Entries Tagged 'women' ↓

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?¢‚ǨÀús day. Rightly the small daughter of my friend asks: ?¢‚Ǩ?ìSo, are all the other days men?¢‚ǨÀús day then??¢‚Ǩ?ì

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.)