jill/txt

“Nobody knows you’re a dog on the internet“, right? Although many of us still engage in a little harmless identity tourism now and then, the internet in general is not an anonymous space, and current trends in social media are making it less and less so. If you can’t connect your Twitter name to a solid identity with a website and preferably a photo and CV on LinkedIn, you’ll have trouble being taken seriously. But there are still examples of people making good use of the possibility to be “anyone” on the internet. Such as “James Chartrand”, a successful freelance writer who, as it turns out, just happens to be a single mother who couldn’t make ends meet when she sold the same writing using her real name and gender.

Have you ever seen such a ridiculously over-the-top male website? Well, it worked. As James Chartrand, this woman, who still remains anonymous, launched a successful career. It wasn’t until someone who knew her secret threatened to reveal it that she admitted that “James” was a woman. She still hasn’t made it obvious on her website, although it’s there if you look.

Sounds rather he-man-ish, doesn’t it? But if you click that link labelled “pen name”, you’ll find the full story.

I’m rather shocked at this story, I must admit. Obviously it’s hard to know whether you’d have more success as a man when you always present yourself as a woman. I’ve never experienced obvious discrimination, though I’ve certainly felt uncomfortable in meetings where everyone else is male. Oh, and fumed at the difficulties of breastfeeding while travelling and noted that applications aren’t evaluated equally and that I have (had? have…?) a tendency to act like a little girl, a typical mistake women make.

And “James Chartrand” isn’t just acting like a man. She’s acting like a caricature, a parody of a man. I mean, look at that logo, an ejaculation if ever I saw one. Come on. A photo of welding below it? And on and on. Perhaps clients don’t just want male writers, they want he-men?

Annelogue wrote recently about watching FLYING: Confessions of a Free Woman, a six hour movie by Jennifer Fox that explores how women live, think and feel today across the globe. Intrigued by Annalogue’s post I followed the link to the director’s blog, and was immediately hooked. In eloquently written posts, she wonders about why men and women communicate differently (she wants to talk, he doesn’t so much), weaving different possibilities into her narrative in such a thought-provoking way. She writes about a recurring argument with her boyfriend - now that sounds awful, doesn’t it, but it’s not, she manages to write about it with distance and love and intensity, which sounds impossible but I certainly recognise not only much of what she’s describing, this is the sort of thing my girlfriends and I talk about often.

I might have to see her movie too. I was rather happy to find that it’s available for international sale in just a few weeks, whereas the US and Canada have to wait another half year. Just the opposite of the usual :)

I knew it all along, of course, but thought I might as well broadcast it:

They found that having a feminist partner was linked to healthier heterosexual relationships for women. Men with feminist partners also reported both more stable relationships and greater sexual satisfaction. According to these results, feminism does not predict poor romantic relationships, in fact quite the opposite. (Science Daily, via Dagens Onde Kvinner)

Via Drusilla, over at Dagens onde kvinner, I give you this gorgeous drawing of what researchers look like - by ten year old Ina Sofie Stien. This is from Forskning.no, a Norwegian website run by the universities that presents current research in a popular format.

I think I’ll be the one in the pink dress at the computer with the birds. Which researcher will you be?

There’s a conference in Bergen in a couple of weeks time (commercial, not academic) called “Digital hverdag”, which means digital everyday life - there are exhibitions, and presentations, you know, but the striking thing is they’ve managed to set up a program with ONLY MEN in the plenary sessions. Not ONE woman. There are, admittedly three women squeezed into the parallel sessions on the final afternoon. But for goodness sake, look at that front page: all those mens’ faces. Lovely men, no doubt, but honestly, 11 of 11 plenary speakers are men, and 13 of 16 speakers in the parallel sessions are men. And Norway is supposedly one of the countries with the best gender balance in the world. It’s depressing.

It also seems extremely stupid, given that women surpassed men as gadget- and electronic-purchasers more than three years ago. Whose digital everyday life are we talking about, anyway?

