BlogHer - New York Times to Geek Girls. Get thee to the Fashion and Style Pages! - Comments

HTML? No, but scripting? Yes

maco — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 19:02:43 -0500

HTML might not be programming, but if you're actually scripting the site in PHP, Perl, or Python, that definitely is programming.

If you want an analogy...

starsword — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 16:53:13 -0600

If they insist on using the dress analogy, it's more like this: You've designed your own gown. You saved up and bought the material and stayed up late for weeks sewing it. You hand-stitched every individual pearl. You know you're unique, one-of-a-kind. But when you show up for the party, you discover that the girl down the block walked by your window one day and saw you working. She then proceeded to drive into town and have someone else sew her an identical dress. She put no effort into it, either creatively or in terms of time and hard work...but no one can tell the difference between you.

Maybe coding web pages isn't "real" programming, but I learned HTML and basic Javascript when I was 13. I then went on to teach a (male) friend, who now owns his own web programming business and is doing quite well for himself. He would certainly be in the "tech" section of the paper. I hate to think I'd have ended up thrown in with fashion, which I wouldn't be caught dead reading anyway.

Exactly

Denise — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 13:11:49 -0600

Wearing the same dress is dismissive. You wouldn't see an article about boy game creators or script builders that said guys get mad when people are wearing their jeans, would you?

~Denise
BlogHer Community Manager

Flamingo House Happenings

I stand corrected!

Liz Rizzo — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 13:00:33 -0600

But comparing it to "wearing the same dress" makes it sound really girly and dismissive; whereas "people stealing your stuff without giving credit" sounds more thoughtful, and is gender-neutral. (Which I get is not the point of the article. Sigh.)

Liz Rizzo

I blog at Everyday Goddess.

As the mom of a teen who creates graphics

Denise — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 09:05:14 -0600

It's a combination of wearing the same dress and of wearing the same dress and not giving credit.

I have never heard Michelle complain about someone stealing her bandwidth. She's always had enough bandwidth that this has not been a problem for her. She has often ranted and raved about people stealing her stuff - ie not asking first and not giving credit.

She's sort of outgrown the ranting, mostly because she's not as involved with the whole "layouts" crowd as much - she's too busy with other things.

~Denise
BlogHer Community Manager

Flamingo House Happenings

The NYT reporter should have talked to someone at NSF

Kim Pearson — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 20:52:45 -0600

The research shows that using technologies that allow students to tell stories is an effective way of getting girls, especially, into computing. It also appeals to boys with learning differences, while we're at it. There are programming languages such as storytelling Alice and Scratch that have been created specifically to take advantage of this finding. It's also part of the reason that my colleagues and I were awarded a grant to introduce middle-schoolers to computer science using interactive journalism.

No, scripting web pages is not programming, but it's a great gateway drug, especially for girls.

Kim
BlogHer Contributing Editor|Professor Kim|

bandwidth and

Virginia DeBolt — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 19:17:02 -0600

intellectual property rights. That's stealing your web hosting costs and stealing your creative product. I agree. It isn't about look-alike fashion in the least.

http://www.webteacher.ws/
http://first50.wordpress.com/

Not wanting people to steal your bandwidth...

Liz Rizzo — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:19:05 -0600

I was surprised no one jumped on this little gem:

"That desire is never so evident as when girls criticize online copycats who essentially steal their Web page backgrounds and graphics by hotlinking (linking to someone else’s image so it appears on one’s own Web page). Aside from depleting bandwidth, it is the digital equivalent of arriving at a party wearing the same dress as another girl, Professor Palfrey said."

I'm not sure I really believe that someone ticked about hotlinking isn't mostly pissed about THE BANDWIDTH. That's been a known problem for years now, and I have never once thought of it in terms of someone wearing the same dress as me.

Are they serious?

Liz Rizzo

I blog at Everyday Goddess.

What articles?

KellyMac — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 15:11:21 -0600

I don't recall seeing too many articles about male bloggers. It seems the men aren't getting accolades for blogging OR the tech stuff.

