tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36889934200985564792024-03-18T04:03:53.528+01:00Blog Open Thoughts 2012 - Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC)The aim of the Open Thoughts blog 2012 is to gather opinions and to fire a debate around gender and ICT issues by answering a concrete question: What if Steve Jobs had been a woman?OSRThttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07184585670318002537noreply@blogger.comBlogger37125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3688993420098556479.post-73531840318099852272014-03-07T15:50:00.001+01:002014-03-07T17:40:51.122+01:00International Women’s Day – one day is not enough2014 marks the 103rd International Women’s Day. What began as a socialist political event in Europe is now celebrated world-wide, and endorsed by organisations as wide-ranging as the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the Ukrainian feminist group, Femen. It remains as vital as ever to showcase women’s manifold social, political and economic achievements, but it is also crucial that the campaign for gender equality is loudly and energetically sustained.<br />
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Three recent examples underline the need for continuing vigilance against sexism and action for more egalitarian, more respectful gender relations both off- and online. An advertisement campaign entitled “The Autocomplete Truth”, recently run by UN Women, used actual Google searches to reveal widespread sexism and discrimination against women. It placed the search results over the mouths of women’s photographs, effectively silencing them, and makes for sobering viewing (on the web at http://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2013/10/women-should-ads; on Twitter at #womenshould).<br />
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This week, the European Union Fundamental Rights Agency launched the most extensive survey yet undertaken on violence against women, which showed staggering numbers of women having experienced some form of violence right across the EU, including in those countries we consider to be most gender-equal. <br />
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At the same time, prominent women campaigners have recently revealed their shocking experiences of online bullying and abuse. Everyone should be able to use the web without being subjected to this type of thing. <br />
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Whatever the medium of communication, women’s voices must not be silenced. This message is one of the most important that International Women’s Day can convey. But International Women’s Day must also be a day when women, and men, celebrate the respectful, peaceful and progressive acts that are done to advance women’s and human rights. For advancing gender equality and celebrating the gains made so far, one day per year is not enough.<br />
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By Juliet Webster, Director, Gender and ICT Programme, IN3OSRThttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07184585670318002537noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3688993420098556479.post-39443406669646771002013-12-03T09:32:00.000+01:002013-12-03T09:32:15.487+01:00Steve Jobs was a woman because he bit the apple! <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">By <a href="http://openthoughts.blogs.uoc.edu/p/open-thinkers.html#martaaymerich">Marta Aymerich</a>, Vice
President for Strategic Planning and Research at the Open University
of Catalonia (UOC).</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXP3oqWrTcDGR1LSSBh1MR3ocfAEt1g-0vme9b4LcEAmopFIj9ZCJuek2QataIAutN2mOMinTWBW4xfG2s3VQGNWuNOHfYDnvOG2TcdiGH9mK3UdWfL9QFMUtLGVH9AT9IfnJgiD9nwS6F/s1600/13.07.06+UocTrobadaDocents_small.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXP3oqWrTcDGR1LSSBh1MR3ocfAEt1g-0vme9b4LcEAmopFIj9ZCJuek2QataIAutN2mOMinTWBW4xfG2s3VQGNWuNOHfYDnvOG2TcdiGH9mK3UdWfL9QFMUtLGVH9AT9IfnJgiD9nwS6F/s1600/13.07.06+UocTrobadaDocents_small.jpeg" /></a></div>
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<span lang="en-GB"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Apparently, from
our very “creation”, we have a special affinity for this fruit.
Or at least, this is what we have been told. As we have also been
told, though more subtly, that studying a technical degree course is
not for women. Both things are far from the truth. They are just ways
of making us see gender as preconditioning us for certain tasks and
attitudes, and not for others. In reality what happens is that we end
up being preconditioned –but not because of genetics, but because
of culture. From birth, we are taught that there is a colour for
girls and a colour for boys, and later, that there are toys for girls
and toys for boys. And, subsequently, we end up believing that there
are studies for girls and studies for boys. And from here it is a
short jump to think that there are more suitable men for positions of
responsibility in academia than suitable women. More women than men
graduate from university in Catalonia today, but this has not led to
a substantial change in the proportion of women in academic
positions. This is partly because we have grown up thinking
that we do not have the right predisposition. Well, I do not believe
this. And I myself am proof. I do not have to believe that technical
degrees are not for women either; nor are we particularly drawn to
biting apples. Or are we? If you think about it, maybe that is what
we have to do. Jobs chose an apple with a bite out of it for the
company’s logo and he broke the mould. </span></span></div>
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<span lang="en-GB"><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">«</i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>Maybe, and I speculate, he
chose it as a ground-breaking symbol, with the image in mind of the
first person, a woman, who is able to overcome the status quo.</i></span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>»</i></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"> </i></blockquote>
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<span lang="en-GB"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Indeed, you often have to break the rules to make progress.
Especially if what’s at stake is ensuring we do not lose so much
talent.</span></span></div>
OSRThttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07184585670318002537noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3688993420098556479.post-71435888409626734882013-11-04T13:37:00.000+01:002013-11-04T13:41:40.986+01:00Filling the gap with Steve Jobs<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">By <a href="http://openthoughts.blogs.uoc.edu/p/open-thinkers.html#doragroo">Dóra Groó</a>, president of the Association of Hungarian Women in Science.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">From my national and international view, I can say that in order to change the traditional and pre-modern processes and stereotypes — in every part of the life ― we always need good practices, which we can use to underpin the necessity of our aims and tools; and role models who can prove that nothing is impossible, thus legitimating our work. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Today in the ICT and in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) sector, women need to be more mentored, encouraged, inspired and supported, because these sectors need more female talents, otherwise the industry won’t be sustainable and renewable. A lot must be done before we got the talents. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i> «We need role models who can prove that nothing is impossible, thus legitimating our work»</i></span> </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We should start to support and encourage the girls — from childhood through the high school years and finally the university ― not to be afraid of math and informatics. Imagine if Steve Jobs had been a woman. People would say: “Hey girl! If Ms Jobs did it, you can also do it! Go and code that robot!”. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">If Steve Jobs had been a woman, we could break the glass ceiling and fill the gap in one second.</span></div>
OSRThttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07184585670318002537noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3688993420098556479.post-39006801297009008882013-10-01T11:39:00.001+02:002013-10-01T11:52:14.003+02:00A visit of Stephie Jobs to Shenzhen<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>This month's blog post has a different focus from most of our others, because it concerns the working conditions in Foxconn, Apple's main supplier, and the terrible injuries inflicted on China's (largely rural migrant) workforce. Qiu raises the question of whether a female Steve Jobs would tackle this horrendous human attrition. So, this is not so much about redressing the gender imbalance in professional computing work, more about asserting and protecting the human rights of computing assembly workers. It is a devastating read.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">By <a href="http://openthoughts.blogs.uoc.edu/p/open-thinkers.html#jacklinchuan"><b>Jack Linchuan Qiu</b></a>, associate professor, School of Journalism and Communication, the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibSShiQs3YpGNIpwGPLapeuqsarMLFa1-J0pf4ZLivDps7eAPT_By4m98bmw8BWfAubvxUZDQh-20CGPEFd07OwWCV7nzF-cst-NQSNgxy1x6kUySRmYUGNrprviVCqImgTL-FJ4DS6Jqe/s1600/JQiu_post.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibSShiQs3YpGNIpwGPLapeuqsarMLFa1-J0pf4ZLivDps7eAPT_By4m98bmw8BWfAubvxUZDQh-20CGPEFd07OwWCV7nzF-cst-NQSNgxy1x6kUySRmYUGNrprviVCqImgTL-FJ4DS6Jqe/s1600/JQiu_post.jpg" /></a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Had Steve Jobs been a woman — let’s call her Stephie — I'd take her to the Second People's Hospital of Shenzhen (Guangdong Province, China), a place I've been visiting once a month — sometimes once a week — in the past year. There lies Tingzhen Zhang, who <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/11/zhang-tingzhen-foxconn_n_1957851.html" target="_blank">lost his left brain</a> in an industrial accident at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn" target="_blank">Foxconn</a>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Foxconn is Apple's main supplier, employing 1.4 million workers in China alone. It manufactures about half the world's electronics each year. If China is the "world's factory", then Foxconn is the "electronics workshop of the world".</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Stephie must go to the hospital because Shenzhen is where most of her gadgets are put together; because she must have watched the <a href="http://mikedaisey.blogspot.com.es/p/monologues.html" target="_blank">Mike Daisy show</a>, at least its online version, and because she might wonder what the heck is going on there. She must go, as I need a woman to talk to Tingzhen's relatives.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Tingzhen, like most his peers, is from the rural hinterland. Due to work injury at Foxconn, he now walks with difficulty and he only has the intelligence of a one-year-old. His whole family has come to take care of him, find out what happened, and obtain justice. Every time I visited, his father kept talking to me: what a wonderful person his son used to be, how outrageously Foxconn treated them, why he thought the local officials were sympathetic, but incompetent.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>«A conversation between Tingzhen’s sister and Stephie Jobs may well inspire a whole new world beyond capitalism, a better world for workers and for humanity»</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">His mother and sister seldom talked to me though, likely because I'm a man. They smiled, brought me water, never tried to interrupt dad. But I know they need people listening to them, talk to them, as well. A few months ago, driven by despair caused by Foxconn's refusal to help, Tingzhen's sister, Hongling, even tried to commit suicide.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">— "Suicide?!" </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">— "Yes, Stephie." I’d say. "Foxconn is known for its workers killing themselves, as much as it's known for making your Apple products. Thirteen people jumped from tall buildings in 8 months in 2010. Never before had this happened in the entire history of industrial capitalism, anywhere in the world."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">— "Hongling, I'm sorry." </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">— "No, you don't...", would reply Hongling after a long pause. "You have no idea how helpless we were." </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">— "I’m really sorry. Can you tell me more? Is there anything I can do?"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">At this point, I'd leave, dragging Tingzhen's dad with me. He and I need to manage an on-line campaign, designed with our old-fashioned masculine impulse, to help the family sustain their legal battle. If they win, it will be the first time Foxconn China ever gets defeated in a labor court. That may mark a new chapter for Foxconn, and for Apple.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Yet winning this case is perhaps not as important as the conversation between Hongling and Stephie. I hope her mother can join them, too. The results from that conversation may not just bring about a new company or two. They may well inspire a whole new world beyond capitalism, a better world for workers and for humanity.
