Monthly Archive for August, 2008

The Nerdette

Published on August 31, 2008 in Articles. 1 Comment Tags: , , , .

A while ago Newsweek ran an article on a new breed of nerd: the nerdette. The nerdette is a girl nerd. These nerd girls are a growing group of young women who make the term nerd their own. They subvert the negative stereotype of the nerd either by not seeing it as derogative at all or by creating a new, more feminine version of the nerd. Instead of being social outsiders, they are social, enjoy networking and are often fashionable and stylish. And counter the stereotype of the nerd, they are not male. The male image of the geek, nerd or hacker seems to be outdated with this young generation of women who have grown up with new technologies. These young women take technology by storm whereas the few women who broke the glass ceiling in the tech industry - like Meg Whitman or Carly Fiorina – are slowing exiting as a recent article lamented. However there seem to be many women in the starting blocks to take on leading positions in technology if we are to believe Business Week or USA Today.

From academic research we know that what I have called ‘reprogram stereotypes’ is one way of overcoming stereotypes. Reprogramming stereotypes means to give them a different meaning. This meaning should not be a radical departure from the original meaning but a playful reinterpretation. This is exactly what the term nerdette does. It uses the stereotype of the nerd giving it a new meaning which is that women can be nerds too. Instead of conforming to the masculine undertones of what it means to be a nerd, being a nerdette gives you license to be feminine. The article mentions things like having been a cheerleader or wearing pink pumps as examples of this femininity. These are traditional qualifiers for being feminine. It shows that women do not have to be masculine to be a nerd/ette and can endorse traditional feminine attributes. However these attributes are feminine stereotypes in themselves.

The problem with stereotypes is that it restricts who can count as a certain type of person. Traditional nerds were defined on the idea that they are not women and therefore this definition excluded women from being nerds. The nerdette definition now includes women but only those who fulfill traditional expectations about femininity like being a cheerleader or liking pink heels. Nothing wrong with this per se, but many women might not want to use these classifiers of femininity - and might prefer flat shoes.

I also see another problem with this over-feminisation. This over-feminisation goes hand in hand with certain expectations of being sexy and available to men (this piece seems to suggest that nerd girls are particularly appealing to certain men and their main characteristic it to be beautiful, to wear glasses and to attend Star Trek conventions –Seven of Nine is of course their role model). However we know that if a woman is too sexy in the workplace, she generally is not seen as competent. Sexualising being nerd might therefore not necessarily be a beneficial subversion of a stereotype.

However the Newsweek article suggests that most of these nerdettes do not rely on over-feminisation but rather combine being a nerd with being a woman as part of who they feel there are. Being a nerd is now chic. At least to be a female nerd.

Gender and the semantic web

Published on August 26, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Caveat: I’m not entirely sure I understand the semantic web, but I do think it’s a fascinating idea and that there is some great work going on in this area laying the foundations for what promises to be a fantastically exciting development for the web. Despite my relative lack of knowledge, I’m going to express an opinion anyway. Please do correct me if you can.

So the semantic web is a mix of technologies which essentially aim to make the web more readable by computers. In order to do this, coders are trying to come up with technologies that go beyond HTML’s description of content to a description and classification of things themselves. For example, there will be defined, in this semantic web, an entity named “Barack Obama”. It will have attributes, such as gender and party affiliation, and various elements of his life history too. Crucially, it will also have relationships. So the web will know, for example that <Barack Obama><is the husband of><Michelle Obama>, and <is the 2008 presidential candidate of><the Democratic Party> and so on.

Much of the power of the semantic web comes from defining what kinds of these triples (<object> <relationship> <object>) exist, and from filling out the definitions of things so that computers can search them. The object is to come up with a system in which, for example, I could ask my computer to find out who I am meeting in three weeks time, when their birthday is and what the company they are working for is currently up to that I should know about. While much of this information is available to people searching the web, computers are much worse at interpreting the text form in which it currently resides and so we have to do the legwork of looking for it ourselves. The semantic web aims to make more of the web machine-readable.

After that long introduction, here’s the problem. A researcher from Austria believes that the semantic web is in danger of becoming gendered because of the gender of people who are building it. As I have noted before, men are way more likely to get their fingers dirty with the business of tinkering with hardware, writing code etc. And so it is that the semantic web community who are setting out the relationships, entities and protocols that will define this new web are mostly male.

Are the male and female points of view so different that the basic ontologies we give to computers to make sense of the world might be inadequate if only one gender contributes? I am struggling to think of ways in which this might actually make a difference, but then I am somewhat handicapped by my (60%) male brain. Perhaps someone can enlighten me?

