you're fired.

You're fired.

(U r fired)

Is the sudden, unexpected pregnancy of current female soldiers an issue? Is the rate of female soldier pregnancy higher or lower than the current rate of unexpected injury among male soldiers?

In my experience most female military members are A.) lesbians and B.) no longer menstruating anyway because of the intense physical training they have to maintain.

The military doesn't issue pregnancies, they have to bring their own.

The same with self inflicted wounds. The soldier owns it, and must suffer the consequences of it preventing them to do the job.

I have a feeling the chicks who would go in for SF would be like the women of a century ago who pooted out the kid in the middle of the rice paddy or wheat field, sat out for a while, had some water and then went on about their job harvesting

True, but that 6 months beforehand would slow them up. ;)

Won't someone think of the critters. What will happen to them if soldiers have to start carrying field delivered babies in their packs?

Attachment 54386

More warm fuzzy feeling photos

Yana Gallen, at Northwestern University, has written a paper summing up a study of gender gap in Danish employment. They found women are paid 16% less and are 12% less productive, but have unable to pin down the other 4% other than bias.

One important point, at least to me, was childless women were equally productive with men. I doubt that productivity loss stemmed from showing cow orkers pictures of their kids. Even in a family friendly utopia like Denmark, it's more likely exhaustion and stress, ongoing and accumulative. Days off and holidays bring no respite, just additional pressures, expected duties, and self-recrimination for not living up to the June Cleaver model.

The paper can be downloaded as a pdf at the link above.

Interesting, thanks Bruce.

Sometimes, organisations really try to do something positive but trip themselves up by not truly understanding the nature of the problem. IBM has been trying to encourage greater female participation in STEM fields. They came up with this gem of a campaign. It's laudable that they are trying, but they clearly are missing huge chunks of the point. I read the article and I was just trying to imagine the strategy meetings for this campaign. I'd love to be a fly on the wall for some of this stuff.

Yep - because obviously, in order to make science and engineering attractive to women, it must first be translated into something they can relate to: haircare and beauty. On the same spectrum as the makers of science kits for kids who market kits to boys that have them creating model volcanoes and kits to girls that have them exploring the science of perfumes and bubblebath.


Women already in STEM fields were not impressed and took to Twitter. Some of the tweets are great.

@reubenacciano tweeted: @Stephevs43 says: These two made me laugh:

@minxdragon: @joalabastar posted a picture of a folded towel with this comment: But my favourite came from the London Fire Brigade. It's nice to know they're keeping an eye on things:

Read the rest here:

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

Good on IBM for trying. Good on them for their swift response. Please do better next time - it does matter. Stop focusing on changing the content to make it relatable for women and start making tech fields more welcoming of women in a way that doesn't make them feel like someone on an exchange trip from Venus.

"Hack a Heat Gun". In small print - if you don't have a heat gun, you can use a regular household hair dryer.

I especially agree with the London Fire Brigade, though. Using a hair dryer (or heat gun) in an unusual manner might cut off ventilation, or concentrate heat for too long on something that isn't designed for it. And, even more, when I think "hack" I think "open up and take apart", and that gives you exposed AC and heating elements.

Note: I have, in fact, disassembled a hair dryer, though I forget what it was for. And I do have a heat gun.

The outrage is now very nearly self-feeding. In the near future we won't need the original campaign.

ETA. In the near future, we won't HAVE the original campaign. Companies will realize that, whatever they do and whatever they say, it will be wildly re-interpreted and then the re-interpretation wildly broadcast over all social media. Therefore they will not do anything at all. Women in STEM? Too controversial. Our official company policy is nothing. Way to go.

I agree, you can't say anything without offending someone, especially on the net where trolls are gleaning everything for something to pounce on.
I can envision them trying to come up with a campaign to persuade teen girls the sciences are cool, and trying to think of something mechanical/electrical most girls would be familiar/comfortable enough with to start envisioning other uses. The chick snapping she was too busy coding obviously was not the target, and foolish to think all girls are on her path.

