns out 15% of genes escape inactivation altogether, each of which now becomes a candidate for explaining differences between men and women,” said Robin Lovell-Badge, of the National Institute for Medical Research, UK.

“Moreover, another 10% are sometimes inactivated and sometimes not, giving a mechanism to make women much more genetically variable than men. I always thought they were more interesting!” [...]

But there are also good news for men:

[...] New Scientist reports that although men are more likely to be mentally retarded, they are also more likely to be geniuses.

Although the average IQ of men and women is equal, men are more frequently found at both extremes of intelligence.

This is because, if you have very good intelligence genes on your X chromosome, it pays not to have them muffled by more average genes on another X chromosome.

So now genetecists have proved what I suspected: that men are women are different, but it all compensates and evens out in the end.

Great bit from Margot Wallstr?ɬ?m’s blog:

8 March: International Women?��Ǩ��s day. Rightly the small daughter of my friend asks: ?��Ǩ?�So, are all the other days men?��Ǩ��s day then??��Ǩ?�

My good friend Helga kindly translated her Born to be geek essay into English (the original was written in German).

This text of Helga’s is funny. But it’s not only that. What it says is too true.

[...] Often the following is your chat-up line: “Hey, I saw you at the lecture today. How come that a girl studies Computer Science?” We are in the 21st century, aren’t we? Why is it so amazing that there really are girls studying Computer Science?

So go and read it and have a good laugh. And then, please, come back and tell me, what is so strange about women tinkering with computers?

(BTW, Helga is also a talented artist. The cartoon here is one of her depictions of herself for her ‘My perfect day’ page.)

The case for women in the technology business (The Register) interviews Rebecca George, director of director of UK government business at IBM and chair of the “Women in IT” forum. She seems to have a sensible approach to the issue, rejecting nonsensical positive discrimination policies and emphasising mainly the need for diverse teams as a key to success.

“A field like application development is, these days, about working in teams,” she points out. “Women bring many needed skills to the team, particularly in data analysis, for example. When you are working on the kind of diverse problems that software developers face now, it makes sense that a diverse team will lead to a better output. You need a variety of different approaches to solve things.”

[...]

She argues that the culture of a company is fundamental to its success or failure in retaining women, and that this is where the effort must go at a corporate level if companies want to have a diverse workforce.

“The kinds of programmes that are attractive to the whole workforce will be the ones that change the culture,” she says.

[...]

George is equally clear about how not to tackle the issue: “This is absolutely not about, and cannot be about positive discrimination. We don?��Ǩ�Ѣt have quotas, and we don?��Ǩ�Ѣt have targets.”

IT skills shortage threatens humanity (The Register):

The poll of 3,200 companies showed that 76 per cent of businesses which had problems finding staff have been forced to delay launching new products and services because of problems filling IT vacancies. One third of businesses are suffering such shortages. Part of the problem comes from the continued lack of women in the IT workforce - only 20 per cent of IT workers are female.

(emphasis mine)

From BBC News Maasai man in Kenya reveals all:

It is an unusual admission, as Maasai men, who often beat their wives, do not like to lose face before their community.

“If you do not beat your wife it’s taken that you’re a hen-pecked husband, which is not allowed in our community,” Maasai elder Johnson Ole Sipitiek told the BBC’s Network Africa programme.

But Mr Mewet, who has reported the incident to the police, said he was so overcome with pain that he could not help but make a noise.

After hitting her husband and knocking out his front teeth, Mrs Mewet bit off his testicles and despite his struggles when he awoke, chewed off his penis.

“I don’t have a penis now,” he explained, showing the BBC’s reporter his wound.

[...]

“She knew that I had many girlfriends, and I don’t know why she complained when I got another girlfriend,” he said.

According to Mr Mewet, castration is unprecedented in Maasai culture, as there is no traditional punishment.

Mr Mewet said he was left with no option but to pursue an action against his wife through the courts.

Mr Mewet’s father said they planned to slaughter a sheep in the homestead in order to remove any dangers of a curse.

Forbes has published a list with “The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women. The most powerful woman is Condoleezza Rice. In the Top Ten, there is only one executive: Carly Fiorina is the 10th most powerful woman.

The list is browsable by categories: Executives, Heiresses, Media & Entertainment, Presidents & Prime Ministers, Queens and Wives (!). Interesting category division. Where do they put the two US Supreme Court Justices that appear in the Top Ten? And why do they list Hillary Clinton is listed in the “Wives” category?

I can’t wait to read what the girls at misbehaving.net will write about this list…

IHT reports about a “Feminist uproar in Spain over Vogue photos”. The September issue of Spanish Vogue runs an article about the 8 female ministers in the Spanish government. The report is called “8 women for history” and talks about the political views of each of them and their reflections about the role of women in modern society. The article is accompanied by a photo session were the ministers pose in designer suits.

Some feminist groups are now outraged because of the ministers posing as models. I can understand, to some extent, that posing in expensive designer suits of prizes of up to 5.000 EUR does not help to bring the ministers “close to the voters”, but what I strongly disagree with is this ‘feminist’ message that ‘looking good’ is anti-feminist and old-fashioned. Apparently, caring for their image and posing for some elegant fashion pictures means that the Spanish ministers are un-professional and generally incompetent. So what then, to look professional a woman in Spain has to look as plain as possible?

A group picture from the Vogue article can be seen in this ‘El Mundo’ article.

South Korean “Institute Of Etiquette And Wisdom” is an institution that educates young women to become good brides and wifes. In this BBC News article you can read some of the invaluable advice Ms Pak, director of the school, gives to her students. I will quote just one of her priceless admonitions:

“A woman must never tell her husband what to do,” Pak Yong-Suk said.

“For example, saying, ‘on the way home, go to the supermarket and buy this, this and this, and don’t forget’ - you mustn’t do this.
“This is giving an order.”