- “You Cannot Be Mommy”: A Female Cook on Ratatouille | Rebecca Lynde-Scott at The Toast (Sept 15): “Notice that, while her position is never specified, she’s low enough on the totem pole that she’s given the job of training the despised plongeur (“garbage boy” in the film, actually dishwasher), a job only given to the person occupying the station the new person is moving into, so she’s pretty damn low. […] Linguini announced his and Colette’s relationship to the press, “Inspiration has many names. Mine is named Colette.” That moment in the movie is supposed to be about how he’s betraying Remy by not being honest, but he’s betraying Colette nearly as much just by these two sentences. In eight words, he demotes her from competent cook on the way up to artist’s muse. As the former, she could keep working her way up. As the latter, she might never get another job in a really good kitchen again, if she and Linguini break up. That gets ignored, of course, shellacked over with Remy’s story, some sharp remarks, and that trademarked Disney happy-ever-after.”
- [warning for discussion of harassment] Pushing Women and People of Color Out of Science Before We Go In | Jennifer Selvidge at Huffington Post (Sept 18): “The misogyny and racism I experienced and saw at MIT became more and more concerning […] I know that even with close to straight As, I am still unwelcome in my scientific community and unwelcome as an engineer. I will be competing with white men with lower GPAs and less research experience who will likely be chosen over me, as professors on graduate committees. After all, some of those very same graduate school committee members probably remember fondly “the days when men were engineers and women were flight attendants.” The problems in STEM are the people in STEM. I shouldn’t have to play catch up, when I am already ahead.”
- New FOSS Outreach Program internships for female technical contributors | Quim Gil at Wikimedia (Sept 18): “The Free and Open Source Software Outreach Program for Women offers paid internships to developers and other technical contributors working on projects together with free software organizations. […] The application period starts on September 22nd and ends one month later on October 22nd.”
- [warning for police brutality] Police killed a black man dressed up like an anime character | Aja Romano at The Daily Dot (Sept 16): “For the second time in two months, a black man has been shot and killed by police officers while holding a toy weapon. The Utah police fatally shot 22-year-old Darrien Hunt on Wednesday.”
- Participate in a Survey About Gender Diversity in Video Games | Carly Smith at The Escapist (Sept 16): “Student researcher Jennifer Allaway is examining the relationship between players’ desires for diversity and game developers’ understanding of that desire, among many other topics, for a GDC 2015 talk.” There are separate surveys for developers and consumers.”
- [warning for discussion of sexual harassment] Misogyny and the Atheist Movement | Comment by Hold your seahorses at Metafilter (Sept 15): “The article makes a passing mention of new “rules” for the “gender dynamic” and I think there’s actually something to that, as far as the reason why at least a subset of men get extravagantly, sometimes violently, upset and retaliatory when they run up against, or see someone run up against, those “rules”. Because yes. Absolutely, the rules are changing about what you “can” and “can’t” do with/to women (at cons, in public, online, in general). But the people getting upset about this tend to misunderstand what the idea of “the rules are changing” means. The “rules” – that set of norms that determined where you could and couldn’t acceptably transgress with someone – used to be much more liberal from the male perspective. […] That sense of assurance, of insulation from consequences, is what’s been increasingly yoinked away from men as it becomes less and less acceptable to do these things.”
- Time to Raise the Profile of Women and Minorities in Science | Brian Welle and Megan Smith at Scientific American (Sept 16): “over the past few years, we discovered some pretty ugly news about our beloved Google Doodles. We had been making these embellishments to the corporate logo on our home page, often in honor of specific people on their birthdays, ever since the company was founded in 1998. For the first seven years, we celebrated exactly zero women. We had not noticed the imbalance.”
- why many women of colour within the so-called ‘Western countries’ and those outside are very alienated with the [mainstream] feminism | lesetoilesnoires at tumblr (Sept 20): “The idea that to show a White young woman in the West why and how she needs feminism, or why and how she has benefited from feminism, you have to appeal to the ‘tragic plight’ of Women of Colour ‘elsewhere’, turn these Women of Colour into caricatures of victimhood while contrasting it with White, middle-class women as ‘empowered subjects’, is simply condescending in the best case and outright racist in the worst case.”
- Albert Einstein, Anti-Racist Activist | s.e. smith at this ain’t livin’ (Sept 22): “It is perhaps not surprising that Einstein’s contributions to anti-racism were erased at the time. It was easy to focus on the media-friendly physicist who amazed people with his mind, and to quietly skate around details of his personal life. His work can’t have made contemporary media comfortable, either, as he was unafraid when it came to specifically confronting white complicity and talking about what whites needed to do.”
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