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Sisters of the world, think different.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqnw31otyJXmcrmag_g2C8B6mkITxVJTjB_ND-atiuIxFzSbs0Jc4PrtLIhs-9gWtG0QB_ZXBo4o-NGwt6aI2peTlmA4aT87xR6mhNF9INFCpFvvtmWi0IXBsmKsu7zB0SyQAPMQJKNwuh/s1600/TingzhenInjury.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqnw31otyJXmcrmag_g2C8B6mkITxVJTjB_ND-atiuIxFzSbs0Jc4PrtLIhs-9gWtG0QB_ZXBo4o-NGwt6aI2peTlmA4aT87xR6mhNF9INFCpFvvtmWi0IXBsmKsu7zB0SyQAPMQJKNwuh/s320/TingzhenInjury.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Tingzhen Zhang before and after his injury at Foxconn. The company still withholds the ID card he wore around his neck, making it difficult for his family to establish his employment relationship with Foxconn Shenzhen.</span><br />
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OSRThttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07184585670318002537noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3688993420098556479.post-2403779751222855052013-09-02T08:30:00.000+02:002013-09-02T08:30:02.602+02:00Could Apple have been founded by a woman?<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; text-align: justify;">By </span><a href="http://openthoughts.blogs.uoc.edu/p/open-thinkers.html#isanchez"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; text-align: justify;"><b>Inés Sánchez de Madariaga</b></span></a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; text-align: justify;">, director, Women and Science Unit, Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Would Apple, as we know it, exist if there had not been a Steve Jobs? Probably not, but perhaps we would still enjoy the same type of devices because, as Sánchez de Madariaga says, innovation comes when its time has arrived. Could have this "twin" tech company have been created by a woman? Again, probably not, at least in the time Steve created it, but it seems that now things are starting to change. <a href="http://www.cost.eu/about_cost/governance/genderste" target="_blank">GenderSTE</a> COST action chairperson, Sánchez de Madariaga talks about all these questions in the video below. She kindly agreed to be recorded during a visit to Barcelona.
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<i><span style="font-size: large;">«In the 80's, when Steve Jobs started working on Apple, a woman wouldn't have been given credit for such innovative approaches»</span></i>OSRThttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07184585670318002537noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3688993420098556479.post-84182768966454133662013-07-25T11:10:00.001+02:002013-07-25T11:10:37.747+02:00Challenging the "normal" gender order in society<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">By <a href="http://openthoughts.blogs.uoc.edu/p/open-thinkers.html#acnyberg"><b>Ann-Christin Nyberg</b></a>, gender and innovation researcher.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqE-wO2wzbiXRUnhUyl7J9B0XAz6QSP6XriVJoYOFnbPu2G7KbREifytz73ESZ6mq9Cjun2jjKZHUOQZWwHfZf36wukfZESMESGpU8OiieZOYOhH4BsATz4Kgbr_PMTErRpIf-RdL2Ki0L/s1600/ACNyberg_post.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqE-wO2wzbiXRUnhUyl7J9B0XAz6QSP6XriVJoYOFnbPu2G7KbREifytz73ESZ6mq9Cjun2jjKZHUOQZWwHfZf36wukfZESMESGpU8OiieZOYOhH4BsATz4Kgbr_PMTErRpIf-RdL2Ki0L/s1600/ACNyberg_post.jpg" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I bought my first Macintosh in the 1980s when I was an engineering student. It was radically different from all other computers I had seen: user friendly with an appealing design but also very expensive for a student like me. I really desired and loved it, as I later have come to desire and love other inventions brought to the world by Steve Jobs and others. Inventions that many of us now take for granted and use almost every day, innovations that have made an impact on society. That technology, intertwined with society as it is today, is often made by men for other men is problematic for many reasons. For instance, the shaping of society is not very democratic when women in general have so little influence.
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">What if Steve Jobs had been a woman? Would it have made a difference? When it comes to technology, women's talent has often been overlooked in society, and it still is sometimes. Men are often, on the other hand, expected to know technology by nature rather than by training and experience. Discriminating norms and practises concerning gender and technology still persist. Hence, probably none of Steve Jobs' brilliant ideas would have come to exist if he had been a woman. She would have encountered many additional obstacles that Steve probably never even would have imagined existed.
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><i>«The shaping of society is not very democratic when women in general have so little influence»</i></span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">There are of course always exceptions to the rule. Some women have indeed succeeded in extremely male dominated contexts, despite opposition and structural barriers. Hence, there is a slight chance that Apple’s brilliant inventor and charismatic business leader could have been a woman. Today there are some women at high levels in the ICT industry, for example <a href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/sheryl-sandberg/" target="_blank">Sheryl Sandberg</a>, COO of Facebook, and <a href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/marissa-mayer/" target="_blank">Marissa Mayer</a>, President and CEO of Yahoo. Women in technology are important since they challenge to some extent the “normal” gender order in society where technology is considered to be a men’s thing. They bring hope that discrimination can be brought to an end and a more egalitarian and meritocratic society can be formed.
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">There is a lot to gain for society, its organizations and individuals from making the ICT industry more inclusive. Due to their marginalised position women may well be “the rebels” who see things differently today. As Steve Jobs put it: “The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.” With access to technology on equal terms, the Steve Jobs of tomorrow may just as well be women as men. Let’s make it happen! “Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”</span></div>
OSRThttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07184585670318002537noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3688993420098556479.post-70727967448524400772013-07-11T10:46:00.001+02:002013-07-12T11:27:35.740+02:00An overview on women in tech (and on this blog)<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">By <a href="http://openthoughts.blogs.uoc.edu/p/open-thinkers.html#jastelarra"><b>Judith Astelarra</b></a>, emeritus professor, Department of Sociology, Autonomous University of Barcelona.
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I must say that when I was invited to participate in this debate several months ago I did not like the question. Now I think that it was a provocative question that lead to very interesting answers. However, I still have doubts about the question because I feel that if what we want is to analyze the absence of women in the sector of technology, do we need to play this provocative game of making a transvestite of Steve Jobs?
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Steve Jobs was an outstanding creator, everybody has agreed on that. Traditionally the creators in any field, had been considered beings who had an exceptional individual talent that was emphasized in its work. However, individual genius can only be put into practise and recognized in social and cultural contexts. It is society that allows the creative talent to be developed and, what is equally important, is responsible for the recognition of the value of the creation. Gender is part of this social context related to creation, but there are other factors as well.
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<i><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: large;">«We can look at the women that are now in these fields, even if they are a minority, to see if they make a difference»</span></i></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Most of the answers to the question about Steve Job have spoken about how the gendered dimension of society and culture, characterized by inequality for women, have been an impediment for women’s incorporation in the technological field in terms of creation, production and recognition (the “icon”).
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Others answers have stressed the individual characteristics of technological creation be it men or women. Only a few have dealt with Steve Jobs as a creator and tried to relate it to gender. In this sense, I liked very much the <a href="http://openthoughts.blogs.uoc.edu/2012/12/genius-is-gendered-what-would-happen-if.html">analysis made by Gillian Marcelle</a>. In describing Steve Jobs as a woman most of the answers either spoke generally of the situation of women, or plainly admitted that they did not know whether it would make such a difference. <a href="http://openthoughts.blogs.uoc.edu/2013/02/doll-heads-materials-or-different-ways.html">Henry Jenkins spoke about Bill Gates</a>, what was very interesting because here we deal with two men, in the same field and time, who shared gender but were different.
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">All these answers could have been just the same if Steve Jobs had not been in the question and all we were dealing was with the issue of women and technological creations. What makes me uneasy about it is that, even if it is not the intention, the proposal of replacing Steve Jobs by a woman leads to a sort of confrontation between men and women.