I came across Koenraad in the copy room yesterday photocopying a dozen or so copies of Christine Wennerås and Agnes Wold’s dissection of the review process for Swedish post. docs (here’s a freely available copy for those without insitutional access), where they very convincingly demonstrate that to get the same score in the evaluations, female candidates had to have 2.5 times as many publications as men. I’d heard about the study while listening to Virginia Vallan’s talk Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women (highly recommended!) but hadn’t actually read it before. After reading, I’m shocked that the results aren’t more widely known and discussed. This paper is almost ten years old!

So in brief: Wennerås and Wold noticed that while there is an almost equal number of male and female applicants for post docs in medical sciences in Sweden, twice as many men as women actually receive a fellowship. They wanted to know whether this was due to the female applicants simply not being as good, or due to a gender bias. Conveniently, there was central and consistant evaluation of these candidates, but the evaluations were not public. So Wennerås and Wold went to court to gain access - and they gained it, as the Swedish consitution makes state documents that are not a threat to national security open to the public. Once they had the data, they analysed it in a number of ways. First they found that only the very best women were given a score as high as the average man, and that women with equal numbers of publications as men got lower scores than those men. Women would in fact have to publish 2.5 times as much to get the same score as men. Oh, having an affiliation with a committee member helped a lot, too, even though the person you were affiliated with was not allowed to be directly involved in assessing you. There’s lots more: you should read the paper, it’s only three pages long.
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My colleague Hilde Corneliussen is involved in organising the Gender, Images and Global Contexts conference to be held in Helsinki next March - the CFP’s out, so now’s the time to start working if you’d like to present something there!

What do you think game designers can be thinking?

Let’s design our games assuming no women will play. Let’s market games by using booth babes at conventions or employing girl gamers as “totty with trigger” (you’d think it was a parody but it ain’t) and oh, we’ll run ads showing dead, naked women even when the games themselves have no naked women in them. A focus group? Oh great, but remember to ban women from the focus group, because they’re women and therefore not interesting. (Fortunately, several of the men in that particular focus group spoke on behalf of their girlfriends who are also gamers.) And how about the media? When Wired does a special issue on gaming, they leave out the women - oh, except for that risqué sex game with the dildos. We’ll include that. (I hadn’t realised Wired was a men’s magazine. It’s my favourite to buy on flights and so on - far more interesting than Cosmopolitan or something, and more, um, relaxing than the more intellectual alternatives.)

Let’s look at the facts. Apparently 24-35 year olds are the heaviest gamers. According to a recent survey, 65% of women in this age bracket play games. Only 35% of men in the age bracket do. The survey found that women play “slightly less” console games than men and that many more women play casual games, like flash games in web browsers, solitaire or online Scrabble. They didn’t think to ask the women why they liked casual games, but assume that it’s because they’re non-violent and non-cometitive (they can’t have played many games at games.com). Great. Let’s just assume gender stereotypes instead of asking.

Interestingly, Nick Yee’s statistics from MMOGs show the same trend: while boys are clearly dominant among teenaged players, women players outnumber men for players above 23 years of age:

[edit 22/5: see Torill’s comment below, this stat doesn’t quite prove that]

So let’s see: despite the game industry marketing games almost exclusively for young men, almost twice as many women as men play games in the biggest market segment, based on age. Many of these games are casual, but even for console games, only “slightly less” women than men play. More women than men over 23 play MMOGs.

And yet the game industry continues to market and design games almost exclusively to that slim market of teenaged horny boys.

And I continue to get stupid comments from male players in WoW - “wow, I didn’t think women played games!” (Doubly idiotic since they can only see my female character and not me.)

I just had my first World of Warcraft marriage proposal. It was utterly un-charming - I was in Warsong Gulch, a battleground where ten Horde players battle ten Alliance players, each time attempting to capture the other team’s flag. It’s a fast-paced and very exciting part of the game, but unfortunately I was stuck doing defence, looking after our blasted flag while the rest of the team was off slaying night elves and gnomes. Even more unfortunately, I was not alone. A level 39 orc hunter was with me. He started off with an unusual but affable enough “I like you”, escalated a second later to “pretty troll” (huh?) and then started spamming “i love u”. I tried to fight back by roleplaying the impatient bloodthirsty troll with no time for this love thing, just wanting to get on the battle field, but he kept going. I made use of the “/slap” command and got angry with him (in character) and he proposed: “plz marri mi”.