What would you call it, constraints of the mother? These are the options my mother and her mother had so they must be mine. I guess this is where family encouragement works best, but if nobody in the family has broken out of the box, that's not likely to happen. World war II was the turning point for working women, maybe we need another world war. :haha:

Well, that's one way of looking at it. On the other hand, maybe the major companies might start taking on board that when they do this stuff they need to be particularly thoughtful and careful. Is it really such a reach to suggest that maybe the 'girls like hairdressing and fashion so lets get them into science by making it about that' approach might be a bit of an own goal? This stuff been talked about ad nauseum in recent years, for example through the 'Let toys be toys' and 'let books be books' campaings, where science and tech toys in particular were a focus for concern.

It isn't like this stuff is not being talked about. Did nobody in those strategy meetings consider that wider discourse?

As I said, I think it's a really good thing that IBM wants to encourage girls to take up STEM subjects. But actually, what is needed is an approach that reaches children and draws them in and then doesn't put constant cultural and systemic roadblocks in the way of one gender.

Girls are studying STEM subjects in greater numbers than ever. The problem is that it doesn't translate to large numbers of women working in STEM fields, or women progressing to management and leadership in anything like equal numbers to men within those fields.

Look at a bunch of young children being taught about scientific concepts or engaging in physical experiments to learn about the world around them and you'll see no real difference in interest between girls and boys. Somewhere between those early explorations and work in the field the girls drop away. Even where a cohort has taken on higher study in large numbers, between that and Silicon valley, again the girls drop away.

It's the context that needs dealing with, not the content. What puts girls off STEM? All sorts of things, but cultural assumptions that girls naturally have a different set of interests to boys and that science and technology are primarily male, play a part. This campaign attempts to tackle the latter of those, whilst reinforcing the former.

What, in my opinion, would make for a much stronger approach would be to start breaking down those barriers between boys and girls. Because, actually, though we particularly want to encourage girls in order for them to make up a more equal proportion of those going into STEM - we also still need to encourage more boys to go into those fields. Rather than target it at girls, maybe target it at young people in a way that includes girls and boys equally. Or if you're going to particularly target girls, consider the varied interests and proclivities of the girls you're trying to reach.

As a one-off campaign, taken in isolation it's not such a big deal. In the real world, where it does not exist in a vacuum but as part of an ongoing cultural discourse it is. If the leaders of the STEM fields tried to bring more boys into their ranks and the only way they could ever think to reach them was through football, and if every book designed to reach out to boys, and every promotion attempting to draw boys into any subject automatically assumed they were football mad - they'd alienate almost as many boys as they drew in, probably more. If every industry and every field that ever wanted to bring in more boys always focussed on football. It would be ridiculous and reductive.

Is it true lots of girls like hair and make-up? Yep. So, is the way to reach girls through hair and make-up? No. Because girls, even girls who like looking pretty, have more than one interest in their lives. And lots of girls, aren't actually that interested in hair and beauty. It might be a factor in their lives - but it sits there with a bunch of other stuff. Some of which, quite remarkably, crosses over with the boys's interests.

There are lots of ways to reach girls that don't set them into a cultural and emotional silo from boys, subtly reinforcing the notion that girls are essentially different and that their lives revolve around their attractiveness.

It's no good having an overt message of inclusivity and welcome if the subtext reinforces the barriers you're trying to break down.

An additional thought:

I wonder, what it was that drew in the women already working in STEM. What was it about physics, or engineering, or coding that got them so interested as girls? What was it about their learning environment that made them feel that was open to them, despite the barriers that companies like IBM are now trying to address?

Maybe IBM could consult with them. Find out what got them interested in science and technology and what made them as girls follow that path. That might inform a useful campaign. Unless, of course, were suggesting that those women were unlike other girls, because they were interested in science and technology.

More research into why girls drop away might also be useful. Much of the research that has been done has looked at the jump between junior and senior as a natural drop-off point around puberty. That's useful - and the sudden importance of gender during puberty is likely to be a factor - with girls becoming far more focused on expressing their femininity than they would have been before puberty, the idea of 'boys' subjects and 'girls' subjects is likely to gain additional weight for some. But that doesn't have to become the trap that it is at the moment. If we demasculinise science then it should become less of an issue for young people focused on establishing their gender roles and identities.