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<i><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: large;">«Finding places in which both genders can collaborate is also part of the feminist proposal of creating new realities»</span></i></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I have been a feminist from the late 1960 and early 1970 when I was doing my PhD at Cornell University. When we started, women’s inequality was not even a social, cultural and political issue. We needed to be loud and confrontation was part of it. But now, the situation is different. Obviously inequality still exists and we need lobbies and political movement to deal with it. But the problem is now recognized and there are women now in the fields from where they were excluded. We can evaluate what we have done to correct inequality and look for new things to do. But, we can also look at the women that are now in these fields, even if they are a minority like in the technological field, to see if they make a difference. Not just give hypotheses of “what if” that cannot have rigorous answers.
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I liked very much the answers that stated the need of social innovation in technology, no matter what the person’s gender is. I think that finding places in which both genders can collaborate is also part of the feminist proposal of creating new realities. Here we can play the game “what if”, not changing the past but looking at the future, because in this case imagination can be used. Starting from the problems that the TIC have today and the new lines that should be developed in the future, we can think of a woman (even if imaginary) that can play the role that men like Steve Jobs played in the past. We would not be using a man as a reference, we would be using women’s experiences and realities today. An endeavor that can be shared between this new outstanding woman and the men of her time. A pluralist proposal that does not discriminate anybody.
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">But in spite of my doubts with the question I really think that the debate has been very interesting.</span></span></div>
OSRThttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07184585670318002537noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3688993420098556479.post-64822114436231215272013-06-27T10:46:00.000+02:002013-06-27T10:50:24.189+02:00Jobs, the mother<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">By <a href="http://openthoughts.blogs.uoc.edu/p/open-thinkers.html#jzeng"><b>Zeng Jinyan</b></a>, blogger and human rights activist</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">My five years and seven months old daughter has been under single parenting since she was born. Her <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/hu_jia/index.html" target="_blank">father</a> was detained and sent to jail for three and a half years for the crime of “inciting subversion of the state power”, which was a price of his writings and international press interviews in an autocratic state. We moved to Hong Kong last September after I had been prohibited from travelling to — as well as abroad ― for five years. Meanwhile, her father is still prohibited to travel and join us in Hong Kong.
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Because of that, as soon as we arrived in Hong Kong, I bought an iPad, which was my first time to buy an Apple product. Apple products are too expensive to me, a de facto single mother, even though their function indeed greatly facilitates me in dealing with researching and teaching tasks, parenting and social activism in my everyday life. No longer after the purchase, my daughter claimed the iPad as hers. Now, she contacts her father via Skype any time she wants to and thanks to that she spends a lot of story time with him before going to bed.<br /><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">So I wonder what if Steve Jobs had a single mother parenting experience. I am not sure how many distant families benefit from Apple products and Skype. But I am very sure that there are lots of people in rural China and less developed areas around the world that are left behind. In 2012, a 17 years old senior secondary school student, Mr. Wang, sold his kidney for 20,000 CNY (around 2,400 EUR) in underground organ transplantation market. His purpose was to buy an iPhone and an iPad.
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<i><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">«I found more relevant to reflect on whether Jobs believed in feminity not masculinity, partnership instead of domination»</span></span></i></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">If Jobs had been a mother witnessing the whole process, she would have probably raised the critical question to the public: who is left behind in the high speed development of IT technology and IT products? What should we do to make opportunities, to guarantee empowerment for those who are left behind?
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">In fact, when thinking about the main question of this blog, I found more relevant to reflect on whether Jobs believed in femininity not masculinity, partnership instead of domination.
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Before I moved to Hong Kong, I hardly used mobile phone for social activism. Even if all suspected software is deleted, its security is still doubtful, because all Chinese telecommunication companies are active in implementing state surveillance orders and policies. Even leaving behind all the politic risks, we still cannot do our online activism as we wish, for either the social media websites are blocked by Chinese government or the contents are censored, filtered, and even deleted by the website companies which cooperate with the government in the implementation of censorship policy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Would a female Jobs have considered installing <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vpn" target="_blank">virtual private networks </a>(VPN) in her products as a factory setting? That would have definitely been an act of solidarity with the victims of state surveillance and censorship on freedom of expression around the world.</span>OSRThttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07184585670318002537noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3688993420098556479.post-19649909312800631532013-05-28T08:28:00.000+02:002013-05-28T12:26:38.445+02:00Beyond a pink phone<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">By <a href="http://openthoughts.blogs.uoc.edu/p/open-thinkers.html#abouverot"><b>Anne Bouverot</b></a>, Director General, GSMA</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">If Steve Jobs had been a woman, the iPhone would have been pink. <a href="http://www.apple.com/ios/siri/" target="_blank">Siri</a> would have been a man, and the default ring time before voicemail kicks in would have been two minutes, to allow women time to find their phone in their handbags. Very bad stereotypes, I know!, but sadly there is a grain of truth here. When I ran the mobile business for Orange – France Télécom, handset makers did actually send me pink phones, ‘because she is a woman’…
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Thinking about this seriously now, if Steve had been a woman, I think products like the iPhone would be elegant and stylish. They would be perfectly sized to fit in your hand, and they would have a sleek design, sculpted from the finest materials. The software that runs on the phone would be simple and intuitive, while providing all of the features needed for your daily life. The iPhone would be a high-quality product that consumers would love to own.<br /><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Now, those of you that own an iPhone will realise that what I have described above is exactly what an iPhone is today. In fact, many of the latest generation of smartphones coming to market meet these criteria. We are in the midst of an exciting time for the mobile phone industry, with a range of amazing designs from companies like Apple and Samsung and others to capture the imagination of consumers.
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<i><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">«My goal is to live in a world of great design and services, but also a world where they are produced by companies that are led by great men and great women»</span></span></i></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The key point for me is that it does not matter whether Steve Jobs was a man or a woman. What is important is that great design comes to the fore and helps us all take advantage of the revolution in our lives that is being enabled by mobile broadband services.
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">But there is an underlying problem that needs to be resolved. While woman make up over half of the world’s population, they hold less than 5 per cent of the senior management positions in technology companies globally. And this is a massive lost opportunity for the world’s leading technology companies.
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">My goal is to live in a world of great design and services, but also a world where they are produced by companies that are led by great men and great women. Only then will we see the next generation of amazing products, and the demise of the pink phone stereotype!</span></div>
OSRThttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07184585670318002537noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3688993420098556479.post-83467719116473058732013-05-16T08:13:00.000+02:002013-05-16T10:34:55.933+02:00GenPORT: sharing knowledge and inspiring collaborative action on gender and science<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">By <a href="http://openthoughts.blogs.uoc.edu/p/open-thinkers.html#julietwebster"><b>Juliet Webster</b></a>, Director, Gender and ICT Research Programme, IN3-UOC</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Imagining the world of computing as if Steve Jobs had been a woman requires a considerable degree of guesswork, since we do not know for sure precisely which aspects of this world would be different from how they currently are. Nevertheless, during the last three decades, research has taught us a great deal about the gender relations of science and technology, and provided a firm basis for practical action to advance gender equality. The problem is, though, that this growing body of information is scattered, and for many reasons it is not always easily accessible.
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">We are therefore very pleased to announce today the beginning of a new four-year action on gender equality in science which we are co-ordinating in the Gender and ICT Programme at the <a href="http://in3.uoc.edu/opencms_portalin3/opencms/en/index.html" target="_blank">IN3</a>. The ‘GenPORT’ project will exploit the numerous resources that try to advance gender equality in science, technology and innovation. Although the wealth of gender and science resources developed in Europe over the last decade offers enormous potential for knowledge sharing and informed action, these resources are dispersed, and have varying degrees of visibility and usability. Globally, too, major gaps in the dissemination of past and present knowledge persist, while new knowledge is constantly being produced. This information needs to be offered in accessible, timely, and useable ways to enhance the potential for its exploitation. This is the purpose of the GenPORT project, which will develop an online community of practice on gender equality in science, technology and innovation.<br /><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">«Although the wealth of gender and science resources developed in Europe over the last decade offers enormous potential, these resources are dispersed, and have varying degrees of visibility and usability»</span></span></i></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Exploiting the <a href="http://www.uoc.edu/portal/en/index.html" target="_blank">Open University of Catalonia</a>’s established expertise in developing online resources, the project will create an internet portal to provide an open entry-point to the high-quality research, policy reports and practical resources on gender, science, technology and innovation which already exist, and to new resources as they are generated. The main gender and science policy environments in the EU, US, Australia and beyond will provide the platform for developing the collection worldwide. Policy support will also be provided through research syntheses and ICT-enhanced policy briefings.
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Since it will support a community of practice, the portal will be interactive and dynamic. We will achieve this dynamism by ‘crowd-sourcing’ the portal: we want to draw stakeholders in, share knowledge, create web tools to add value to resources, and exploit social media to boost the impact of the key messages coming from the latest research and policy insights.
