The Gender Equality Checkpoint

[DanaC]

That may be just be two different kids with two different sets of interests and proclivities who just happen to correspond broadly with what we assume their gender will be into. I've known sibling pairs who were exact opposite.

Or it could be the influence of the wider culture in which they live, and over which you as a parent have only minimal control. It's very difficult to tell. The world is noisy with messages, and clearly some girls do get put off somewhere along the line, as boys also get put off. How many little boys are quite content to follow mum round the house 'helping' her vacuum, only to lose that the moment they walk through the school gates?

It takes a fairly strong sense of self, to forge your own way as a small child. Most of us will get pushed or pulled in some direction along the way - to lesser or greater degrees. Maybe we'll let something go that we used to find interesting - forget we ever liked it by the time we're 12. Maybe we just didn;t explore a thing that kind of intrigued us but felt vaguely transgressive, or socially dangerous. Like the little boy who really likes playing in the wendy house.

*shrugs* it's a complex soup of stuff, some of which we have it in us to change, some of which might never change, some of which should or shouldnt change.

[Undertoad]

They don't want to know, possibly because they are still overwhelmingly managed by men, all that boring, icky shit about sexism and stereotypes that women keep banging on about.

You've pictured in your head how the IBM decision-making process went, and you applied all the stereotypes you could think of, and here we are. The thing must be run by men, men must have made the decisions, they don't want to know, hence they were clueless, hence the result.

Your narrative and this entire thing comes out of stereotyping men and the IBM decision making process. What's up with that.

IBM is run by a woman. She wears a hairstyle that requires blow-drying.

[DanaC]

I was being facetious and my description of the decison-making process was meant to be humorous. But also to recognise an eseential truth about STEM companies as they are right now, which is that at a strategic and managerial level they are overwhelmingly male.

Yes - IBM is run by a woman. And yes, IBM have, partly through her pushing, increased the number of women in managerial positions. But - as a general rule, the CEO of a global tech giant, is unlikely, I'd have thought, to be micro-managing the specific editorial content of every part of a campaign like this. This advert was part of a larger initiative by the company to promote careers for women.

Even with a female CEO, IBM at a strategic and managerial level is three-quarters male. Unless she is specifically involving herself at every level of this campaign, rather than running the company, and unless IBM have specifically tasked their female management with this campaign, then there is a statistical likelihood that the majority of those making decisions about what makes the cut across the various components in this campaign are men.

And the fact that she might use a hairdryer is besides the point.

[Undertoad]

I'm now trying to find evidence of the original campaign and cannot find any.

We didn't need it anyway -- but if anyone can point to evidence of the original campaign that would be great.

[Undertoad]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

I'm now trying to find evidence of the original campaign and cannot find any.

We didn't need it anyway -- but if anyone can point to evidence of the original campaign that would be great.

Hereby documented: the first time the outrage machine had no original source. It's self-aware now, and of course, growing. Good luck to all of us.

[DanaC]

Stuff like this, as tiny as it is, really gets under my skin. Partly because it seems insane to me to bracket children so tightly (and if it is so fucking natural and innate why do the people who feel that way also seem to feel the need to encourage and reinforce it so strongly in children?), but also because it resonates with some of my own experience of growing up - where what I thought being a girl should be didn't always match what the culture I was in thought being a girl should be. To be clear I mean the wider culture - my family pretty much let me be what I wanted to be and explore what I wanted to explore - which was a range of stuff some of which was seen as boyish by others some of which was more 'girly'.

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandst...be-pirates-too

I am with my three-year-old twin daughters at a princess and pirate-themed child’s birthday party where there is an Anna from Frozen character dishing out temporary tattoos. She is, however, nonplussed by their preferences. “Are you sure you don’t want a princess one? Look at this sparkly tiara! Or there’s this fairytale castle!”

“No, this one please.”

“Are you really sure?” Lookalike Elsa’s wide eyes look to me for confirmation.

“She’s sure,” I say, pointing to the skull and crossbone tattoo. “She loves pirates.”

“Oh-kay,” says Elsa. “If you’re really sure. Look! Here’s a glittery wand!”

“No thanks,” my daughter says. “I really like this one.”

By now I’m giggling. I’ve just spotted my daughter’s twin sister behind her in the queue, and she’s holding a transfer with a pirate’s galleon on.

“Another unusual choice! There’ll be none left for the boys!”

Daughter number two looks absolutely crestfallen. Her hand falters. “Of course you can have a pirate one too!” I overcompensate for Elsa’s overly pencilled arched eyebrows.

“My girls are really into all things pirate. They love Peter Pan and Swashbuckle’s their favourite CBeebies programme …” My girls break into a rendition of the Swashbuckle pirate salute, and nearby parents smile. They don’t think my daughters are odd. Do they?

“Proper pair of tomboys you’ve got there.” Elsa’s parting shot.

“I’m not a boy!”


“I’m a girl, not Tom boy. She’s a silly lady!”

“Yes, she is a bit silly, isn’t she?”

Even before that:

At their two-year health check, one of the tests was to identify words on picture cards. I spotted the friendly childcare assistant quietly putting aside certain cards, while cherry-picking others with an excited, “Ooh, you’ll get this one!”