But there are other drop off points throughout that are more problematic. When kids reach that age there's a drop off from STEM across the board. As soon as subjects become optional and it becomes possible to specialise people drop away, girls and boys. It's uneven at the moment, but that's changing. The drop off rate becomes more uneven as you progress through the higher levels of education and into industry. So, what is happening to those girls who were interested in those subjects, and who saw the value of scientific curiosity and then dropped away?

You won't get more girls by focussing on beauty products. There's a small chance you might get a different group of girls - but I very much doubt that a girl with no interest in scientific subjects, or engineering will change her mind because someone showed her how to hack a hairdryer. The girl who will be interested in hacking a hair dryer, was probably already into science and tech, rather than already being into harirdryers.

Just too subtle. Can't be subtle.

Well maybe there will be more women in STEM now that they've been all over-dramatic, humorless, and strident about it is presented.

That's the very stereotype of the feminist movement for 50 years but hey. Good luck with that! Me, I'm off to my job. It involves STEM.

The very idea that we need to "do something" for, or to, or about girls actually perpetuates the lowered expectations.

What I think needs to happen--and I know I'm basically alone in this--is we need to encourage boys into teaching, nursing, etc. It's not "boys' jobs are automatically better, let's raise the girls to their standard," rather it's "all jobs are legitimate, make the boys (and everyone else) stop shitting on the jobs that have been traditionally done by women." At the same time, greater participation in these fields from men would drain off some of the questionable-to-downright-bad STEM guys, leaving more openings and demand for the talented STEM gals.

I originally picked my career because it involves working with machines instead of people. Nursing and teaching, I hear they require you to interact with others.

It's not about being too subtle, it's about always falling into the same conceptual traps whenever male-dominated industries attempt to reach out to women.

I don't see they were over-dramatic. They posted mainly humourous and snarky comments about something that pissed them off a little : the same thing that has probably been pissing most of them off for many years - the constant assumption that female = interested primarily in beauty and fashion. They are the women at the coalface - they are the ones who've gone through a university education that was until quite recently unwelcoming of women (I've read about young women being catcalled by primarily male audiences whilst giving academic papers, or technical presentations, for example) and work in fields which still often favour their male colleagues as the 'serious' option for hiring, and routinely expect different things from women (such as offering different remuneration, funding levels and mentoring to a 'male' candidate than to a 'female' candidate when presented with identical resumes and research profiles).

When you look at some of the experiences of women in STEM fields, in which they are often assumed by visitors to be less senior than they are, and subject to comments about their looks and constant reminders by some male colleagues that they are different - the lazy stereotyping of women as primarily intrigued by matters relating to beauty and fashion might a) feel a little too on point and b) resonate with them as people who have far more insight into what might get girls and women interested in those subjects.

The campaign was a laudable attempt at redressing some of the imbalances but it was clumsy, inept and inadvertently feeding into, because it is informed by, the very stereotypes that are causing the problem in the first place.

Lots of people go on twitter to raise an issue, trend a hashtag, mock ineptness, have a laugh, or express frustration. You are dismissing these women as shrill and humourless, because they didn't just suck up the almost ubiquitous insults to women that underlie the tone of many of these campaigns, and give the company gold stars for a good effort. Because the tweets listed in that article are pretty good humoured for the most part. They are mainly jokes, a little snarky, but not particularly aggressive or nasty. As has become the norm, these days, the way to protest or disagree, or send a message is to make a funny tweet. There are some really fiery twitter storms - and this is not one of them. But hey - they are women rejecting and commenting on a misguided and not nearly well-enough researched campaign which yet again relies on the same old stereotypes - so obviously they are shrill and humourless.

Damn women eh? Keep shooting themselves in the foot by not accepting whatever progress gets thrown down from the top table without question. Keep undermining their cause by not smiling and saying thankyou and being generally gracious.


IBM are a big company. Campaigns like that go through many stages of design and approval. Is it too much to ask for someone in that chain to say - hey....you know what....this might actually play into the same lazy stereotypes about girls and science that has been so talked about lately, is it worth us maybe consulting with women in the industry to see what they think?