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<i><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">«GenPORT will showcase a vast array of resources and innovative user interaction to boost practical and policy action by illuminating the contribution of gender equality to science excellence»</span></span></i></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">On-line community activities will be at the centre of the portal. We are also planning physical meetings and stakeholders’ events to create synergies for increased collaboration between members of the community of practice. Our aim is that this portal, showcasing a vast array of resources and innovative user interaction, will boost practical and policy action by illuminating the contribution of gender equality to science excellence. It will link closely with EU activities to promote structural change in science and research, specifically those being undertaken through the EU COST Action <a href="http://www.cost.eu/about_cost/governance/genderste" target="_blank">GenderSTE</a>, which under Inés Sánchez de Madariaga’s leadership is also concerned with policy action for gender equality in science. In the US, the portal will exploit and promote the work being done under the National Science Foundation's <a href="http://www.nsf.gov/crssprgm/advance/index.jsp" target="_blank">ADVANCE program</a>, among others.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">We have received funding for this action from the <a href="http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/sis/" target="_blank">EU FP7 Science in Society Programme</a> under the theme ‘Creating a transnational community of practitioners (Internet Portal)’. Five partners — <a href="http://www.gesis.org/en/home/" target="_blank">GESIS</a> in Germany, <a href="http://www.fondazionebrodolini.it/en" target="_blank">Fondazione Giacomo Brodolini</a> in Italy, <a href="http://www.umb.sk/" target="_blank">Matej Bel University</a> in Slovakia, <a href="http://www.oru.se/English/" target="_blank">Örebro University</a> in Sweden and <a href="http://www.portiaweb.org.uk/" target="_blank">Portia</a> in the UK — will work with us to develop the portal over the next four years. In the longer run, we aim to make the portal self-sustaining through the contributions of community members, so that its resources are permanently available to the gender and science community. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">We are convinced that a shared vision, and shared information to achieve it, are vital elements in creating a society where the question posed in this blog no longer carries any meaning.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">We are keen to hear from you, whether you are an academic, policy maker, employer, professional association, or have another type of practical interest in this field and would like to be involved in this project by contributing your resources, ideas, news, and expertise. You can reach us at the addresses below:</span></div>
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<li><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Dr Juliet Webster, Project co-ordinator: <a href="mailto:jwebster@uoc.edu">jwebster@uoc.edu</a></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Dr Jörg Müller, Project manager: <a href="mailto:jmuller@uoc.edu">jmuller@uoc.edu</a></span></li>
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OSRThttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07184585670318002537noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3688993420098556479.post-7961190969429489752013-05-03T09:45:00.000+02:002013-05-03T15:11:35.910+02:00Women in the techie world, far from being a bed of roses<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">By <a href="http://openthoughts2012.blogspot.com/p/open-thinkers.html#adonald"><b>Athene Donald</b></a>, Professor, Department of Physics, University of Cambridge</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">If Steve Jobs had been a woman, let’s say called Stephanie, one has to ask whether she could have gone on to be the leader of Apple. Not because of a lack of brains, or innovation skills or imagination, but because she would have found the environment in which she worked so unpleasant she might have decided she’d rather work in some other field which didn’t make it so hard to progress.
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Maybe Stephanie would have gone on to excel in some other sphere, or maybe her innate creativity was sufficiently specific to the world of computing that her amazing skills would have been permanently lost, but as the recent story of Adria Richards —known as "<a href="http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/03/richards-affair-and-misogyny-in-tech/" target="_blank">Donglegate</a>"― reminds us, women and the techie world isn’t a match made in heaven ―at least as yet.
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I’m a female physicist, and I’ve frequently found myself in a minority of one in a meeting room, or a somewhat larger minority at conferences, but the sort of hostility which seems to pervade the world of <a href="http://pycon.org/" target="_blank">PyCon</a> —where Donglegate took place― and the like is beyond my experience. I don’t believe academic science is full of misogyny, although it may be full of people (men and women) suffering from a bellyful of unconscious bias.
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Pirelli calendars no longer grace my department walls and I haven’t seen a woman asked about her engagement ring and child-bearing intentions for a long time at interview. Somehow tech culture is stuck back in the Stone Age and, given the vile abuse that was generated by Donglegate, it seems unlikely it’s going to clean up its act fast.
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">So, if Stephanie Jobs had been born, I suspect she might have been inclined not to fight against the tide just because she had so much to offer, but to take her skills to an arena which was better able to appreciate them and treat her decently at the same time.
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OSRThttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07184585670318002537noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3688993420098556479.post-70078231073808934652013-04-19T11:05:00.001+02:002013-06-11T10:58:17.462+02:00Women can have a family and at the same time excel in the sphere of innovation<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; text-align: justify;">By </span><a href="http://openthoughts.blogs.uoc.edu/p/open-thinkers.html#rchiao"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; text-align: justify;"><b>Rebecca Chiao</b></span></a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; text-align: justify;">, co-founder and director, HarassMap</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">As manager of an organisation that uses technology to help changing the social acceptance of a terrible situation like sexual harassment in Egypt, Rebecca Chiao kindly agreed to put herself in front of the camera and give us her reflections on the main question of this blog. Chiao was one of the featured speakers at <a href="http://www.tedxbarcelonawomen.com/ENGLISH/SUCCESS!.html" target="_blank">TEDxBarcelona Women</a> event. We deeply thank the organisers for this contribution.
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<i><span style="font-size: large;">«When it comes to financial decisions from investors and partnerships, a lot of people tend to consider that women are entrepreneurs as a hobby»</span></i>OSRThttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07184585670318002537noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3688993420098556479.post-17926651796313043852013-04-04T11:22:00.000+02:002013-04-04T11:34:47.271+02:00Towards a new generation of versatile "Jobs"<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; text-align: justify;">By </span><a href="http://openthoughts2012.blogspot.com/p/open-thinkers.html#imao"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; text-align: justify;"><b>Isaac Mao</b></span></a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; text-align: justify;">, co-founder and director, Social Brain Foundation; philosopher at Sharism.org</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I never had an Apple product for my daily use, but I did buy some of them for my family members, including my 7-year-old daughter VV and my father. I believe Apple really fits those people who are afraid of using a computer, or are trying to touch base the digital world. So it’s not difficult to imagine why China is now the biggest market for Apple products. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Each time VV shows me some new apps on her iPad I can’t help praising: "it's really an exquisite toy", and my daughter always nods back. Once she even said: "(iPad is) like a pretty princess". I had to agree. The sense of touching the screen and the borders of Apple’s products really prevails the feelings I get on my Google tablet. Then, I reckon I would be not surprised if Apple's products were designed by some deft women. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Even though we still remember Steve Jobs as the man that enabled those exquisite toys, <a href="http://masha-ma.com/" target="_blank">Masha Ma</a>, one of the top fashion designers in China, told me she always thought Jobs had a female heart. That might be the reason why he could transfer the view of ICT products from lame machines into soft fashion devices.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">After Steve Jobs, the combination of both aggressiveness and sensitivity is inexorably indispensable in industry. If any other “Jobs” wants to copy his success, he or she can’t be merely a designer or an engineer, but should be both. Last March, Masha just finished her show in Paris, which included very cool 3D printed earrings in her new seasonal collection. I see this combination of design and ICT on her work as well: apart from being a designer she also has a geeky heart. And more interestingly, she is now learning how to use <a href="http://www.python.org/" target="_blank">Python</a> (a programming language) to code her next season's design work. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I don't know what would have happened if Steve Jobs had been a woman. In fact, Jobs' gender shouldn't matter, only his legacy. In the coming maker's age, as author <a href="http://www.makers-revolution.com/#fae/custom_plain" target="_blank">Chris Anderson</a> predicted, future may present us more versatile "Jobs", and surely they will be indistinctly called Steve or Stephanie.</span></div>
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OSRThttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07184585670318002537noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3688993420098556479.post-16996416696130921272013-03-22T10:28:00.000+01:002013-03-26T13:11:01.138+01:00A portrait of Stephanie Jobs<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">By <a href="http://openthoughts2012.blogspot.com/p/open-thinkers.html#shapsah"><b>Sharifah Hapsah Syed Hasan Shahabudin</b></a>, Vice-Chancellor, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">If Steve Jobs had been a woman, she would have probably been named Stephanie and would have started and co-founded Apple in her family’s kitchen, not in her family’s garage. Stephanie Jobs would have completed her bachelor’s degree and continued to obtain a PhD. She would have postponed marriage to avoid the hassle of balancing work and family life. She would have started her career in a male-dominated division of an IT-company and would have become the first woman to rise to its top CEO position. She would have been a dynamic, visionary and charismatic leader driving the company to greatness.
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">As a leader, Stephanie would have worked extremely hard, moved very fast and made creative decisions. While Steve was job-centered, she would have neglected neither her employees nor their families. Stephanie would have used the same presentation style for launching her Apple products to motivate and instill in her employees, particularly women, the need for achievement, power and affiliation, while meeting the goals of their personal lives. She would have used her CEO position and charismatic leadership style to help her workers identify with her on the emotional level, including sharing her battle with cancer. She would not have dared to be different, and would have made decisions outside the normal rules
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">In business, as in life, she would have cooperated rather than competed. She would have been very focused and clear in what she wanted, pouring her ideas into her products with passion and intensity. All these would have been part of her perfectionism in creating the most beautiful and highly-sought after consumer products, as well as leading one of the most successful technology companies in the world today.
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">If Jobs had been a woman, she would have paid more serious attention to her health. After being diagnosed with cancer, she would have stepped away from Apple and devoted her life to her family and charity. She would have developed a Foundation and devoted her talents and genius to solving incurable diseases, environmental problems and human conflicts around the world. If Steve Jobs had been a woman, she would not only made our world more beautiful with iPods, iPads, iTunes, Macintosh and Pixar Movies, but she would have also used her products to make our world a safer place to live in.
