Worker Bees Blog

Hat tip to geek goddess Mary Hodder for pointing me to the latest example of how sexism, real live sexism, is alive, well, generally accepted and in fact perpetuated by our very own "liberal" media. Ha!

Check this NY Times article on Girl Geeks. It seems to be touting the fact that girls are outpacing boys at using and creating content on the web. There's a gender gap in blogging and other social networking and media...and it's widening. Cool, right?

Except I direct you to the top of the article, to the place where you'll note the section of the newspaper in which this appeared.

Fashion & style.

Because geek girls are so cute aren't they?

When they code CSS or html they make all their fonts pink, don't they?

I loved this sentence:

"It is possible that the girls who produce glitters today will develop an interest in the rigorous science behind computing, but some scholars are reluctant to draw that conclusion."

"Glitters"? "Rigorous science behind computing"?

'Cause the guys who are code jockeys are all into the "rigorous science"?

Most programmers I know started out simply programming. Sure, people go to college for it, but they also teach themselves, and they start out teaching themselves to do stuff that's fun. The first program my S.O. wrote was a really simple game. He never went to college, by the way, he just became a programmer, and he's worked at the biggest companies out there. He's a hard core software developer, but he started out as a teenager creating crap on his computer.

Unfortunately I think if the reporter was trying to promote girl power what she did instead was perpetuate their pink-ification. And if it was an editor who decided what section this story about geek girls belonged in, well, they made sure to ghettoize them good and proper.

As Mary says:

So when they interview people like Doc Searls, Loic Le Meur or David Weinberger, all of whom are very smart about tech, those articles are in the tech section or business, but when they talk to girls, who for the record, are far more technical in this article than these three tech experts, girls are put in Fashion. I've never seen coverage with Doc or David or Loic in fashion. Maybe they should be there depending, but they aren't put there by the editors that I know of...

Nope, they certainly are not.

Labels: blogher, geek girls, Ny Times, shes geeky, women in tech, women speakers