Resounding laughter was the only response, from both Jill and my troll, and I arranged a swap so I got out of the defense job and out of range of this orc. But can you believe it the guy kept at it, whispering “i love u” and “marri mi plz” to me every split second, spamming me so I couldn’t see what the raid leader was saying.

I considered telling him I was a 57 year old man, but decided a simple /ignore seemed wiser. It was really unpleasant, though, being stuck defending the flag with such a harrassing person. Especially when he started whispering instead of using /say, so that the other people who were occassionally present couldn’t see (”hear” - /whisper sends words only to one person, /say broadcasts them to the room) what he was doing.

But what IS that? I mean, most guys seem to think all female characters are played by boys anyway - though about 30% of WoW players are women. So did he assume I was male and want to “marri” my troll anyway? Did he think it would lead to some kind of WoW-sex or something? Maybe his tactics sometimes work? Or did he just want to annoy me? And does his behaviour count as harrassment? I mean, it was certainly unpleasant, but it occurs to me now that I could have asked him to stop in the /raid channel so everyone would know what was going on - and I could even have reported him to a gamemaster, though I don’t think he quite warranted that. I probably should have asked him publicly to stop, though. Conceivably he actually doesn’t realise how unpleasant that kind of behaviour is.

[Edit: Turns out he was proposing to the other female troll in the battleground too. And still whispering to me when I logged in again. I guess he’s just one for the /ignore command. But will that make me not hear what he says even when other people present hear it? How weird.]

I’m off to a faculty meeting at Voss tomorrow, where all the heads of department and vice heads and pro-deans and contra-deans and office managers and whatever we all are are going to discuss things like reorganisation, success criteria for cross-disciplinary research collaboration and internationalisation. Unfortunately this involves being on a bus in the city at 8 am which in turn involves leaving home at 7.30 which I do realise is late by some peoples’ standards, but for me it means leaving home a whole hour before school starts. That means my daughter has to go to before school care, (morgen-SFO), which has happened all of twice before in her life and which had her in tears at bedtime this evening.

Of course children know from birth that mothers are suckers for tears from children who don’t want to be left at daycare of any kind. I just dropped my guard because she hasn’t done this for so long. Obviously she’ll be fine. She’s nine and a half. And she’ll spend the night with her loving (and beloved) grandmother (once she’s landed after her business meeting in another city). And I’ll be back Friday at 4 pm.

I still feel like an absolutely monstrous mother who is no doubt scarring her child for life. Oh dear. And the poor little darling…

Ooh. I’d like to go to this conference in Oslo on women in academia - not least because Virginia Vallan is giving her Why So Slow: The Advancement of Women talk, which Hanna wrote about a while back. Also, because I keep noticing I’m the only women in situations where I don’t see why there should be so few women - in a committee at the arts and humanities faculty (which has more women than most fields) or in the university’s IT reference group or in my university’s mac user mailing list discussions. Or there was that talk I gave at the media department (the media department, not physics) where there were about forty male professors and grad students in the audience and two women, one a student. What’s up with that? Where did the women I studied with go? I’m not likely to get to the conference, though: I’m coming home from Christmas holidays in Australia just before it, so I think I’ll content myself with watching Vallan give her MIT version of the talk on video. Must put aside time to actually do that soon. (via Torill)

Look out for The World of Warcraft Reader, an anthology of scholarly essays on World of Warcraft, edited by Jill Walker Rettberg and Hilde Corneliussen and coming from MIT Press, Spring 2007!