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OSRThttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07184585670318002537noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3688993420098556479.post-27544654668044544002013-03-08T11:09:00.000+01:002013-03-08T11:13:01.415+01:00ICTs are not synonymous with knowledge society and woman is not synonymous with gender<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">By <a href="http://openthoughts2012.blogspot.com/p/open-thinkers.html#gbonder"><b>Gloria Bonder</b></a>, Director, Gender, Society and Policies Area, FLACSO Argentina
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Women, in Latin America and in most regions, are a minority in technology production, and this is one of the most significant digital gender divides. The research we have carried out from the <a href="http://www.catunescomujer.org/" target="_blank">UNESCO Chair in Women, Science and Technology in Latin America</a> confirms this. However, the results enable us to state that gender inequalities in this field do not only concentrate on this issue. Age, ethnicity, educational and socio-economic level and area of residence (urban/rural) are some of the determinants that have a significant influence on the construction of this techno-cultural environment.
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Only an uninformed view would lead us to state that the first step has to be increasing the number of women in technological production. Looking more closely, we realize that change does not start there.<br /><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">«Creating technology with gender awareness is a first step towards a society that is more receptive to both women and men's ways of thinking and innovating»</span></span></i></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Encouraging the interest of more women in technology careers, reversing the stereotypes that associate ICTs with the male world, promoting the full participation of women in technology-based enterprises and encouraging strategic appropriation of ICTs by both women and men, are some of the links of this chain that must be strengthened.
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Having (more) women in technological production does not ensure an information/knowledge society that is more inclusive, diverse and attentive to their needs, desires and interests. However, if the person who creates technology (either male or female) does so with gender awareness, we will have taken a first step in overcoming inequalities, and in the construction of an information/knowledge society that is more receptive to everyone's ways of thinking, innovating and transforming, both men and women.
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">If Steve Jobs had been a woman, perhaps the only difference would be the Apple logo.</span></div>
OSRThttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07184585670318002537noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3688993420098556479.post-57131670701129007502013-03-07T11:13:00.000+01:002013-07-09T12:27:47.890+02:00Will we welcome a Stephanie Jobs any time soon?<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">By <a href="http://openthoughts2012.blogspot.com/p/open-thinkers.html#julietwebster"><b>Juliet Webster</b></a>, Director, Gender and ICT Programme, IN3-UOC
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.internationalwomensday.com/" target="_blank">International Women’s Day</a> is inevitably a time for a gender equality progress review. As the excellent, thoughtful, angry, optimistic, and often witty responses to the question “What if Steve Jobs had been a woman?” show, achieving gender equality in ICT is a very complex project. From the socialisation of kids and the cultural expectations of girls and boys, through to the management cultures of innovators and the employment practices of ICT companies, there are many interlocking reasons why there has to date been no female equivalent of Steve Jobs. This matters enormously: ICT is a site of major employment growth and opportunity in industrialised societies. The people who do this work create the tools which we all carry around, work with, manage our lives with, and perhaps even define who we are.
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<i><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">«When senior politicians and corporate leaders declare women’s role in ICT to be important, women are treated more seriously»</span></span></i></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">So, if gender equality in computing remains elusive, what is to be done to advance it? Over the past three years in the IN3 Gender and ICT programme, we have analysed a string of initiatives designed to advance and support women in ICT in several countries. Loud and clear from our analysis comes the conclusion that a vital ingredient in the success of these measures is high-level, consistent, sustained, political support with resources to back it up. When senior politicians and corporate leaders declare women’s role in this work to be important, women are treated more seriously. This is not the only factor, but it is a key one.
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Unfortunately, in an economic crisis, the ‘trickiness’ of doing gender equality becomes a reason for retreating from it. Decision makers, who remain primarily male, are too inclined to treat gender equality as an option. The retreat from a commitment to equality has been evident, for example, in the resources and priority it is receiving in the framing of the European Union Horizon 2020 programme<a href="http://openthoughts.blogs.uoc.edu/2013/03/will-we-welcome-stephanie-jobs-any-time.html#footnote"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><sup>1</sup></span></a>. As the strategy for European research, science and technological development for the next seven years, it is a vital mechanism for ensuring that gender equality is fundamental to such activities, indeed to all knowledge creation. It has been remarkably silent on this question.
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">If anything, action on gender equality becomes even more urgent during a crisis. How else are we going to recover any kind of social or economic capacity, if we do not build new social arrangements? The existing social ― and gender ― relations have so shamefully destroyed so many lives. But we need political support to help us shift the social and cultural framework within which we all live and work ― to transform the provision of education, to support working women, to hold employing organisations to account on equal pay, training, and career progression. If we cannot achieve these changes, then the ‘hyper-masculine’ domination of the computing world ― indeed, the world as a whole ― will take much longer to undo.
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">To take this challenge forward on our own patch, the Gender and ICT Programme at the IN3 will soon start work as the leader of a substantial EU project. This project will build a new community of global activists and practitioners working in the field of gender equality in science, technology and innovation ― activities which will be vital for our individual and collective futures. <b>GenPORT</b>, as our project will be known, will allow people to share their knowledge and resources, develop gender equality tools together, learn from one another, and build pressure for change. This blog will give you more news, and when we begin work, we invite you to join us.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">1 European Commission 2012, <a href="http://ec.europa.eu/research/iscp/pdf/com_2012_497_communication_from_commission_to_inst_en.pdf" target="_blank"><i>Enhancing and focusing EU international cooperation in research and innovation: a strategic approach</i></a> (COM 2012) 497.
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OSRThttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07184585670318002537noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3688993420098556479.post-86904137069539408752013-02-18T14:00:00.000+01:002013-02-18T14:18:03.421+01:00Doll heads materials or the different ways of addressing challenges<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">By <a href="http://openthoughts.blogs.uoc.edu/p/open-thinkers.html#hjenkins"><b>Henry Jenkins</b></a>, Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education, University of Southern California
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">In her book, <a href="http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300050721" target="_blank"><i>Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of American Girlhood</i></a>, the social historian <a href="http://cas.umkc.edu/wgs/faculty-staff/profiles/forman-brunell.shtml" target="_blank">Miriam Formanek-Brunnell</a> tells a fascinating story. At the turn of the 20th century, doll manufacturers were confronting a problem: previous dolls heads had been made of china or bisque. For some, this was a feature, since it forced young girls to play with them gently and to thus acquire what were then seen as feminine skills and graces. But, for others, this was a liability since they easily shattered and so designers set out to design a doll's head that would absolutely not break.
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Thomas Alva Edison confronted this as a purely technical challenge, seeking advice from the men in his lab, and seeing an opportunity to develop a potential new market for his phonograph to create talking dolls. What the boys in the lab came back with was the use of industrial level materials. They made the cast iron baby doll, which would not break under any circumstances, though we might predict that it would break a few jaws if young children then played with it as aggressively as kids today might. Meanwhile, there were some smaller companies, which were run by female entrepreneurs during this period, which had on-site daycare facilities. They sought to solve the problem by observing how young girls played with dolls, and they came back with the idea of using Indian Rubber, a material much more apt to respond appropriately to human touch than cast iron.
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<i><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">«Many of today's software projects are a bit like cast iron baby dolls: offering solutions that are not grounded in the human life world and expecting we will bend our practices to their demands»</span></span></i></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I am telling this story in part because Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, has often been described as the modern equivalent of Thomas Edison: an industrial leader who runs a large research team and seeks to figure out how to solve problems primarily on a technical basis. We may not know what would have happened if Gates was a woman, and it is a hard question to answer without falling into essentialist traps. But, we do know the difference between how Edison and his female counterparts addressed this particular challenge.
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Many of today's software projects are a bit like cast iron baby dolls: offering industrial strength solutions that are not grounded in the human life world and expecting that we will bend our practices to their demands rather than seeking to understand what role these products play in the context of our everyday experiences. Would a female Bill Gates have approached the problem differently? We can only speculate.</span></div>
OSRThttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07184585670318002537noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3688993420098556479.post-16264348679993400532013-01-31T13:55:00.002+01:002013-01-31T13:58:45.123+01:00What will it take to bring about change?<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">By <a href="http://openthoughts.blogs.uoc.edu/p/open-thinkers.html#gshapiro"><b>Gillian Shapiro</b></a>, Managing Director, Shapiro Consulting Ltd</span>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Is there a difference in the relationship that my son aged 5 and my daughter aged 10 have with technology? They both, of course, love to play games on the computer and Moshi Monsters are the big craze at the moment. But it is my daughter that is leading the way in all of this. Her interest in games, writing stories, searching on-line ―albeit for pictures of cute puppies― is what is firing up his urge to also get on-line. He is following her, guided by her, learning from her. She is his role model.
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Role models for women in technology, science and engineering are, of course, incredibly important. Because they are few in number, they send out a strong message that it is possible for women to excel in this field. Would it have made a difference if Steve Jobs had been a woman? Yes! How could having a woman as the head of such a major innovative organisation, not make a positive difference. The value of Stevie Jobs as a role model is enormous.
