Gender
Teen girls are breaking the online mold for women.
(Detrie)
Female Gamer/Gaming Articles
- Female Gamers On The Rise
New report says girls and women make up 28% of all U.S. videogame players. Read more...
(from Forbes.com - poster by Reshan)
- This IT girl's got game: Kendra Taylor, PMS Clan leader and systems engineer
The PMS Clan, a video game group for women, may sound a tad ominous, but it's successfully capturing the hearts of numerous women gamers around the world. There are quite a few female video game groups that have formed in the past several years, but the PMS Clan boasts to be "the first, largest, and most competitive all-female XBOX LIVE and PS2 ONLINE Clan." Read more...
(from Tech Republic - posted by Reshan)
UNIFEM: United Nations Development Fund for Women
UNIFEM is the women’s fund at the United Nations. “It provides financial and technical assistance to innovative programs and strategies to foster women’s empowerment and gender equality” (www.unifem.org). The organization focuses on advancing women’s human rights in regards to poverty, mental and physical health, and professional gender equality.
As part of an ongoing effort by UNIFEM to raise awareness and deepen knowledge about gender issues within Information and Communications Technologies (ICT), they have released a report, in partnership with UNDP, on current issues regarding gender and ICT in Central and Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States. The report emphasizes powerful potential of ICTs as a means for advancing and achieving greater gender equality.
NOTE: It is a relatively long report (128 pages long), so if you have time, I’m attaching the PDF here for you to download.
BridgingGenderDigitalDivide_eng.pdf
You may also download it directly from the the UNIFEM website here.
EURASIANET.org
EurasiaNet is a New York-based organization that seeks to promote more open and informed discussion of political, economic, environmental, and social issues in the countries of Central Asia and the Caucasus, as well as Russia, the Middle East, and Southwest Asia.
On the site, I was particularly interested in an article that came out in February of 2002 regarding Mongolia’s Universities. After having a great conversation about gender equity issues in education with a colleague this past week, he recommended that I do some research on this subject. The article talks about Mongolia’s educational system being dominated by women. Women represent 60% of the graduating population, and in some places women outnumber men four to one. Due to the limited number of schools, the school system administers exams in the 5th, 8th, and 10th grades. If students do not pass the test, they may not advance to the next grade. Testing comes at a detriment to boys in their teenage years because they tend to demonstrate behaviors and attitudes incompatible with being successful on these high-stakes exams.
The article goes on to talk about the economic and social implications of women’s higher educational levels.
Read it here for more information.
-Posted by Jonathan Tiongco
Games 4 Girls provides a way for college women to serve as mentors to high school girls through an annual competition of game design. A team of college students forms, designs a game for teen girls with the intent of enouraging more girls to consider computer science as an attractive career option. The young girls play the games, judge, and award prizes to the winning top two teams. The idea was initiated at the University of Illinois and is a great way for women to learn from each other using technology as a conduit. - Laura Brooks
Interesting divergence from the often held "common wisdom" regarding sharing creative work in the digital sphere. This also relates to the variance between men and women in perceived ability (keyword = perceived).
Overall, almost two-thirds of men reported posting their work online while only half of women reported doing so. When Hargittai and Northwestern's Walejko controlled for self-reported digital literacy and Web know-how, however, they found that men and women actually posted their material about equally.
“This suggests that the Internet is not an equal playing field for men and women since those with more online abilities -- whether perceived or actual -- are more likely to contribute online content,” says Hargittai.
The study titled “The Participation Divide: Content Creation and Sharing in the Digital Age” recently appeared in the journal Information, Communication and Society.
“It appears that lack of perceived skill is holding women back from putting their creative content out there,” says Hargittai. She says that other factors that may be responsible for the observed difference, although not measured in the study, may relate to lack of confidence in the quality of one’s work or privacy concerns.
NY Times: Gender Separation on the Rise
This is a program based out of Hunter College, here in NYC:
http://www.tiltfactor.org/
They are commited to social change through gaming and have a lot of programs for girls.
Yahoo Launches Site For Women To 'Shine'
Schools Try Separating Boys From Girls - NYTIMES (3/10/09)
“Before it was all about showing the girls who was toughest, and roughing up and being cool,” said Samell Little, whose son Gavin is in his second school year surrounded by boys only. “Now I never hear a word from teachers about behavior problems and when he talks about school, he is actually talking about work.”
MAGIC (More Active Girls In Computing) is a mentorship program throughout the country, available to middle school girls designed to foster a positive attitude towards computing. MAGIC is run by women with careers in technology. Mentorship is on both technical and personal subjects, including work/life balance, role of girls in our society and how that is changing, how to avoid the technology stereotype, etc.
Gender Inequity in China
China is five thousand years old. Chinese are very proud of their longest human history in the world and the great contribution to the world.
In the long history river, there are many residues sinking on the bottom. One of them is gender inequity.
Chinese men (and some women) used to believe (and some still believe) that
---women shouldn't be educated: the less education, the purer moral they would have;
---the longer hair, the shorter view.
---women are not good at learning math, science, and technology.
Women/girls are expected to do all the houseworks--cooking, sewing, taking care of younger brothers/sisters, cleaning, yielding everything including all the opportunities to male (father, brothers, classmates, and co-workers, etc.).
With those unequal gender treatment and expectation in China, every female has some kind of external barriers--which could be possibly turned into internal barriers--to cross on each single day during childhood and teenager time when one's self-confidence was weak. She has to jump over the endless hurdles laid in front of her by her parents, some teachers, caretakers, and fellow classmates (both male and female). It is extremely difficult to overcome all of the barriers and to move onto her next and higher academic stages smoothly because of the following reasons:
1. Lack of female role model;
2. Lack of encouragement both at home and at school;
3. Lack of ladder to climb in order to achieve higher goals;
4. Negative influence and waves everywhere;
5. Society is not supportive for her to reach the full potential-no equal opportunity and same expectation for boys and girls.
Thus, Chinese women/girls need more cultural innovation in order to support them in cognitive development as well as life-long career achievement.
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