Sounds like a silly question – we know lots of people are reading the journal and many of you are also contributing. But as we publish another issue we would really like to know more.
Who and where are you? What is your particular interest in Gender and SET and is it as a researcher, a professional or a practitioner? Are you finding things that help you?
If you have got as far as ‘Engaging’ please post us a quick message in the comment box. We look forward to hearing from you.
Dear Readers- this time we are blowing our own trumpets a bit and soliciting your support.
We are really pleased that the Open University interactive website The Real Wonder Women that some of us from the journal worked on this year for International Women’s Day, has been shortlisted for a website award: ‘Tasty Website’. We mentioned the site to you in a blog posting here on the 9th March.
There is more information about the award at the ‘Bigchip’ site
If you think ‘The Real Wonder Women’ is good enough you can vote for it by texting the codeword DOTSTAR to 84433 [ this is if you are inthe UK - I am afraid I don't know what you do if you are outside the UK- add the country code perhaps?].
It would be good to have a site with feminist content winning so do vote for us if you like the site.
Gill
Independent open access journals – like GST – have been leading the way in the last few years in experimenting with new online features, such as this Engage blog. But established publishers are now catching up with us, and we need to follow what they are doing.
For example, a special issue of Interacting with Computers on Feminist HCI will be published later this year, and the editors tell us that some of the articles in the issue are already available in manuscript or proof version on the journal website.
Most of them will be of great interest to our readers for example:
Michael Muller: ‘Feminism asks the “Who” Questions in HCI’ and Sheryl Brahnam, Marianthe Karanikas, Margaret Weaver: ‘(Un)dressing the Interface: Exposing the Foundational HCI Metaphor ‘Computer Is Woman’
You can access these via the journal at this link , or, you can download the proof versions from the journal’s Articles in Press section, via this link .
Having papers available in a pre-publication form sounds like a very good idea to us. The questions we need to address are:
– at what stage of the editing process would we make such paper available?
- when would it be most useful to authors or readers to be able to access a version (which would probably be different from the final version)?
We’d be very interested in any comments from our readers about what you feel we should be doing.
As I was thinking about the outcomes and success of recent projects about women in SET to celebrate 100 years of International Women’s Day – in particular those here at the Open University ( The Real Wonder Women ) – I was reminded of another celebratory project. Over the last six years I have been excited and inspired by the UKRC Women of Outstanding Achievement photographic exhibition project (Women of Outstanding Achievement 2011 ) in which annually several outstanding SET women are chosen and celebrated in wonderful photographic portraits. I was reminded because previously the launch of each year’s exhibition was on or about 8th March.
Women have been nominated for outstanding contributions in the areas of SET discovery, innovation and entrepreneurship; communication of SET with a contribution to society; and SET leadership and inspiration to others. The collection now has 30 award winners’ portraits. As well as being a celebration and tribute to the individual and collective contribution of women in the SET field, this project is very much about visibility. Looking around the walls of our great institutions, public buildings and public art collections we aren’t greeted by many women at all never mind many women scientists and engineers. This project is a nudge to change that. After the yearly exhibition the portraits find permanent homes in prominent locations in leading SET professional bodies, academic institutions, renowned laboratories and engineering companies. It is to be hoped that these portraits and the stories that go with them will act as role models and inspirations to others.
This year’s winners will be announced and the portraits unveiled ( a little later than usual) on 5th May. I’m looking forward to seeing another group of exciting portraits of some inspirational women. I’m also hoping that among us we can think of ways of maximising the potential for visibility that the existence of this collection brings.
I love graphical presentations of information especially ones that make me rethink my well held opinions. Graphics have the sneaky knack of appearing to simply present reality, they say: ’this is how it is’ , rather than engage in an argument with you. But can we trust them?
This week I came across an unfortunately named website called: Chart Porn: data visualizations you just gotta love. It aggregates graphical representations of data- mainly from the US press onto its site. There are some graphics on gender data that might interest GSET readers for example:
He Said she Said : words that men bloggers use more than women, and vice versa . - made me wonder about how we’re doing in this blog?
And did you know that in the USA women working in mining quarrying and oil and gas extraction earn roughly 22% more than those working education and the health services, while women in construction earn 3% less than those in education and health. However, women in construction earn 92% of what their male colleagues earn, while women in mining etc earn only 80% of what their male colleagues earn. [If you click on the chart below you should get a version you can read]
After all these years we still can’t predict where the biggest gender gaps in earnings lie – even in our SET fields. ( Gill)
We have recently been involved in a couple of discussions where people have related experiences of being ‘in’ Second Life. There probably aren’t many readers of this journal don’t know what Second Life is – although it is probably a minority of you who are active there. Second Life is what is known as ‘an immersive virtual world’. That is computer simulation where ‘players’ become so engrossed that they ‘feel’ as if they are ‘present’ in the simulation – some of the papers in the recent special issue on gaming are about such environments. The discussions we have been involved with have been about the possibility or value of ‘being’ another gender in a virtual world, and this brings up all sorts of issues about the nature of gender as we live it day to day in the ‘real’ world, and whether ‘playing’ another gender in a virtual world or even in a game, gives a valid positive insight into the experience of being a man or woman, or whether it trivialises it.
