The Art and Science of Everything

There, Inc. Delivers a Brave New Online World to Consumers:
- “Women rule: Women continue to be an underserved audience for online games despite women outnumbering men on the Web and spending more money online than men. There appeals to women; during Beta they returned more often than men and were more often leaders of the community.”
[I wonder if there was a selection effect for the kinds of women they recruited to be beta testers. For example, they recruited me because they found me as the leader of the Women in CS group at Stanford. Otherwise, this bullet is obviously trying to imply that women gravitate towards community based approaches to engaging technology. Reminds me a little of Brenda Laurel type ideas, though I don’t really know her ideas well enough to really say that.]

Gender associations and social software

I recently saw a comment on myths about blogging, one of which said something to the effect of:
“Blogging is only done by teenage girls”

At first I thought to myself “what makes that myth negative?” then realizing that teenage girls are a symbol for insipidity in our culture. Then I counterargued with myself, noting that I’m just as disparaging, if not moreso, about teenage boys and their video games. So maybe it’s not so much something about one gender’s adolescence being maligned over another’s, but I think there is something to the fact that the technologies that embodies these stereotypically maligned behaviors might *not* be evenly disparaged.

There’s a lot more fervor behind the development of video games and the component technologies and algorithms that propel their progress than there seems to be around blogging and communication software. Maybe there’s just not as many obvious places to take “social software” — but somehow, I find it hard to believe.

I realize there are bunch of counters to this musing because it is just that — observationally informed musing. But it is rooted in something.

Object oriented programming vs imperative programming
Relational vs mechanical command oriented
Really gender polarized? “Relational” fits certain stereotypes of females being nurturing, relation-oriented. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

What I want to know is whether there is a observable difference between women’s (and men’s) responses to/performance on tasks centered around relational paradigms vs mechanical ones (whatever that means).

This isn’t very fleshed out because I’m sitting in a seminar right now, jotting this down before I forget.

Kanter’s theories about tokenization in the workplace are primarily directed at explaining how women are viewed as the gender ratio varies. What are findings that examine who women may present themselves differently as their composition of the social group changes? The thing that made me think of this is that it’s not only true that women as a distinct group are most visible around that 15% marker (according to kanter, anyways…psychology of contrast), but it’s also true that my self-awareness as a woman (cuing of gender) varies with the composition of my companions. The kind of relationship surely alters the cocktail as well — work relations vs friendships, for example.

So…hmm…how to more concrete. Does the blackness of a black dot in a field of red dots come to attention more than the blackness of a black dot in a field composed of 30% black dots and 70% red dots? I would guess yes. What if instead of 70% red dots the 70% dots of a random distribution of like…(m/10)+ colors (where m=# of dots)? In that case, I would wonder if the black dots might have a sense of groupness as the largest minority, despite the minority status. That seems more obvious now that I’ve fleshed it out in those terms.

To reframe the first scenario a bit, does the blackness of a black dot come to attention more when 99% of the dots are black? Certainly the black probably gets framed as “normal” as opposed to aberrant, but still, gender is cued. So in the real world, how does the cueing of gender vary as the gender ratio swings from one extreme to the other (male saturated to female saturated). I wonder if there would be interesting similarities since the same notions of gender get cued by the extreme nature of both situations.

Sorta related to the vaccuum thread, but only tangentially, it does seem the demographics should influence design and creativity not necessarily because of socially encourages knowledges and concerns (though certainly possible, harder to predict?) but also through just cueing a different range of concepts.

Maybe the thing to creativity isn’t so much gender equity as just variance along all dimensions. In fact, that’s a lot more it, I think. And once “pale and male” is no longer the norm, then will pale and male become the aberration that may generate our “unconventional creativity”?

Blah. Confusing self. But I feel like this is an interesting quagmire to me.

Bob Sutton’s book “Weird Ideas That Work” is a biz press sort of book that actually seems pretty grounded in research as these things go, and that research probably should drill into these issues if it doesn’t already.

I appreciate the attention to this topic. The fundamental question of whether demographics affect design interests me a great deal. But the artlcle and argument is also pretty simplistic and gives me the heebie jeebies.

STUFF : INFOTECH - STORY : New Zealand’s leading news and information website: “‘There’s a lack of understanding from men in what women do. For example, the robot vacuum cleaner is round, and all women will know that won’t get the dust out of corners.’ ” [me - Anyone who has vacuumed should realize that, I suppose. I don’t think the square edges get stuff out of corners either, actually.]

“Many think the industry is full of computer geeks writing viruses and causing havoc. But unlike other industries, where you have to comply with an image, in technology you’ll be able to find your niche.” [me - I think it’s totally wrong that sociology findings go out the window in tech culture. I don’t think it does a service to anyone to lie. If you’re resorting to that, then you should take a second look and figure out what the compelling reasons to get involved actually are.]

Welcome to WomensMedia.com - the site for working women

Survey of recent information about digital divide with respect to gender. Haven’t had a chance to review it yet.

Phonograph Makers: Jean-Luc Fradet: “Acoustical reproduction systems were so limited in the higher and lower end of the spectrum that they could not even reproduce a female voice correctly - not to mention piano music.”

I’m trolling around for phonography history based on an uncited comment in “Rocking Out” by Garofolo stating that there have been claims that female voices were not well reproduced on early phonographs. He disposes of this theory for the lack of women’s prominence in early recordings, commenting that if that were true, then how would they have made picolo recordings?

Props for the name “Femmebot” go to Anne Balsamo, author of Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women.