Thursday, February 21, 2008

Geek Girls are sooo cute and fashionable!!! Squeeeee!

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.

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Comments:
To your point, I have MANY geeky male friends, and every single one of them got into programming for the same reasons. No matter how you slice it, they either wanted:
1. To blow virtual stuff up, or
2. To see naked chicks
 
I like how right before the condescending line about "rigorous science behind computing," they pointed out one of the primary reasons women shy away from tech:

"it is difficult to shake existing stereotypes about men excelling in the sciences"

*slap*
 
Yes! And yes! To you both.

Head. Exploding. Now.
 
most of my guy friends got into programming because they wanted to make games, and I think when I was in 4th grade i wanted to make games, too. Then I wanted to be a mathematician. I guess I just always liked science better. I don't know if making pink MySpace pages is the same thing, but I read an article about this young girl of Whatever Life that is a millionaire because of her myspace templates. Anyway, I'm going offtrack, but I definitely think girls can do just as much or even more than boys in technology.
 
Geek Girls certainly are cute!
 
geek girls UNITE!! lol. i definitly spend to much time on my blog. lol. and its not lyke anyone ever evan looks at it. lol. so i qualify as a geek girl.. i think. lol
 
Was there no one sitting around at the New York Times that said, hey, maybe this article should go in the Tech Section? No woman? No man? No robot?

Obviously not.

I'd love to know their excuse for putting an otherwise interesting article where they did: "Well, we all know gals don't read the Tech Section, so we put it in the only section they do read." Or, "The Tech Section had too many important articles about real computer issues." Or "Our advertisers insisted.
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Thanks for the important article.
 
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