If that's true,

Virginia DeBolt — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 13:03:48 -0600

then why aren't articles about male bloggers in the Fashion & Style section? They don't have any "technical computer skills" either.

http://www.webteacher.ws/
http://first50.wordpress.com/

It Isn't Tech, Either

KellyMac — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 09:40:48 -0600

Agreed it shouldn't go into the Style and Fashion section. But posting blogs and making pages on myspace and facebook hardly qualify as technical computer skills.

Agree

Kaddi — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 10:05:27 -0600

This article does not belong in the Fashion and Style section, there is no doubt.

I agree with the article though too, designing web content is not the same arena as computer engineering. And as I'm a recent graduate of this field, I would love to see more women there.

And here I was thinking...

Skye — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 16:00:27 -0600

that these girls could probably make some decent money with the design skills they're developing. But apparently that's not good enough, they have to become software engineers or it's not worth a damn.
__

Flooded Lizard Kingdom
Heroine Content

There's Just Nothing Cuter Than A Girl Who Can Write Code

Megan Smith — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 14:28:16 -0600

Was there no one sitting around at the New York Times that said, hey, maybe this article should go in the Tech Section? No woman? No man? No robot?

Obviously not.

I'd love to know their excuse for putting an otherwise interesting article where they did: "Well, we all know gals don't read the Tech Section, so we put it in the only section they do read." Or, "The Tech Section had too many important articles about real computer issues." Or "Our advertisers insisted.

What a bunch of bone heads.

Megan
BlogHer Contributing Editor, TV/YouTube

Megan's Minute
Video Runway

"surprisingly pretty"

missbritt — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 12:36:58 -0600

In what world is calling an intelligent, accomplished woman "surprisingly pretty" supposed to be a form of flattery??

Miss Britt
http://www.miss-britt.com

New York Times to Geek Girls. Get thee to the Fashion and Style Pages!

Virginia DeBolt — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 08:43:20 -0600

An article with the hopeful title Geek Chic: Not Just For Guys–Sorry, Boys, This Is Our Domain in The New York Times this week got my attention. I clicked through to read the story and was amazed to discover that this article about girls who blog was in the Fashion and Style section.

The NYTimes quoted a Pew report from last December, saying,

Pew Internet & American Life Project found that among Web users ages 12 to 17, significantly more girls than boys blog (35 percent of girls compared with 20 percent of boys) and create or work on their own Web pages (32 percent of girls compared with 22 percent of boys).

Girls also eclipse boys when it comes to building or working on Web sites for other people and creating profiles on social networking sites (70 percent of girls 15 to 17 have one, versus 57 percent of boys 15 to 17). Video posting was the sole area in which boys outdid girls: boys are almost twice as likely as girls to post video files.

That sounds like big news in the Fashion and Style world to me. What do you think? Yeah, here's some fashion news for you. Martina Butler, 17, of San Francisco, was the first teenage podcaster to snag a big corporate sponsor. Her Emo Girl Talk, an indie music podcast brings in the bucks.

Then there's Nicole Dominguez, 13, of Miramar, Fla. Nicole likes to design icons, layouts, animations and web pages. How very stylish and chic and cute of her.

OK, enough already with the sarcasm. The New York Times is a serious mainstream news organization and they would never demean the female gender or a physics instructor's age by reporting a story from an unsupportably biased viewpoint.

Mary Hodder at napstirization.org commented in The NY Times on Girl Geeks: They are Fashion, Not Technology that

Sorry, Boys, This Is Our Domain talks about how girls are coding up more content online: webpages, web art, blogs and podcasts.

And then they decorate it with an image of a girl at her laptop with a devilish tail. But instead of asking one of the girls they interviewed to make the artwork, they ask Adam Strange to do the art for the article:

So when they interview people like Doc Searls, Loic Le Meur or David Weinberger, all of whom are very smart about tech, those articles are in the tech section or business, but when they talk to girls, who for the record, are far more technical in this article than these three tech experts, girls are put in Fashion. I've never seen coverage with Doc or David or Loic in fashion. Maybe they should be there depending, but they aren't put there by the editors that I know of....