The best nurse I encountered when my FIL was in and out of the hospital a year ago was a dude. He was so compassionate. That guy rocked.

Oh, and teachers? No way would I ever be a teacher. That job is way too demanding. I don't have what it takes. My wife comes home every day, and the stories she tells. I wouldn't survive an hour.

I very much agree with this. I do think there needs to be a concerted effort to make STEM areas more conducive to female participation - but that's not about making science and tech more interesting for girls, it's about making the fields in which those things are studied less unwelcoming of them, by degendering them. Not by reinforcing gender stereotypes.

But the reason I want that to happen, isn't because science and tech jobs are better, or that male dominated industries are more important - even though they are remunerated and treated as such. It's because girls are just as able to follow those paths and just as likely to want to if the barriers are removed. It's great for the girls because they get to fulfil their potential without being streamed off in childhood to something that is simply considered more appropriate to their gender. And it is good for society, because it means we have a much wider pool of potential talent to draw from.

Absolutely the same thing applies to nursing, teaching and caring. It is fucking surreal that we as a society consider those jobs as somehow a lesser career choice, and that they pay so much less. Purely because they are fields that involve attributes we consider primarily female. When a job type changes from being considered mainly male, to mainly female, it drops down in respect and reward. Secretarial work is a classic example of that, as is teaching.

How many potentially awesome nurses and carers do we lose because boys get discouraged, directly or indirectly, from entering those fields. The further down the age scale you move, the more female dominated teaching becomes (though not, it has to be said when it comes to head teachers/principles and management). It is rewarded more as you move up into deeper subject teaching with older children - because teachers of young children get kind of dismissed a little as child carers - which is bizarre really. First - child caring is fucking hard work and requires a lot of mental agility, and second, teaching small children who aren't yours is not the same as babysitting - it requires years of training and learning about how to teach and manage a classroom, the psychology of learning and a host of other highly specialist skills and knowledge.

So we get a double-bind. Femaleness is once again the factor that devalues - and it sets the scene for further devaluation and segregation - whilst at the same time robbing boys of some of their opportunities to reach their potential and find success and fulfilment.

I couldn't teach children. It's my idea of hell. Young people, cool. I'll teach university students with delight. But kids? No.

I've known some awesome male nurses and carers. And I have knownguys working unfulfilling sales jobs that would probably have made fantastic nurses had that ever been presented to them as something other than an oddity when they were growing up.

You don't break down barriers by erecting a smaller fence made of the same wood.

I got drawn back into this discussion, but I actually came in to post something else :P

Because then there are the times that I just think, oh ffs, get a grip. The IBM campaign was an own goal, because it was clumsy and could easily have been done so much better. A major player - one of THE major players in tech and they couldn't be bothered to get it right on a campaign for something they apparently consider very important.

And then there's this - where really, you have to ask, are they damned if they do and damned if they don't?

We just had the 'how many female characters are on the screen and how many good female roles are available in comparison to men' debate - indeed it is currently raging. One of the key players in big budget hollywood movie making tries to do something about that and seems to actually, largely, get the point and this is the response:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentis...ioned-nonsense



No, it isn't. And no, that's not what he said. A male film-maker decides that, in an iconic sci-film film franchise, with a large cast of characters who have traditionally tended to be mostly male, having some of them be female, and those female characters not be gold bikin-clad, decorative rescue objectives, might make the film more appealing and enjoyable for female fans and allow that franchise to possibly occupy a similar cultural role amongst mothers and daughters as it has previously occupied for fathers and sons - and gets roasted.

Nowhere did he say, or even imply, that women only watch films with female characters. He did recognise the extreme imbalance, not just in the number of female to male characters, but in the level of agency those characters are given, and in how they are presented, that has always existed in the Star Wars franchise. There were always girls and women who liked Star Wars - and girls and women have always read/watched fiction with male protagonists and mainly male casts of characters - because otherwise we'd have about 30% of current fictional output to choose from. But actually - it is kind of nice to watch a movie, or read a book and have some good male and good female characters. It does get a bit wearisome, as a sci-fi fan, when all the good characters are guys and you can count the interesting female characters on one hand.