What was on the discarded pile? You guessed it, pictures that could be considered to be for boys: trucks, tractors, worms and dragons. As soon as I spotted what was happening, I asked the lady just to turn the cards as they came up, explaining that my twins loved playing with a range of toys. I know she’d meant well, but it just sat too awkwardly with me not to say anything. Why should they only get to look at princesses and ponies? Why should their world be shrunk in such a way?

There's quite a bit more, but this bit struck me as particularly interesting, given the earlier comments about the effect of this stuff on boy's opportunities:

A friend recently asked me whether she should be concerned that when she picks up her three-year-old boy from nursery he’s often dressed as a fairy. Another friend’s son is usually to be found pushing a vacuum cleaner or making everyone cups of pretend tea. She gets constant comments about him being “soft”.

“It’s worse for boys,” both friends have said when we’ve nattered about our non-fixed-gender-play conformist children. They feel that girls can get away with being tomboyish, but with boys the assumption is that there’s something seriously wrong with them if they embrace what are considered to be feminine traits and behaviours. “I bet you’ve not seen a boy attend at a themed party in a dress …”

Until this month, they would have been right. That was before Paul Henson, a dad from Virginia, posted a picture on Facebook of his son dressed in his Halloween costume of choice – Elsa from Frozen. Paul explained that his son had chosen this costume for a Halloween party, and that he’d also asked him to go along as Anna, something he was game to do. “Halloween is about children pretending to be their favourite characters. Just so happens, this week his is a princess.” The post went viral, featuring on BuzzFeed, and had over 28,000 Facebook shares in a week.

What an awesome dad.

Why the fuck shouldn't a little boy play at being a princess? We're fine as fucking dandy with him imagining himself as a dying soldier (remember how fun death throes were as a kid? They were the best part of a pretend battle), or a gun-wielding criminal, a morally questionable, rage-driven super hero, a tiger, a lion, a wolf, or an alien species from a different galaxy - but to imagine themselves momentarily as a female character is an unnatural and dangerous reach.

[xoxoxoBruce]

If boys wear dresses the Ghey can sneak up from beneath, even kilts invite the Debbil hisself.

[monster]

Originally Posted by DanaC

Why the fuck shouldn't a little boy play at being a princess? .

Hebe was going to a princess party. Hector got invited to go keep the brother company so it became a princess and king party. Hector insisted on a princess dress to match Hebe's. And got one. When he got there, the brother was in a long flowing robe as a bishop

I'll have to fish out the picture. He wore the shoes better than Hebe too

[DanaC]

A spokesperson for IBM said: “The videos were part of a larger campaign to promote STEM careers. It missed the mark for some and we apologise. It is being discontinued.”

http://www.theguardian.com/technolog...aimed-at-women

I've seen in a couple of articles, particularly the ones which are more sympathetic to IBM's situation, descriptions of some other elements of the campaign. But I have seen so many articles about it, I can't recall which ones they were.

I was happy to take IBM's word for it that this was only one element of their attempt to engage girls, rather than the entirety of it.

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Hereby documented: the first time the outrage machine had no original source. It's self-aware now, and of course, growing. Good luck to all of us.

How hard did you look?

[Undertoad]

Originally Posted by Happy Monkey

How hard did you look?

Thanks. Your last link is the Facebook video page for the campaign with 60 shares and 3633 views.

That, I could not find. How long did it take you?

All I could find were stories about the program's termination. Which are your first four links. Your first four links are the outrage machine in operation.

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Thanks. Your last link is the Facebook video page for the campaign with 60 shares and 3633 views.

That, I could not find. How long did it take you?

I googled "IBM hair dryer".

All I could find were stories about the program's termination. Which are your first four links. Your first four links are the outrage machine in operation.

And you what, assumed that they made it up? That a program that was terminated never existed?

It seems like you're searching so hard for the "outrage machine" that you're doing what you're claiming it does.

[Undertoad]

Originally Posted by Happy Monkey

I googled "IBM hair dryer".

Ah, I should have done that. It's result #22!

And you what, assumed that they made it up? That a program that was terminated never existed?

Ha! Ha! Of course not!

Did you think when I said "the machine is self-aware" that I believed the machine was self-aware?

Come on now. It's gonna take at least another six months for that.

[DanaC]

I understand people's concern about the 'outrage machine'. On the other hand I also can see the frustration of those women who are in STEM with the same mistakes being made over and over by companies big enough and well-resourced enough to do better. Innovation is king in tech - but not apparently when it comes to trying to tackle gender inequality. It's the predictability of it all that is disheartening. And the drip, drip, drip of it.


From one of the articles HM cited:

A common complaint was the whole thing felt patronizing: Trying to attract women to tech with the lure of hairdryers, even with empowering language, felt a bit like offering pink lab coats to women instead of seriously addressing systemic barriers that discourage women from entering the tech industry. For instance, a 2014 Center for Talent Innovation study found that women in engineering and tech were far more likely to leave the industry than their male peers, at least in part due to factors like "hostile macho cultures," exclusion from the "buddy networks" of their peers and a lack of female role models.

[BigV]

Now there's only one country left in the world where women can't vote.