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>«Role models for women in technology, science and engineering are incredibly important. Because they are few in number, they send out a strong message that it is possible for women to excel in this field»</i></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">But it wasn't Stevie, it was Steve. And we know that, statistically speaking, my son is unlikely to follow female role models into technology and my daughter is unlikely to be one. So where and why does it all go so wrong?
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">My question, of course, is not new. It has been asked by many researchers and policy makers for many years. The barriers and causes of few women entering into and developing careers in science, engineering and technology jobs cited are repeated, study after study. Some of the work to address the barriers and causes is innovative and impactful. But overall the change achieved is slow and patchy.
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<i><span style="font-size: large;">«The mere hint of a threat of a quota for women on Boards in the UK has led to a movement of leaders intent on change»</span></i></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">What will make the step change needed to bridge the female gender gap in science, engineering and technology? Does it need to be a Stevie Jobs?
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The mere hint of a threat of a quota for women on Boards in the UK has led to a movement of leaders intent on change. After years of very little change in the representation of women on Boards, following the Lord Davies Review and recommendation for at least 25% of Board positions to be occupied by women, their representation in FTSE 100 companies has increased from 12.5% to 16.7% in a year.
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">What would motivate the Chairmen, the CEOs and other leaders, male and female, working in technology jobs, the media and education from being bold and bringing their power, influence, experience and leadership to bear in changing once and for all this imbalance?</span></div>
OSRThttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07184585670318002537noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3688993420098556479.post-37973932297114033412013-01-17T19:00:00.000+01:002013-03-21T15:48:20.655+01:00ICTs and a new opportunity for women's empowerment<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">By <a href="http://openthoughts.blogs.uoc.edu/p/open-thinkers.html#lnefesh-clarke"><b>Lindsey Nefesh-Clarke</b></a>, founder and managing director of Women's WorldWide Web (W4)</span></span>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">During her recent visit to Barcelona (Spain), Nefesh-Clarke kindly agreed to answer live and in front of the camera the heading question of this blog. She was one of the guest speakers at <a href="http://www.tedxbarcelonawomen.com" target="_blank">TEDxBarcelonaWomen</a> event, celebrated on December 1<span style="font-size: x-small;"><sup>st</sup></span> 2012. We would like to thank the organisers for this contribution.
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>«We have an unprecedented opportunity to make a new wave of women's empowerment: a strong movement of community-driven collaborative change»
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OSRThttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07184585670318002537noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3688993420098556479.post-20219013822189680142012-12-20T12:45:00.000+01:002012-12-20T12:45:11.351+01:00Genius is gendered: what would happen if Steve Jobs had been a woman?<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">By <a href="http://openthoughts.blogs.uoc.edu/p/open-thinkers.html#gmarcelle"><b>Gillian Marcelle</b></a>, Associate Professor, Wits Business School
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The invitation to write this blog on what would happen or have been different if Steve Jobs had been a woman proved to be too enticing to turn down. This despite the fact that I had left off my serious work on gender and ICTs for nearly a decade. Different themes emerged as I played with the idea of gender transformation and Steve Jobs. I am not sure whether I can cover all these themes here and so perhaps this invitation will lead to future work on the subject.
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">From the point of view of development studies, I would argue that we need more people like Steve Jobs, and it really does not matter if they are male or female, except if there are biases, whether structural, institutional or psychosocial that stand in the way of the emergence of female Jobs like figures. The point is that Steve Jobs stands at one level as a standard bearer for successful entrepreneurship and transformation and he has become the touchstone for success.
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">«A woman with a similar balance of negative and positive personality traits was very unlikely to have succeeded in formal business settings»</span></i></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">This then leads to my take on Jobs from a management science perspective. Steve Jobs’s approach to steering a company and its innovative process includes: single-minded dedication to “specification”, ruthlessness, setting standards very high and not compromising about how these were achieved, being unaccepting of industry standards and setting out to be disruptive. He is characterised by enormous self belief, arrogance and a spectacular willingness to take risks. Steve on all accounts is legendary for is attention to detail, keen observational skills and an ability to improve new possibility outside what currently exists. This latter feature has been hailed as him having a reality-distorting ability and this applied to the product features and design of Apple products and services.
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">From all accounts these “positive” qualities and characteristics were wrapped up in personal attitude that made Steve Jobs an exceptionally challenging human being, in both his personal and professional lives. It is his personality and human characteristics that have meant that he is revered and loathed with great intensity. Before his death, the negative and challenging aspects of his personality were spoken of in hushed whispers. Jobs the mythical path breaker occupied much more airtime than the man who insisted on a paternity test for his first child, refused to reconcile with his biological father, and regularly reduced managers and employees meeting with him at Apple to tears and even attempted suicide. Since his death, the accounts and reports have become more revealing and dare I say insightful. There have been many analyses attempting to reconcile the positive and negative aspects of his personality and to understand the implications for practice.
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">This is where the gender issues are stark. My sense is that a woman with a similar balance of negative and positive personality traits was very unlikely to have succeeded in formal business settings, let alone to have been celebrated and venerated as a management icon. She would be more likely to have been burnt at the stake! Reality-distorting women who buck traditions, set their own standards and insist on dragging followers on the path they have set out for them and have that confidence of conviction more on grounds of personal self belief and branding that norms and moral standards.
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">«Is society reproducing female and male Steve Jobs clones rather than developing alternatives?»</span></i></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I don’t know whether we will even be able to test the hypothesis that a female Steve Jobs would not have been allowed to survive as against the counter hypothesis that a female leader in the ICT sector world is unlikely to have the same balance of “offensive” and positive personality traits. I certainly cannot think of a female powerful figure who is associated with single handedly setting new benchmarks for an industry, hero worshipped and venerated. These are some reflections on Steve the man.
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">As far as the products produced by Steve Jobs and Apple, I wonder about whether a woman of a similar age, cultural, racial and political background would have produced a set of technologies that had the same characteristics.
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Industry domination, lock-in effects, propriety standards are central to the Apple success story. This is a technological leader model per excellence. If we are to separate out particular personality traits, we still have to ask the question whether the propensity to adopt strategies with these features is gendered. Do female leaders eschew strategies with these characteristics and do they have a high propensity to adopt alternatives? We don’t have any evidence to answer this question. Are female leaders, whether they pursue paths of business diversification and growth that differ from that pursued by Apple likely to be as successful? This would also need to be answered in the future. In considering these issues, it may be helpful to ask whether female executives operating in these settings actually have definitions of success and power that are fundamentally different from their male counterparts. Do put this differently, would a white, educated, middle class female in a wealthy country have either the option or desire to manage success and power in a way that differed significantly from Steve Jobs. Do we have processes of selection in place that effectively means that a female computer science or business student hoping to catch the eye of a mentor or to climb the ladder of success is more likely to perform management in a Steve Jobs like fashion than not. Is society then reproducing female and male Steve Jobs clones rather than developing alternatives? The recent opting-out and missing generation debates in the US suggest that these issues and questions are not that farfetched.
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<i><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">«Steve as icon not only sets the standard but has probably set back feminist advocacy in this field for many decades to come»</span></span></i></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Finally, I want to tackle the politics of the situation. In my work as a gender equality advocate with a focus on the ICT sector, I argued that unless a critical political analysis was made of the integration of social, political, institutional and structural processes that led to patterns of gender inequality, the situation would continue. The advocacy positions of the groups with which I was associated called for concerted efforts within the ICT sector and in the policy space to end exclusion and inequitable access to and control of ICT systems and industries on a gendered basis.
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Several years on, although I am not as familiar with the academic, policy or civil society work in this area, I certainly have the impression that there has been no major breakthrough in terms of wrestling into these issues and making transformational changes.
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">And in that sense, Steve Jobs’s success at Pixar and Apple, his wealth creation, his bad behaviour, and hyper-masculinity means that he is the robber baronesque figure of the 21st century. Steve as icon not only sets the standard but has probably set back feminist advocacy in this field for many decades to come. By contrast, Bill Gates is a mild-mannered, happily married, philanthropy inclined, not particularly macho man, who is very wealthy. But he has not attracted the same love-hate reaction (except in Open Source circles).
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">If there was a level playing field and the world had really become a fundamentally different place, perhaps a warm-hearted, fuzzy, female leader with a heart of gold and on her best behaviour would have emerged to lead a firm that was concerned about triple bottom line issues, making useful ICT product and services in collaboration with users and competitors that addressed human needs as well as advanced private motives.