A film with a small and tight cast of characters that is all or mostly male, doesn't bother me - why would it? I get just as into that - I'm just as happy to associate into a male character as I am a female character, if it's well-rounded and engaging. But a film or show with a large cast of characters, unless it is set in the army or a male prison or something, that doesn't have some interesting and active female characters feels off. And if the female characters that are included just seem there for ornamentation or mission objective, or are always declawed or made powerless, undercut in some way, no matter how kick ass they seem to be, that gets a little stale.

I was into Star Wars as a little girl. We all were - kids, I mean. When it first came out, it wasn't a boy's film, it was a family adventure film. I went to see it with my mum, dad and big brother. My best friend, David, had all the models. Millenium Falcon and everything. Our little gang used to play Star Wars. I used to get really pissed off, because I always had to be Princess Leia. Because she was the only real female character, and whilst, at times I could be a boy, if we were playing army, for instance, none of the boys could be Princess Leia, because she was a girl. And as Leia, I mainly got rescued. I got to dance about doing toy fighting, but it always ended up with me waiting to be rescued. David was a bit of a stickler for the plot of Star Wars.

And that's my roundabout way of saying that I appreciate the effort with this new Star Wars, to do something a little better and have female characters who are relatable and exciting for the little girls who see it and play it with their friends.

THIS Clodfobble nails it once again.

Each individual should be considered on their own merits and talents relative to the task.

I like Danas comment about unfulfilled sales guys, similar thing in reverse

Big assumption that was IBM's strategy.
They were not the target of the campaign.
How about stop changing the content because of criticism from a few . There's no way to make everyone happy.
Hmm... affirmative action. Sure, nobody could criticize that.

How does a heat gun, even when a hair dryer is suggested as an alternative, become a campaign based on "hair care and beauty"? That's a stretch, even for nitpickers.

I'd bet a lot of money the answer would be "I don't know", or more likely there was one person in their youth, Dad, older brother, teacher, Mr Wizard next door, who was always messing with stuff and took the time to explain what/why they were doing. That sparked her interest in science and wanting to emulate people she admired. Whatever, I'm 99% sure it was a person, not a corporate campaign.
Peer pressure, wanting to fit in by having the same mindset and goals as the popular girls?
HEAT GUN, it's the critics who have twisted this into hairdryers and beauty.
OK, do you think the women in the PR department have any technical/mechanical background, and could suggest a better idea than a heat gun, or would object the adding the hairdryer footnote when somebody said kids aren't likely to have a heat gun even if they know what it is?

I know you're fully aware of the problems. I also know most women agree with some part of it, and others are happy with their life and don't get it at all. Think of the Republican women who have stated women shouldn't hold public office. IBM's campaign targeted a specific group, maybe too broad, maybe to narrow, I don't know. But I do know that if they get shit every time they try to do something good, they'll stop completely.

The heat gun was me, not IBM. I was suggesting a less haircare-oriented approach they could have taken.

No, they were not. But, they may have some insight into the issue at hand.

It's this all over again:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/...b08e945ff004c9

OK, thanks. That means nobody in PR thought it was sexist or hair care and beauty related.

Thanks for pointing that out. I had intended to respond to your post, because I thought it was excellent, but then I got distracted with other posts.

Why do companies/corporations so routinely get the tone wrong? With all of this stuff such a big part of cultural discourse right now, how did nobody at IBM think to query this? How was this not picked up? It's fucking obvious.

I do agree that it's unfortunate that their efforts have ended up with a backlash. It's a shame. But - sometimes, it isn't enough just to try, you actually need to get it right.

Now, I don't know, because I am not privy to how they came up with this campaign, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the main creative input into the specifics of what that advert would look like, were male. I also wonder, as many of the articles have, how many of the 25% of IBM management that are women had sight of the drawing boards and scripts before they made them.

Cause it's not fucking obvious.

Almost anything has the potential for an outrageous take that seems obvious after the fact. To see it before the outrage is much more difficult. Like the hidden arrow in the Fedex logo, you can not notice it for 20 years; and then, once it's pointed out, you can't NOT see it.