It does, however, moderate my earlier optimism that the new web would be female-friendly and easy to use. For all that coding is no longer as important for the average user, it still builds all the technologies we love. Perhaps women will find it just as easy to use as men, but the fact that they are routinely not involved at design time may mean that gendered ways of thinking are hardwired into new technologies.

(This obviously applies to other groups who are excluded from the design process. There is a lot of interesting work on how basic philosophical concepts, such as ‘knowledge’, differ between ethnic groups. The same arguments as applied to men above may well apply to north Americans, or white people (not that most programmers are white, but you get the idea, hopefully). This blog is about gender, though, so I’ll stick to the point for the time being.)

R4, the taboo technology that downsizes your DS

Published on August 16, 2008 in Uncategorized. 5 Comments

There’s no name more feared by the makers and vendors of video games than the “R4″, the cheap, popular add-on to the Nintendo DS that allows gamers to load approximately 100 illegally downloaded games onto a single ‘cart’.

Naturally for some, the allure of this technology is the ability to get something for nothing. There are others who claim that they only use this technology for legitimate ‘homebrew’ software. I think there’s another really good reason that gamers like these things:

As you can see from the demonstration above, the DS is not quite as portable as it’s makers claim. Users of R4 cards have the advantage of combining many games into a single package, effectively allowing them to carry an entire collection in a tiny handbag.

The thing that Nintendo seem not to have noticed is that the pirate product really is delivering a better user-experience than the legit product sold in shops. The R4 cards and their many imitators have freed DS gamers from constantly needing to swap easily lost game-carts.

As a gamer whose happy to spend money on games but really appreciates not having to carry a load of crap with me, I’d like to see Nintendo respond to this threat not by the usual litigation and threats to ban products which hurt their business model. How about some innovation?

Nintendo needs to release it’s own R4 killer. Imagine an official game-download service like WiiWare for the DS that allows affordably priced games delivered directly to the hand-held, plus it should allow a large number of games to be stored on one cart.

That would kill my R4 envy and make room in my over-filled handbag, which would be a real bonus for many women, considering the average woman’s handbag is now 40% heavier than 5 years ago.

We are our choices

Published on August 14, 2008 in Electronics. 0 Comments

We’ve just completed some interesting work about people’s relationship with technology.

Classical research theory assumes that our decisions are based on conscious, rational thought or reflex ’snap’ decisions. These days most psychotherapists have come to the conclusion that the truth is somewhat more complex: decisions are often post-rationalisations and snap decisions are backed up by a lifetime of knowledge.

Our client had previously spent thousands of pounds on ‘traditional’ research which failed to reveal anything substantially new. The planner, had been traveling around the country, night after night, suburb after suburb and was exhausted at the prospect of doing yet more research.

We decided to change our approach and run an ethnographic style study.  We assembled our ‘SWAT’ team of researchers, each was sent to ‘live’ with the subjects of our research: We spent time in their homes. We went shopping with couples buying technology and ‘hung out’ with families, observing their relationship with household technology.

The study revealed a great deal of new insights about how gender influences technology use, for example men often have their PC/Laptop in their ‘den’- its a retreat, its a hide out, a solace place where they can internalize ‘their’ time.  We saw how women use their PC/laptop in the heart of the home. Many women used their laptops to manage the household and ensure things run smoothly: Its used to make sure the shopping online is ordered, help the kids with their homework and keep them in touch with their friends via social networking sites.

We watched how couples shop for technology and the very different roles they take:  Women tend to be more concerned about how the device will ‘fit’ into their home.  Whether it will be a beautiful addition to the home, not just in terms of design but in functionality and ergonomics. This is a motive that so many tech-brands misinterpret as “women only care what the technology looks like“. Men tend to want to make sure that what they are buying is “right” piece of kit.  Not in terms of their home but more in terms of what it will purportedly do.

While the differences are obvious, what unifies men and women is that buying technology is an emotional decision: This does not mean that it is irrational. An emotional decision can be very rational as our feelings are informed by a lifetime of experience. As the neuroscientist, David Lewis states,

“Our conscious is a bit like a PR company.  It justifies our decisions on an intellectual level and seeks to explain behavior that feels right“

The ‘PR’ bit is what ‘respondents’ had been articulating in the focus group.  The planner told me,

“I realized that for 2 years people had been lying to us in focus groups.  Not because they deliberately set out to lie but because they either couldn’t articulate it or were too embarrassed to tell us what they really felt about buying technology”

There are 3 types of decision making.  The first type is the truly instant decision. The second type are those which appear instant but actually access our vast network of experiences, however we often refer to them as based on our ‘gut instinct.’ The last type is the mathematical way to approach them which is cost benefit analysis. Received wisdom has it that the vast majority of choices are of the first and third type, however the more I observe people in the act of making choices the more I realize that the way people shop is neither frivolous nor analytical but something in between.