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Until then we have Steve...</span></div>
OSRThttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07184585670318002537noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3688993420098556479.post-73260878721769345092012-12-04T22:28:00.000+01:002012-12-05T11:56:17.165+01:00How to promote female 'geek' vocations<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">By <a href="http://openthoughts.blogs.uoc.edu/p/open-thinkers.html#cribas"><b>Cristina Ribas</b></a>, Associate Professor, Pompeu Fabra University<br /><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZTc89iuuHnPGcNxchO3h0H39Dw26Rs9RhBa5c2Xb29zedeVNXFUrBRqzZX4daMCTPn5SN02Q8jQdbQI1ayzdZdnwSq9Af0Pxp0VGWgv5jayxYB2WCeJ6YFrEDz8YKFpEsY8HDSxH_8Qlf/s1600/CRibas_post.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZTc89iuuHnPGcNxchO3h0H39Dw26Rs9RhBa5c2Xb29zedeVNXFUrBRqzZX4daMCTPn5SN02Q8jQdbQI1ayzdZdnwSq9Af0Pxp0VGWgv5jayxYB2WCeJ6YFrEDz8YKFpEsY8HDSxH_8Qlf/s1600/CRibas_post.jpg" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Could Linux, Facebook, Apple and Google have been created by women? I think they could, but the fact is that the most visible faces on the internet right now are still men. Does this have anything to do with women's reluctance to consider themselves, and indeed refer to themselves, as brilliant or ‘genius’? Or is that <i>geek</i> culture is too distant from the prevailing sexist education? I wouldn't like to hazard a guess as to the reasons, though I'm sure that both of these have an influence. What is clear is that the consequences of the fact that very few women are creating and influencing technology are very negative, both for women themselves and for society as a whole. As is the case in so many other fields, not only is it unfair to limit decision-making powers and participation by relegating women to simple consumer status, but also shutting women entails a huge waste of talent which could be focused in new and innovative directions. What can we do to make the culture and vocation of technology more appealing to women?
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">«It is unfair to limit decision-making powers and participation by relegating women to simple consumer status, but also shutting women entails a huge waste of talent which could be focused in new and innovative directions»</span></i></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">First of all, greater visibility needs to be given to the female protagonists of the history of technology to shatter the image of their presence as unusual or impossible: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace" target="_blank"><span id="goog_1619918452"></span>Ada Lovelace</a><span id="goog_1619918453"></span>, the mathematician daughter of Lord Byron, regarded as the first female programmer; <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_Jean_Jennings" target="_blank">Betty Jean Jennings</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran_Bilas" target="_blank">Fran Bilas</a> who, amongst other things, programmed the first ENIAC computer in the 1950s; plus all those anonymous women who worked tirelessly at Bletchley Park deciphering codes during the Second World War, who cyberfeminist Sadie Plant paid tribute to in her book <i>Zeros and Ones</i>. In the same way that the industrial revolution was woven by the hands of women in the textile factories, so digital workers were also women, according to Plant.
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">We can also find women in senior management positions in many iconic internet companies, such as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marissa_Mayer" target="_blank">Marissa Mayer</a>, who shone at Google and since July has been president and CEO at Yahoo, and <a href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/sheryl-sandberg/" target="_blank">Sheryl Sandberg</a> one of the most successful executives in the digital business, currently at Facebook. It is also worth pointing out that even though there has been a drop in the number of engineers and computer technicians in the United States, we are seeing innovative start-ups led by young entrepreneurs, as explained by <a href="http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2012-06-04/female-tech-executives/55382536/1" target="_blank">this article</a> in USA Today.
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">«Something is not working in the educational system because there are very few girls with a </span></i><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">geek</span><i><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> vocation, who want to become programmers»</span></i></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Who knows what we might be losing if there are fewer women programmers and entrepreneurs, as we need new strategies to help us transform the world, society and the economy, with the help of ICTs. This happened in the field of primatology, which had a before and an after, when three women introduced a new study method by sharing the habitats of groups of chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans. The "trimates" —Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey and Birutë Galdikas― managed to understand the behaviour of these simians which are most closely related to humans as never before. One of the keys to this was that they considered human integration in the group of animals, a method that had not occurred to any male researchers.
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">There are many more examples of women's input in traditionally masculine sectors. For example, many years ago the sociologist Carme Alemany found that the washing machines designed mainly by men had numerous wash programmes, of which only two or three were ever used, while solutions to practical problems, such as how to make a wash stop if the colours start running —which are technologically simple to resolve― were dreamt up by women designers. Some engineers, such as the Colombian <a href="http://cinara.univalle.edu.co/index.php?seccion=HOJA-VIDA&profesor=3" target="_blank">Inés Restrepo</a> often think along different lines in order to tackle the same problem. Restrepo dreamt up a system of harvesting water in local communities using small gutters built in a network by each inhabitant, without the need for huge, costly and environmentally-damaging dams, which had been put forward as the only solution by the (male) engineers in her country. All of us benefit from new solutions from fresh perspectives. Another contribution might be a change of leadership, from the purely transactional short-term and predominantly masculine perspective to a transformational type of leadership with other goals that focus more on creating long-term value, as explained by doctor <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/saraberbelsanchez/" target="_blank">Sara Berbel</a> on the subject of women's leadership.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Caption from the EU video campaign <i>Science: it's a girl thing</i></span><i>!</i></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Furthermore, we need to move away from the stereotypes featured in campaigns such as the European Union initiative to promote scientific vocations among young people. This controversial <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/9349923/Science-girl-thing-video-branded-offensive.html" target="_blank">video</a>, which ended up being withdrawn, showed women among make-up and microscopes, as if they had to trivialize research to make it appealing to women. Psychologist Gemma Altell, <a href="http://www.accc.cat/index/gemmaaltell" target="_blank">on analysing</a> this case, highlights two important questions. On the one hand, what do we need to change in the educational system to make girls more interested in science and technology? It is obvious that something is not working because there are very few girls with a <i>geek</i> vocation, who want to become programmers. And, furthermore, how can we stop fuelling the prejudices that make us judge women —and not men— by their appearance, and how do we reinvent what it means to be a man or a woman in the 21st century, casting aside the androcentric models generated thousands of years ago.</span></div>
OSRThttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07184585670318002537noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3688993420098556479.post-26112160129001998372012-11-22T13:16:00.003+01:002012-12-19T14:41:21.603+01:00Steve Jobs - The Woman<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">By <a href="http://openthoughts.blogs.uoc.edu/p/open-thinkers.html#mshambayati"><b>Mariam Shambayati</b></a>, artist
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Steve Jobs. Apple. iPhone. Rich. Dead. Black turtlenecks.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I don't know much more about the "myth", except that he was a man. And what if he'd been a woman?</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">She would have been remembered by not as many people, but definitely for many more things. Probably because women tend to do many more things than (most) men in the course of their lives.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><i><span style="font-size: large;">«If Jobs had been a woman she probably would have been remembered by not as many people, but definitely for many more things»</span></i></span></span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">They bear children, and they talk. They lead successful careers and are homemakers. They do the homework with the kids and call their mother in laws to see how they're doing. They bake birthday cakes for their friends' children and they take care of the tax return. They live out their sexual fantasies and they mend trousers. They buy the milk when there's no more in the fridge and they make appointments for their siblings' next vaccinations. They wax their legs and paint their toenails from time to time. They remember birthdays and empty the sand out of their boys' rugby boots. They ski and they read. They cook and they clean. They make business deals and they publish websites.</span></span></span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">© Mariam Shambayati</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">So what do I mean when I tell myself to PAINT LIKE A MAN? I mean: forget about everything else and concentrate on that one thing: PAINTING. Just like a man would.
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I think Steve Jobs <i>The Woman</i>, would have been too busy to become Steve Jobs <i>The Man</i>.</span></div>
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OSRThttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07184585670318002537noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3688993420098556479.post-50550513220490677872012-11-08T12:26:00.002+01:002012-11-08T12:28:23.799+01:00Different genders, different worlds<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">By <a href="http://openthoughts.blogs.uoc.edu/p/open-thinkers.html#jmcohoon"><b>Joanne McGrath Cohoon</b></a>, Associate Professor, University of Virginia.
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Gender inequality persists. Both data and personal reports from transgendered people make this reality clear. For example, transgendered men received more workplace respect and more opportunities to speak than they had as women. Their observations illustrate how subtly and profoundly gender affects our lives, even the lives of exceptional people.
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Culturally, gendered expectations of others and ourselves interact with race and class to shape our language, our interrelations, and our beliefs about what we might achieve and where we belong. Organizations in our immediate environment also affect us at each stage of our lives —schools; businesses; churches, temples, mosques; etc. Each has its own set of policies, practices, and local cultures that differentiate more or less between men and women. So, if Steve Jobs had been a woman, he would have lived in a different world than the world he knew as a man<span style="font-size: small;"><i>.</i></span></span></span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: large;">«Jobs lived in a world where technical interests, technical education, and aggressive business behavior were appropriate. Had Jobs been a woman, his behavior may not have been interpreted in such a positive light»</span></i></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Steve Jobs, the man, lived in a world where technical interests, technical education, and aggressive business behavior were appropriate. Investors saw potential for his success, because Jobs fit their expectations for technical business genius. Employees tolerated his eccentricities because they saw him as a successful leader. Had Jobs been a woman, his behavior may not have been interpreted in such a positive light.
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Stephanie Jobs, the woman, could have behaved in the same ways, but her behavior would have been interpreted differently. By violating expected behavior for women, she would have incurred harsh judgments about her likability, even if people thought her competent. And being thought competent would require performance several times better than Steve would have needed<span style="font-size: small;">.</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Stephanie would have had less opportunity than Steve to develop skills that contribute to success in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). She might have been explicitly discouraged from taking elective STEM courses. Had she taken the courses anyway, she would have experienced isolation, stereotype threat, and less encouragement than her male classmates. Investors would likely have failed to see beyond her femininity to recognize her vision and ability to carry it out. Employees might have labeled her a crazy bitch and refused to contribute their passion in fulfillment of her dreams.</span></span><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">«Stephanie Jobs might have been wildly successful as a high tech entrepreneur and innovator, but she would have had to overcome many more barriers than Steve overcame»</span></span></i></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />Stephanie Jobs might have been wildly successful as a high tech entrepreneur and innovator, but she would have had to overcome many more barriers than Steve overcame. An astonishing achievement would have been even more spectacular, unless of course, the world changed at the same time Steve’s gender changed.