I expect women helped to design this program. It's likely a woman thought of it. (IBM is a STEM company so the all chicks work in Marketing. :b ) "Did they think to run it past" of course they ran it past. Yeah, they did. It's a corporation, every single thing is vetted nine different ways. A place like that, you can't take a shit without getting a buck slip signed by two vice-presidents.

And if the question came up during vetting: is using hair dryers sexist? One would only have had to ask at the conference room table: who here uses a hair dryer? And 90% of the women would raise their hands, and 0% of the men.

And there would be jokes made around it, because half the men would be balding, and could not possibly use a hair dryer ever. And so hair dryers, anyone would conclude, are merely a simple tool that women in particular use, most of them every single day.

While 90% of the women are drying their hair every morning, are they thinking "this is a terribly sexist thing I'm doing"?

I miss the 70s. ;)

Ok. I take it back. Apparently, it is not obvious that attempting to make science more female friendly by showing them all the fun things girls can do with a hairdryer might be perpetuating the cultural link between girls and beauty and the idea that science needs to be made more girly, for girls to get it.

So much has been wrong for so long, it's easy to agree with comments that ring even possibly true. The people who are negative about everything attempted, should come up with a better way, like you suggested, and with enough online push and chatter the corporations will listen. Unfortunately there will still be some habitually negative people who will pick those ideas apart so you need numbers to fight them.

Fight them is a negative term, how about show the majority are rational.

Lots of people, particularly, but not exclusively, women, have been telling the STEM industries what the problems might be and how they might be addressed, for quite a long time now. There are some really good initiatives reaching kids in schools and colleges, and they might be part of why female participation in science and tech subjects, past the primary education age, and into later study has grown substantially. There's a lot of really solid research and case study work to draw from.

It is not that people haven't been offering better ideas. It is that the STEM industry giants have only listened with one ear. They've heard and understood that women actually should be, for a more equal society, but more importantly for better industry, more equally present in their fields. They clearly want to do something about it. IBM has made progress in terms of women in management that really matters. But - they're not prepared to listen to the rest of it. 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.

Here's an example of an alternative approach focused on school age children, on sparking the desire for scientific exploration and a sense of the possible. Note that the way they show and encourage girls into STEM subjects is by encouraging a bunch of kids of both genders to explore science and technology. Degendering, rather than regendering.

http://www.girlsintostem.co.uk/

So what's the answer? How do you get girls to be interested in STEM jobs? How do you get boys to be interested in teaching and nursing?

I've personally tried to involve my daughter in the tinkering activities I do, and she will respond in order to spend a little time with me, but as we get into whatever the project is, she wanders off to go read a book. Maybe I'm doing or saying something unconsciously that turns her away, or maybe she just has no interest in this stuff. And my boy is the opposite. He starts and finished his own projects without me. He devours this stuff.

It's a small sample size, but something is grabbing his attention and not hers.

That's right, glatt, you're children are suffering your shortcomings. :lol2:
Isn't that every decent parent's nightmare, true or not, because there's no way to know if you're doing the right thing for that particular child. I've heard parents say they think they did good and the kids OK, if he/she reflects some of the parents values. Is that raising clones instead of free thinking humans? Is having free thinking children worth the anguish? :haha:

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.

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.

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.

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.

It is changing I think, slowly but I think it is gathering pace. The idea of nursing as a credible and respectable career for young men to go into is becoming much more culturally accepted than it once was. I quite often see male nurses in tv shows now where they were kind of a novelty thing at one time.

The generation coming of age now seem to have a much more fluid interpretation of gender than ours in many ways. When I see my nieces and their friends together, and the way they talk about stuff just seems a lot less hung up on gender and notions of 'girl's stuff' and 'boy's stuff'. The boys seem way more comfortable and confident in talking about emotional matters than the boys of my youth, and the girls don't seem to consider that there may be any barriers in the way of them doing anything. Amelia is one of only a few girls in her cohort for her subject at university, and generally ends up in mostly male projects and she hasn't experienced any of that exclusionary behaviour that dogged a lot of the girls who went into male fields of study a few years ago (and I have heard tales of that still going on in a few areas) - the lads weren't remotely phased by having a girl in their group and just got on with working together and being friends.

