Via Sarah Rios.

It’s surprising how many problems don’t get solved because of who has them.

Originally shared by Cindy Brown

Men have dominated the entrepreneurial field since, well, basically forever. And that means many of the problems that their companies try to solve are focused on straight, cisgender men, or at best they’re gender-neutral. It makes sense; you can only solve a problem that you know exists. But because other groups, including women, have largely been excluded from those conversations, issues that affect non-dudes have gone ignored.

Even today, women who pitch male-dominated venture capital funds have a hard time being taken seriously. When Janica Alvarez invented a far superior breast pump, she had to bring her husband to pitch meetings because she otherwise faced questions about how she could possibly run a business while raising a family, or got VCs literally telling her the pump was gross. It didn’t seem to matter that this was a solution to a problem that millions of new parents have: breast pumps are terrible. They’ve always been terrible. The technology that Alvarez’s version uses isn’t even all that advanced—the innovation is in bothering to make a female-centric product better.

Originally shared by Self-Rescuing Princess Society

“Grainy images of women driving ambulances and working in munitions factories in the first world war have become familiar to us all. Yet the remarkable story of the extraordinary women who took over men’s jobs in hospitals, laboratories and government research facilities only to be forced to relinquish them once men returned from the front is largely unknown. Patricia Fara’s important book, the first of many being published to commemorate the centenary of women receiving the vote, is written as a paean to these forgotten pioneers. Although many of their individual stories remain sketchy, the details of their lives and contributions lost or overlooked, their collective history provides a compelling tale.”

Another book to add to the pile.

The cartoonist was, of course, investigated by the FBI, and accumulated a thick file there. This inspired her to increase the political content of her cartoons.

Originally shared by Self-Rescuing Princess Society

“Ormes’ panel [Patty-Jo ‘n’ Ginger], far from being merely frivolous jokes told by a precocious young girl, contained biting commentary and scathing indictments on issues related to oppression and subjugation through racist policies, government witch hunts, military industrialization, or other means. Through Patty-Jo, Ormes highlights the ways that, as Whaley notes, ‘a young, middle-class, educated Black child in the throes of the civil rights era would express herself.'”

The pass rate on these tests varies from zero to roughly half.

Originally shared by David Brin

I don’t care for political-correctness litmus tests, but I do admit they can be effective and important temporary measures that alter thinking and help to change bad habits. One is the “Bechdel test” —  which asks two simple questions of a movie: ‘Does it have at least two named female characters? And do those characters have at least one conversation that is not about a man?’

I’ve seen a better and more stringent version that asks: “And do those characters have at least one conversation that is not about relationships?” Notice that the latter version goes more to the heart of stereotyping in women’s movie roles.

Well, these columnists at FiveThirtyEight have asked, “What does the next Bechdel Test look like? The time is ripe for a successor. Is there a short, punchy test we can apply?” They asked a dozen women in Hollywood, and the answers ranged from on-target and helpful all the way to a couple that seem downright thought-police vicious. But sure, let the discussion ensue!

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/next-bechdel/

Only note whicy film scores best according to the largest number of these tests? The Independence Day sequel! Another that did well? Passengers. Science fiction leads the way! Hint: judging by the standards and context of its time, SF has always had a branch or several wings that were more advanced and eager for justice. Dissing that past science fiction was sexist provokes the question “compared to what?” In the sense of provocatively doing its job and poking at the ground ahead, SF was always ahead of its time.

Representation matters.

Originally shared by Keith Wilson

If all you knew about black families was what national news outlets reported, you are likely to think African Americans are overwhelmingly poor, reliant on welfare, absentee fathers and criminals, despite what government data show, a new study says.

H/t John Bump​

“It is this tradition which has very few female contributions. More importantly, it seems to me that artificially inflating the importance of the few female authors that might have existed would falsify the historical record. After all, the whole point of the feminist critique is that female voices were suppressed. This suppression is important to talk about, but you can’t rely on the suppressed voices in order to do so.”

I…

The…

Ehhh.

Read the whole article. It does have some interesting, and difficult-to-resolve, points about academic freedom, but especially in light of the quoted statement I find it hard to avoid the conclusion that the professor just doesn’t get it.

Originally shared by Laura Gibbs

When I read articles like this, it makes me very glad that I have opted instead for building courses in which the students choose the reading, and it is my job to find a truly wide variety of readings that I can make available to them. The students then choose, and the students learn from their own choices as well as from seeing the choices made by the students with whom they are interacting through their blogs and projects, etc. This top-down approach (by professor and/or by committee) does not appeal to me at all. As for the attitude of the professor, every time I have challenged myself to improve my range of reading choices by going out and looking for more, I have often surprised myself by the great things I found by looking. It sounds to me like he is not looking very hard…

I have wondered why, if agriculture was so hard compared with hunting and gathering, so many people made the transition.

Turns out it only works that way if you ignore the kind of work that, in industrial societies like those of the (male) theorists who proposed this, is done by unpaid women. (It was generally done by women in the hunter-gatherer societies, too, I suspect.)

The article mentions the “Man the Hunter” conference. I recently listened to an episode of the excellent food podcast Gastropod in which several female anthropologists pointed out that women also hunted in a number of societies, and that in general the conference ignored or diminished the role of women in making both hunter-gathering and agriculture work.

Originally shared by Winchell Chung

TL;DR: It was not a mistake if you take the amount of food preparation work in to account.

Let’s keep in mind, amid all the opining and debating: this isn’t about sex. It’s about power, equality, and respect.