- Girls Go Geek… Again: “Computer science has always been a male-dominated field, right? Wrong.” (From Darrin.)
- Related: stereotype threat and how it affects women in computing.
- Batman villains psychoanalyzed by mental health experts.
- Weird research alert: The effect of country music on suicide. (From Mark.)
Re Girls go geek again. Interesting how competitive wording in job ads brings in all men and no women and when the same project stresses mentorship and learning they get hundreds of women applicants. Surely creativity is the competitive quality not competition for it’s own sake. No wonder the banks have got in such a mess, if you put out a hard nosed uncaring message right from the start you get hard nosed uncaring staff and culture. Never thought how job ads alienate whole groups of people I think it really pays for a business to have job ads writen proffessionaly or have staff trained to write them. I wanna see women form half the directorships and half CEOs Let’s identify and remove the reasons why that isn’t happening.
Re. Batman: I recently reread Killing Joke and came to ponder upon the stunning ineffectiveness of Arkham Asylum. Their treatment rate is scandalosuly poor and their ability to actually keep their inmates under lock and key is no better.
At this point, when Batman apprehends Two-Face or The Joker (again) he really should be saying to himself (and to Gordon) “Y’know, let’s not put him in Arkham this time. Let’s see if we can’t find another institution that will take him. They can’t possibly do any worse. Arkham’s had all the chances they deserve and then some and have proven themselves utterly useless.”
Isn’t Arkham subject to periodic reviews of some kind? I mean, it’s a publicly funded institution, isn’t it? I think the people of Gotham would like to see their tax dollars put to use more effectively.
According to stuff posted today, it may be that Arkham is a faith-based institution, so gets to avoid state oversight.
Just a note. The psychoanalysis one doesn’t really go into detail about the villains. It simply says they’re doing a panel at Comic-con and the reasons behind such a panel. Although if you’re like me. You’ll read the comments after the articles ><
The interesting thing is the word computer was originally created as a job title to describe the women doing the ballistics calculations for the military (in addition to the adding machines they used to do those calculations). So the very basis of the field was incredibly female dominated.
I think the fact that computer science (and tech work in general) is having a slightly shifting view and becoming more commonplace and lower prestige/lower pay within Western society. When you look across many disciplines this shift is usually accompanied by a shift towards more women in that field.
Re the weird research alert: what about this study linking national anthems with lots of low notes to suicide rates: National Anthems and Suicide Rates. (I especially like the bit about Hungary’s national anthem being banned from the radio).