Many feminists seem to have moved over the last 20 years from a position where men ‘playing’ or adopting female personae online was considered naïve at best and devious and dangerous at worst; to a position which argues that this kind of activity is both insightful for the person acting and a radical challenge to the social construction of gender. This last argument effectively positions the technology of virtual reality as a feminist tool for challenging gender structures. Some of us remain to be convinced. Years ago Donna Haraway argued that we are all cyborgs now and some of us now embrace our cyborg lives. But we also realise that we rate the material embodied aspects of that identity very highly, and remain dubious of the value of gender swapping in any virtual environment.
We would be very interested in how others feel about such activity and such technologies as tools for change. Can we use them and how?
The Editorial Team for the journal all based at the Open University ran this half day seminar last week, and it was a slightly nail biting event due to the reliance we placed on high-tech communications technology. We felt that we were doing some rather cutting edge stuff by video- linking live with our first speaker, Dorothy Gordon, in Ghana. Dorothy spoke about the ways that mobile communications technologies can help girls and women in Africa, for use as an educational tool as well as for business transactions in rural villages. Progress is hampered by lack of reliable data on use of IT in Ghana and lack of universal access to mobile phone signals. Supplying a mobile device to every child in school would make a huge difference as this also enable access for the rest of the family.
The second speaker was Maureen McNeill didn’t require a high tech link as she was present in person at the seminar. Maureen spoke about her work on the gendering of biographies of scientists, focusing on the biographies of Barbara McClintock and Rosalind Franklin and contrasting these with the James Watson’s account of the discovery of DNA: ‘The Double Helix’, and his version of Rosalind Franklin’s contribution to this. Common themes that emerged from Maureen’s analysis of the biographies were the authors note a continuing focus on the appearance of women scientists, an emphasis on modesty, almost a requirement to display femininity and an unease with feminism.
The seminar was well attended both virtually via the live webcast and in person. There was a lively discussion after each talk with questions from those in the room and also from those viewing over the web – from as far afield as Ottowa.
If you haven’t watched the seminar yet, it is still available at: http://stadium.open.ac.uk/stadia/preview.php?whichevent=1626&s=31
Both of these talks raise many issues. Please post your views on both talks here and we can continue the discussion that was started at the seminar.
In the Open University [where we work] there has been more interest in doing somthing to celebrate International Women’s Day this year than ever before. Some of us from the GST team got involved in producing an interactive website to celebrate 60 of the most influential women of the last 100 years.
See The Real Wonder Women
We made sure that there was a good representation of women who worked in STEM. We also wanted to note the women – who although not qualified in STEM – made important contributions to it – so we have Hedy Lamar in our ‘Science’ list (do you know what she did?). And we wanted to note the importance of science education in backgrounds some of our most influential women who pursued other careers. Which two important female politicians of the last 100 years had degrees in Science ? If you don’t know you can find them by reading the biographies in our list.
Let us know which women we did not include that you would have included if you had created the list? Who have we missed?
Also please let us know what things you and your organisation have been doing for International Women’s Day.
At the moment for us in the UK one of our biggest concerns is the increasingly difficult economic and political environment for our activities.With recently announced budget cuts, research and project funding for gender and SET work is becoming increasingly difficult to secure. Outside of academia, the economic recession has already had an impact in the private sector and is now starting to impact on women’s employment in the public and not-for-profit/voluntary sectors. Many women’s projects nationally, including gender and SET initiatives, are facing drastic funding cuts.
How can we ensure that our momentum of excellent work is maintained in the new landscape? Can we expect governments to support our work in the future if political priorities change? Or will we see a return to grass roots activism?
We have academic colleagues telling us that it is getting harder to secure funding from their institutions to participate in conferences and events – not a luxury, but vitally important for networking, sharing ideas and community building. We wondered how we could respond to this through the journal and in particular with the use of communication technologies.
One thing we are planning is a Gender and STEM Research Seminar on 15th March at the Open University with a live webcast (that will also be available after the event) so no matter where you are in the world ( if you have good internet access) you can join in the conversation. We’d like the journal to make more use of technologies to run online events such as this, which will help to maintain our networks and collaborations.
But what other things could we do to support you as a community?
We invite you also to tell us something about the situation – economic and/or political – where you are and most importantly whether you can suggest any strategies that we could all learn from in these hard pressed times.
When we started up the GST journal in 2009, we envisaged bringing together people and their contributions from many perspectives and places. We wanted to move our understanding of gender and SET issues forward in the spirit of collaboration and with a shared vision for a more gender equal future.
In this Engage section we now want to start conversations about the things that interest, concern and excite us in the field of gender and SET research and intervention; conversations that do not need to have the same academic rigour that a paper in the body of the journal has to have. But conversations that are reflective and well informed, that support the mission of the journal and offer more immediate responses to events and ideas. No topic forbidden, no holds barred, and we look forward to you – our readers and authors – joining in.