I’ve considered doing a World of Warcraft course (I don’t know whether this’ll actually happen…) so was interested to see Aaron Delwiche’s undergraduate course on ethnographical approaches to Massively Multiplayer Online Games (specifically, World of Warcraft). Some of the student papers are quite good. Well, actually I started by reading Beth C’s paper on sexism in the game, and thought oh my god, this is the standard level of all Texan undergrads? We only have some students this good. What did we do wrong? Luckily (in a rather ungenerous sense of the word, sorry) a look at the other papers confirms that Texan students probably aren’t that different from Norwegian students, though perhaps the fact that they have to write a lot more than our students probably does improve their writing. Anyway, Hilde and I have been thinking about doing something on gender and World of Warcraft, so I was interested in Beth C.’s paper on sexism in the game. Yes, unsurprisingly, players have experienced plenty.

The paper makes an interersting point about the differences between races in the game. My dwarf rarely gets sexual comments, except sometimes slurs about how someone can’t see how anyone could fall for a short, bearded, dwarven woman. (So I guess the races encourage various stereotypical sexual responses.) Me, I think my dwarven warrior is gorgeous: strong, swarthy and with a determined look on her face. She even has wonderful black plaited hair. But look at this comment from an informant who plays a female night elf:

The female Night Elf dance is a stripper dance. When I first made my character dance, I laughed at her stripper dance and then tried typing /dance again thinking she would do another dance. I was angry when I realized the only way my character could dance was in a sexually enticing manner. How is my character supposed to dance when she is happy and trying not to be sexy? There is no way. Every time my female Night Elf dances, she is being a sex object…My boyfriend plays a [male] Night Elf druid, and his character dances like Michael Jackson. That’s fun! Why are the females of the race relegated to being sex objects while the males are fun?

Yeah! My nine-year-old’s first character was a female night elf, and I was appalled when I saw her dancing. That’s worse than Barbie dolls. I was so glad when she made characters in other races so she could play with a wider range of expressions.

One interesting aspect of the paper is that it shows that male players playing female characters also experience sexism. I wonder whether that will make them more aware of it and less likely to condone it in everyday life?

Oh, anyone doing this kind of research on World of Warcraft should have a look at Nick Yee’s statistics and demographics for this and other MMOGs.

Sébastien Babeux’s talk was about space in video games, and has lots of fascinating examples of glitches in game space. You can read the abstract here. I don’t really want to talk about what his paper was explicitly about, I want to talk about the way in which he used the metaphors of child and mother.

Sébastien begins by showing the space between a baby and its mother playing together, and shows the space between them as the space of play. He then relabels the baby as player - interior - and the mother as exterior, the game. (I may have the wrong names there.) The game is the other that the player works with and against.

Shows exampless games where you can’t get outside of very pre-defined space - that is you can SEE an illusion of a full spatial world, but your character can only move in narrow areas, sometimes even with invisible walls to keep you inside. Other games have “glitches” in space where you can get to places the designers didn’t actually plan, or places they forgot, like places you’re invisible to NPCs but aren’t meant to be - a feeling that the creator has lost track fo the player, and then the player is reclaimed by the game space.

The job of the system is to keep you in line, keep you in order.

I couldn’t help but ask a question:
Use of the mother. I saw that image and identified with the mother, not the baby! But mother as metaphor for the game - like the word MOTHERBOARD for the foundation of a computer. I wonder how this idea of the game as a kind of benevolent mother - then you showed us a lot of the limitations of game space - there are narrow corridors you’re allowed into. Dungeons and buildings all offer narrow passageways. Let’s not call them womb-like. And then you talked about how we can get OUT of the limited opportunities, subverting or using outside media.

So on the one hand I’m thinking that that space between the mother and child is BETWEEN TWO ACTORS. The mother is also playing. But a lot of your talk is more about the child player who needs the mother - uh, game - and at the same time wants to become independent.

I’m wondering how this would fit with Helen Kennedy and Seth Gedding’s ideas yesterday about, what did someone call it, pleasurable masochism?