These kids have grown up in an education system that really tried, consciously, to off-set some of the messages kids were being given about what was or was not for girls or boys. Hopefully, they mark the next leaps forward.

Some of the divisions are so arbitrary and ridiculous. The idea of a male nurse has only recently lost its novelty value in popular culture - yet that same popular culture assumes a paramedic is likely to be male.

It would be so nice if we could just draw and recruit the best carers and nurses and technicians and scientists from a pool of 100% of the population. Instead of shutting out, accidentally or deliberately, huge numbers of potential recruits just because we're hanging on to a narrow and reductive view of gender. Which is pretty much what Clod was saying.

I think much of the boys should, girls should, comes from parents, my little princess, my rugged lad. The manufacturers of toys and shit are playing to what has proven to sell, and kids don't buy toys, adults buy toys that fit the stereotypes they grew up with.

The original IBM ad would be of interest to see if it came from in house, or an agency. From an agency would probably get more rubber stamps and less eyeballs.

When I was friends with student nurses - we all worked together in a pub - there was one male nurse across the whole year.

I've just been discharged from hospital, and although the female nurses FAR outnumbered the men, within a week on one ward I had three male nurses. All younger than me, all obviously at the beginning of their careers, but I was heartened all the same. And given that the ward was mixed gastro-intestinal, albeit each individual section was gender separated, I think some of the male patients would have been pleased about this. When I walked to the Day Room I saw patients aged 20-70 (guessing). The older gents may have expected female nurses, and even been more comfortable with them. But the younger ones may have appreciated a bit of banter with their blood pressure cuffs and anal swabs.

Personally I didn't care. The only nurse I didn't like was the very brusque female senior nurse (female) who came back from two days loff and said, "Oh, you're still here then."

When I was young my peer group, which included several nurses, a dentist, and an anesthesiologist, assumed any male nurse was queer. A lot of guys were drafted right out of high school during the Vietnam War, and most had no trade when they got out. Consequentially the ones who became medics, and there were a ton of them, came out with something they could pursue, nursing. Then it became more common to see male nurses in hospitals, although schools, clinics, and doctor's offices are primarily still female domain.

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

Even before that:

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:

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.

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

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. :yeldead:

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.

How hard did you look?

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:

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.

The campaign was launched on October 2. At some point in October it was cancelled. That video was down before Google's cache of the page on December 1. So.

search Google News for "Hack a hair dryer". You get thousands of outrage take results.

Use Google's search tools to restrict your search to October.

This is the period during when the campaign was launched, and the outrage machine is not visible. There are no criticisms of the campaign. The first search result is a Vimeo page of - I did a little digging - the Art Director for the Hack A Hair Dryer campaign! The video is gone, but the cached search result includes the tag:

"The concept: take a hairdryer – something typically viewed for beautifying purposes – and make it gender-neutral..."

Here is the idea that made it through corporate. The original campaign actually INCLUDED the outrage take!

The first result not from IBM is a reaction to the campaign from the blog: "Tech Savvy Women". Their blog entry is still live and so you can see how women in tech reacted, when the outrage take hadn't launched:

It would appear that the outrage engine geared up on December 7. (That's when it arrived here.) And the BBC story HM linked to points that out:

The campaign's take "make it gender-neutral" was nuanced, a little complex. That's why an appealing, simpler take could outweigh it. Original campaign: 3,633 views. Outrage engine: tens of thousands of news stories. Each story designed to tweak your outrage, and attract your attention, clicks, and shares.

But eventually we will not need the original campaign.

And one more thing... I'm actually sorry for getting geared up over this, it's just that I find it to be utterly fascinating!

It is fascinating. I didn't think you were getting 'geared up' it just seemed like robust debate to me. I've really enjoyed the discussion - it's been some nice back and forth, and I learned a lot from it.

I googled "IBM hair dryer".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.

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

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.

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 :lol:

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

Dilbert creator's Scott Adams's words inserted into his comic:

http://mradilbert.tumblr.com/