This is not about David or Loic or Doc (all extremely supportive of women in tech, btw), and certainly they don't choose the section the paper puts them in, but rather the way the editors and writers at the NYTimes see them, verses the girl geeks in this article.

My point is that the NYTimes puts men who talk tech and trends or social impact in tech/biz, and women who code web art / pages in fashion.

Elisa at Worker Bees Blog picked up on this story too. In her article Geek Girls are sooo cute and fashionable!!! Squeeeee! she gets right to it:

Check this NY Times article on Girl Geeks. It seems to be touting the fact that girls are outpacing boys at using and creating content on the web. There's a gender gap in blogging and other social networking and media...and it's widening. Cool, right?

Except I direct you to the top of the article, to the place where you'll note the section of the newspaper in which this appeared.

Fashion & style.

Because geek girls are so cute aren't they?

When they code CSS or html they make all their fonts pink, don't they?

I loved this sentence:

"It is possible that the girls who produce glitters today will develop an interest in the rigorous science behind computing, but some scholars are reluctant to draw that conclusion."

"Glitters"? "Rigorous science behind computing"?

'Cause the guys who are code jockeys are all into the "rigorous science"?

Laura at GeekyMom says in Girls rule–sort of that

I also am struck by how the activities that girls do participate in is almost immediately devalued. Their activities are only good, the article seems to imply at times, if it leads to harder science. It'll be interesting to see where we are in about 15-20 years when these teenage girls start choosing careers.

Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast with her post Around the Blogroll and Elsewhere got a bit irritated with a male interpretation of the NYTimes article.

Kevin Hayden on yesterday's New York Times article revealing that teenaged girls outnumber their male counterparts in the creation of web content. Kevin (rather snottily, in my opinion), makes the point that "Content creation is a whole different animal than the nuts and bolts of code crunching at the heart of the computer industry", which is sort of like saying that working on cars is too dirty and complicated for girls to do, but then also makes the point that if content creation is different, women shouldn't be as underrepresented in the design, writing, and related fields as they are either. The larger point, if we extrapolate outside the teen age group, is that many companies still believe that code jockeying and content creation are part of the same skill set, and that's why you see jobs posted that want advanced Photoshop skills AND 2-3 years of C#, ASP.Net, and Java programming (and some even throw in network administration in the bargain, but those are jobs clearly designed to NOT find qualified American workers). The larger question, of course, is that the whole issue of Web code vs. content is yet another example of the stuff men do better being ranked higher than that at which women excel, because it's men who do the relative ranking of skills. If you've ever tried to navigate a web site put together by someone more concerned with code than content, you know how undervalued a flair for user interface is.

Another male blogger reported that Girls Rule. Boys Drool, which sounds like a sexist headline, but he actually means that boys are so behind in this area that they are still slobbering in their bibs.

But as Laura at rarepattern reported a while back, Geeks not immune to cheesecake (or cheese):

Gina at misbehaving points to the Geek Gorgeous calendar, featuring rather cheesy shots of young women who, we're assured, are true computer geeks.

The little model bios are quite funny in this context--

Lilac, who started working as a programmer at age 16, is now a senior software engineer with an acronym-rich skill-set that includes Java, J2EE, EJB, JSP, JMS, PHP, ASP, ADO, SQL, XML, UML, J2ME, MIDP and more.

Not quite what you'd see on the flip of a Playboy centerfold.

Now that you've gone and looked, I'll say I join Gina in disappointment over the photography and art direction. It could've been so cool, soooo geeky! But while they obviously put some work into this production, the result isn't just cheesecake -- it's cheesy.

Girls and women DO write. Girls do write code. Whether it's a blog, a newspaper article, a web site, or a book, there are plenty of females putting fingers to keys. Perhaps the NYTimes needs a reminder as to how to approach the topic of women in tech from a positive point of view. Perhaps my own article about My Web Design Author's Dream Team or the O'Reilly series on Women in Technology: Hear Us Roar could give them a clue. Here's another clue: a model geek is not the same thing as a cheesecake model.