I spoke too fast and anyway it wasn’t quite a question so I didn’t exactly get an answer - but this strikes me as weird and important. The mother as other, what a peculiar idea! I am the mother! This relates to earlier posts I’ve made about how (male) theorists have quite often compared computers to women, including Ted Nelson quoting Electronic Arts original motto and the Turing test.

This is just sad. Reboot is a conference to be held in Copenhagen in June, and so far there are 23 male presenters and one woman presenter. The organiser claims innocence:

i hadn’t even thought of it this year. Take that as reboot not having any preference on the subject. reboot’s speakers are selected out of strict quality criteria - and nothing else.

Isn’t that cute? He really thinks that the reason he thinks he’s only invited men (well, OK, there’s a woman too: that brings us to about 4% women speakers) is quality.

You know I was just at a seminar on social networks. Strikes me the point about the importance of weak ties must be relevant here. Most people remain ensconced in their own little clusters of people who are more or less like them and who basically have almost all the same information as each other. That’s why bridges to other social clusters are vital: if you find people who connect to people who are different from yourself and your buddies, you’re going to get a whole lot of new information and new ideas. That’s important.

I also recently read Blink! It’s a very easy read, and I have the feeling I’ve read a lot of it before somewhere - online maybe? But it also brings together some important points. The book is an examination of how we make snap judgements based on pattern recognition that we can’t really verbalise. That can be extremely powerful, but it also means we act on biases that we’re not even aware of. This is probably the most interesting — and frightening — section of the book, really. (I wanted to link to an online research site mentioned in the book where you can test your own biases, but can’t find it?)

There is no such thing as selection from strict quality criteria and nothing else.

Seems to me it’d be in mens’ interest to get a few more women involved in their conferences. A few connections to other clusters couldn’t hurt, surely?

I won’t be going to Reboot. Sure, the topic interests me, and yes, it’s in Copenhagen, and I can get cheap flights and I have friends there. No, I’m not going because I find it too exhausting to be in a constant minority. And heck, I’m a white woman who passes as native: if I’m exhausted, what on earth must it feel like for those who are even more marginalised in meetings like this? (via Caterina at Misbehaving)

I just got two books from Amazon: Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office, and Women Don’t Ask. Hanna’s reading Women Don’t Ask, and it keeps getting mentioned. The Nice Girls book is a list of 101 mistakes women make without realising it, that the book claims stop us from being successful. I bought it simply because of mistake #73: “Smiling inappropriately”. I have been harbouring a suspicion for years that I smile too much. On the one hand, that’s an expression of who I am, on the other, I worry that it signals uncertainty and too great desire to please. I do mistake # 81, too, “Sitting on your foot” (which makes you look like a little girl, apparently), and mistakes #56 (”Couching statements as questions”) through #66 (Using nonwords), as well as #47 (”Using only your first name”), though that’s a cultural thing, all my colleagues do, and often mistake #3 (Working hard), #7 (Pinching company pennies) and #15, “Polling before making a decision”.

Of course, it’s hard not to notice that some of these mistakes seem impossible to avoid. For instance, surely one must either commit mistake #16, “Needing to be liked”, or mistake #17, “Not needing to be liked”?

And what if I like putting my foot under me when I sit? Damn it. First society teaches us to behave these ways (oh, and I think that I also commit mistake #77, “Tilting your head”), then we’re told that to succeed we have to behave differently. Even our new recommended behaviour patterns are minutely described.

I’m going to read the book. I want to be aware of these things, and actually, finding myself at department head meetings with the 60-year-old professors, 80% of whom are men, I’ve found that the foot under my leg thing doesn’t quite feel right. And yet I don’t completely want to shed that me-who-learnt-to-smile. She’s me. I like her, though I’m coming to feel a little sorry for her. You’re worth more, I want to tell her. You don’t have to smile to them all. They’ll like you anyway, most of them, and the ones who don’t, well, they probably wouldn’t have anyway.

I wonder what it’s really like to just be male. You would have never learnt to put your foot under your leg, or to tilt your head or smile inappropriately.

How alien.

[Update: I changed the title. The book’s not about not being a woman, it’s about not acting like a little girl. (more…)