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">It is difficult to know whether we are moving toward a world where Steve and Stephanie have equal chance of success. Obviously, women are advancing in education and economic independence in many countries. Yet, even in those countries where women seem to have the most parity with men, occupational gender segregation persists: women, more than men, are in fields with fewer economic rewards, less autonomy, and lower job satisfaction.</span></span></div>
OSRThttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07184585670318002537noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3688993420098556479.post-26286735245732316462012-10-18T17:13:00.000+02:002012-10-18T17:15:16.976+02:00We see what we want to see<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">By <a href="http://openthoughts.blogs.uoc.edu/p/open-thinkers.html#jordibernado"><b>Jordi Bernadó</b></a>, photographer</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">What would have been of Steve Jobs if he had been born a woman? I find it impossible to imagine the answer, in the same way that I cannot think what would have been of Steve Jobs if he had been born in the heart of Africa, if he had been born a hundred years earlier or if he had been born with a physical disability. Each one of us is not just who we are, we are also our circumstances, and our gender configures us as much as where we come from, the period in which we live and the family environment in which we grow up.
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>«What we characterise as feminine or masculine remains subjective to ourselves, to our experiences, to our deepest desires»</i></span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">On the other hand, I also find it difficult to imagine how Steve Jobs would have been different if he had been called Susan, for example. Which personal characteristics would change? What is it that makes Steve different to Susan? I do not have the faintest idea. If I must be honest, I have to admit something: I do not know what a woman is. Do not misunderstand me; I do not know what a man is either. The physical categorisations that we all understand very clearly - or at least we all have a very clear understanding of the physiological attributes that accompany both genders - vanish when we want to take into consideration the mental or purely ontological realms. How would Susan be different to Steve? No idea. What we characterise as feminine or masculine remains subjective to ourselves, to our experiences, to our deepest desires.
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Reality is far more rich and complex than our minds are able to fathom, and if I have learnt something as a photographer, it is that we do not see what there is, we see what we want to see.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">© Jordi Bernadó</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">My photos always show reality and fit into a tradition of documentary, neutral photography. Yet as I say, although everything seen in them may always be real, we often do not know what we see. This is the case with this photograph, which clearly shows a female skater's leg in the foreground, but it is not very clear where it comes from. The size and the scale seem off and it seems out of place. It provokes questions and I find that interesting because it is the beginning of a story. I have chosen the skater's leg to illustrate my post because I believe it reflects my idea of strangeness in the face of what we take for granted but, deep down, is a real enigma. This photograph is included in the book <a href="http://www.actar.es/index.php?option=com_dbquery&task=ExecuteQuery&qid=2&idllibre=3690&lang=en" target="_blank"><i>True Loving and Other Tales</i></a> (Actar, 2007).</span></td></tr>
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OSRThttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07184585670318002537noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3688993420098556479.post-64736060230097443112012-10-04T11:01:00.000+02:002012-10-04T11:02:55.629+02:00The European Women’s Lobby on the Role of Recognition<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">By <a href="http://openthoughts.blogs.uoc.edu/p/open-thinkers.html#signenorgaard"><b>Signe Kristine Nørgaard</b></a>, guest writer for The European Women’s Lobby (EWL).</span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEis2EzpxmxNTscaYKQQQhOiladeJ4nbqolketFtUJLF45dl80kgeNk0Qhvj7b1-ySaIzH6yVheKcOqkldlmkUI4ivkcpPYQaXxrUNJ6DysZyYDqvyVlza9311HAELpRB7hfPRUSKQRxMq5i/s1600/Signe_Norgaard_post.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEis2EzpxmxNTscaYKQQQhOiladeJ4nbqolketFtUJLF45dl80kgeNk0Qhvj7b1-ySaIzH6yVheKcOqkldlmkUI4ivkcpPYQaXxrUNJ6DysZyYDqvyVlza9311HAELpRB7hfPRUSKQRxMq5i/s1600/Signe_Norgaard_post.jpg" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span id="goog_2058635329"></span><span id="goog_2058635330"></span>Could a woman do Steve’s job? Yes, of course. But the status and fame she would acquire are unlikely to bring her anywhere close to the adulation accorded to Steve Jobs, as <a href="http://openthoughts.blogs.uoc.edu/p/open-thinkers.html#sirihustvedt">Siri Hustvedt</a> pointed out in <a href="http://openthoughts.blogs.uoc.edu/2012/07/biased-culture-for-heroes.html">her contribution</a> to this blog. Whether we talk about pioneers at the frontiers of innovation or culture-bearing institutions, we witness the same tendency: when women enter a new (or old) male dominated field, the mysticism evaporates along with much of the status and pay. Consider how prestige and status have escaped historically masculine bastions such as education, the arts, politics and medicine proportionally to the degree of ‘feminisation’, the causality of which has been discussed superbly by Swedish historian <a href="http://www.historia.su.se/forskning/forskningsomraden/modern-politisk-historia/det-nordiska-valfardssamhallet-under-1900-talet/yvonne-hirdman-1.27638" target="_blank">Yvonne Hirdman</a>.<span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://openthoughts.blogs.uoc.edu/2012/10/the-european-womens-lobby-on-role-of.html#[1]"><sup>[1]</sup></a></span></span>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">What excludes women from IT is not the hype and mysticism, but the gendered exclusivity which they symbolise. Inclusion on the other hand means breaking the gendered spell and a subsequent drop in prestige. Of course it is not all that black and white. This could not be further from a biological or essentialist argument. IT is a vast and rather abstract ‘sector’ hardly reserved for men, but there are forces at play which de facto makes it mainly a male domain. It matters little if we are talking about IT or other prestigious sectors dominated by men or rather, masculine values and attributes. The IT sector is symptomatic of the issues worth investigating here. No more, no less.<br /><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: large;">«IT is a vast and rather abstract ‘sector’ hardly reserved for men, but there are forces at play which de facto makes it mainly a male domain»</span></i></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Having provided certain insights into the past and current situation, the pressing question is what we can do to change it. As has been brought up several times on this blog, taking to task gendered stereotypes and role models is an important step towards increasing women’s stake in the sector. And we must go beyond that. Comprehensively overthrowing gendered stereotypes requires that we confront the gendered value system itself. From this perspective, asking what it would take for a woman to do Steve’s job and win his glory is not good enough. Can we even imagine the same hype, prestige and monetary value attributed to, say, an outstanding woman working in the care sector? We might not yet be able to envision this scenario, but the point is we need to develop that ability!
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">IT or care economy. We know that the first sector does not exceed the latter in economic or societal importance. But we also know that the societal valuation of the contributions of these sectors by no means reflects this reality. This discrepancy can be linked to the age-old political discussion about production vs. reproduction on the one hand and on the other it is a pressing socio-economic problem. Above all it is a gender issue. The gender segregation in the IT and care sectors is not a law of nature, nor are the distorted valuations of these sectors’ respective contributions or associated gender pay gaps. Therefore the most tangible benchmark for progress is the level of gendered pay and pension gaps and of gender segregation in the labour markets. But the solution must be found taking a more ethereal road through our minds. So long as society (women and men) subscribes to masculinised ideals, women’s work, regardless of the sector, will remain undervalued in terms of pay and prestige.</span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: large;">«So long as society subscribes to masculinised ideals, women’s work, regardless of the sector, will remain undervalued in terms of pay and prestige»</span></i></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">This is not a battle between the sexes, but merely a matter of how recognition operates. Recognition, like respect, is not something one can claim, but something one must be given; the double meaning of recognition being key here: the way men successfully achieve recognition (acknowledgement) from each other is to a great extent dependent on their societally-rooted culture for mutual recognition in the sense that they ‘recognise’ (know, see and understand) each other. A woman achieving a position equivalent to Steve Jobs’ depends on affecting profound social change, but also on women’s ability to strengthen mutual recognition on their own terms by affirming what we already know: the deep awareness of the indispensable role of our contributions whether they are productive or reproductive. All the proof we need is already there. We need to operationalise this evidence and start formalising the means (institutional, capitalist, symbolic, communicative etc.) to give ourselves the recognition we know we deserve.
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>Footnote</b>:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3688993420098556479" name="[1]"></a> 1. Her profound investigation of gendered culture, symbols and values is synthesized in the work <i>Genus – det stabilas föranderliga former</i> (the mutable shapes of stability). She develops a 'gendered power system' which refers to historically embedded, set of gendered values and symbols, which permeate our daily language and norms. Due to this inherited symbolic system "the masculine" is automatically attributed greater value than the "feminine". What is understood as 'masculine' and 'feminine' can change radically, but the gendered power system remains stable because power, value, prestige and status accrues to the ever 'masculine'. According to this logic attributes with feminine connotations can later on be adopted as 'masculine' attributes and so switch from low to high status, only now they are no longer 'feminine'.
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OSRThttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07184585670318002537noreply@blogger.com1