As Sartre stated, we are our choices.  If only technology companies spent a little more time trying to understand why we do what we do on a deeper level, then maybe so many women wouldn’t feel so frustrated and bored when it comes to buying technology.

The end of male geekery

Published on August 11, 2008 in Uncategorized. 2 Comments

A conversation I was having with my girlfriend’s father sparked a thought about how computing structures can lead to gendered outcomes. He was an engineer in Germany, and for his undergraduate dissertation, he programmed a computer to play a game that sounds like a cross between connect-4 and Go. He did it on punch cards. We talked for ages about the virtues of Fortran versus machine code, C versus Pascal and other geeky things I pretended to understand.

I would describe myself as a novice programmer at best, but like many guys I know I spent significant portions of my youth in the 1980s tinkering with IBM compatible computers that mainly ran MS-DOS. The first thing the computer would show was not a friendly desktop with windows and icons, but a prompt:

c:\>

There is something about this blankness that means you have to begin to get under the hood of your computer, and have a dim idea of how the bits work and communicate with each other. And in fact it encourages you to tinker and tweak. I may have messed up my father’s computer so badly it needed an engineer to come over and spend half a day fixing it, but I learnt a lot. Now, this sort of thing is clearly gendered. The male brain loves getting stuck into machines and playing with them, whether these are cars, computers or bikes.

I am going to resort to purely anecdotal evidence, so if there are any ladygeeks out there who love to program and know their way around autoexec.bat, then apologies, but hopefully what I’m saying will still ring true to some extent. I didn’t know any girls in the 80s, but even since then, I can only think of one girl I have met who could (as far as I know) be remotely interested in the conversation I was having with my girlfriend’s father. For a long time computers and the concept of geekiness were organised around the idea that geeks could program, that they could code their way out of trouble and would take the time to run through system files tinkering and tweaking to accomplish what they wanted to do. And during that time, computer geekdom was a resolutely male domain, as it was largely men who actually enjoyed doing this sort of thing.

That began to change over a decade ago, when Windows 95 banished the C prompt to dire emergencies only. But emergencies still happen, and the traditional male geekiness is still called upon. However, the move towards cloud computing is going to strike another blow at this predominantly male domain. Processing power, programs and the problems they cause will no longer be stored locally, and will no longer be sorted out locally. Your laptop, like Belinda’s Eee PC, will not be a fully-featured powerhouse, but mainly a way of accessing the internet, where most of your computing needs will be met by a variety of services provided by Google, Amazon, Microsoft et al. With this model, there is so much less that can go wrong, and correspondingly less need for the male geek types.

And this unleashes productivity, too. Instead of spending countless hours fiddling with registry files and secretly enjoying it, the focus of computer wizardry shifts to the wonderful things that you can actually achieve with them, and this field is not gendered. Women are just as interested in technology as men, now that the technical fiddling is no longer required (most devices actively discourage you from opening them up and tinkering), and in every way, they are an equally important part of the technology marketplace. Mobile phones, content creation and social media are all areas where women are just as likely as men if not more so to participate and produce. These are also areas where the internal workings of the system are best hidden from its users.

The new geeks will be male and female, they will have no need to know how computers function internally, but they will be masters of manipulating symbols on screen and in the cloud, and the things they accomplish will be awesome.

How female are your browsing habits?

Published on August 11, 2008 in Interesting. 0 Comments

This is pretty cool. Click the link and you are taken to a site which analyses your browsing history to assess how likely you are to be male or female. The idea is that men and women have different likelihoods of visiting certain websites, and so using that information backwards, you can tell a user how male or female their browsing is.

A reader of Andrew Sullivan’s points out:

An interesting irony of it is that the highest ratios you can get are from gay websites (adam4adam is 4.13 as a commenter points out) which ironically means that, in that world, a lot of gay men get a 100% while most heterosexual male get at least something like a 10% female side.

I got 69% male at home, but on my work computer I got 57%, which means I’m fully 12% more in touch with my feminine side at work. I do live with my girlfriend, but also two gay guys, while my office has mostly women and straight guys. Maybe the more feminised context of the office affects what I am interested in online, and probably much more besides?