[Discussion] Feminism and social justice, plus FAQ!

This thread is for discussing feminist issues--from the narrow meaning (a movement for social justice in terms of gender equality) to the broader meaning (a movement for social justice, period), and from the scope of issues in gaming and geek culture to kyriarchy in general.

Basic questions are allowed here for now, we will split out a Q&A thread should it become necessary.

Get a front pocket wallet!!

IMAGE(https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51Mvt43Ek2L._AC_UL200_SR160,200_.jpg)

My wallet is always in my front pocket to a) deter pick pocketing in tourist-y areas, and b) reduce spine/back contorting. This may be complete quackery, but I have been told by medical professionals that a large wallet in the butt pocket can contribute to lower back pain and discomfort.

I go with the phone case wallet combo. No need for a Costanza wallet in this day and age.

IMAGE(http://www.iphone-cases.nl/media/catalog/product/cache/5/thumbnail/800x/17f82f742ffe127f42dca9de82fb58b1/s/e/sena_lugano_wallet_iphone_6_brown-3_1.jpg)

Okay group, the nature camo phone case for sportsmen was a rousing success. Chaos has intensified and our spies tell us that on multiple occasions the camo has confounded its owner after dropping the phone. Even campers were affected which was an unexpected bonus! With this victory under our belt the shareholders are anxious to hear our next proposal to intensify... Chaos. So, Chaos-artists, what could top making our victims pay for camouflaging their own phones from themselves?

Pacemakers that run from...

Everytime with the Pacemaker idea. Johnson, the medical liability alone increases Chaos internally! We are looking to externalize this Chaos. Hopefully in ironic and profitable ways...

*ding*

What sucks worse than losing your phone?
Losing your wallet?
RIGHT!
But what sucks worse than losing your wallet?
Losing... your phone?
RIGHT!!
*ding* *ding* *ding*
Clearly I'm sitting in the wrong chair! Ms. Emily, take this, your rightfully earned seat and tell us more about this wallet-phone-case scam!

So is anyone else going to the Women's March on Washington next weekend?

RedJen wrote:

So is anyone else going to the Women's March on Washington next weekend?

Yes, and THM created a thread for it.

https://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/...

I'll be there!

Also, I'll take this opportunity to point people towards this thread.

The van I'm coming down in on Friday night the 20th (staying at an airbnb in Baltimore and returning on Sunday the 22nd) might have an extra seat or two, if anyone is looking for a way in from NYC.

My wife's bringing a small mob up. Daughter, niece, sister in law and a couple of friends.

Well I just got back from a substitute teaching job at a local high school and everything went really well, but the classes I was substituting for were drafting and engineering, and I felt sad because there were only one or two females in each of the drafting I classes, and there were *none* in the engineering class. I would have thought things would be more improved gender-wise, especially since I knew a number of female CADD designers/engineers when I was working in corporate engineering.

bekkilyn wrote:

Well I just got back from a substitute teaching job at a local high school and everything went really well, but the classes I was substituting for were drafting and engineering, and I felt sad because there were only one or two females in each of the drafting I classes, and there were *none* in the engineering class. I would have thought things would be more improved gender-wise, especially since I knew a number of female CADD designers/engineers when I was working in corporate engineering.

That sounds like my college engineering degree. 105 students started, 5 were women. I think there were 2 left in the graduating class.

On the flip side, at least as far as my workplace is concerned, there’s a (relative) abundance of women engineers, at all levels, not to mention huge diversity of ethnicities and nationalities too. My team is 40% women, my immediate boss is a woman, and her boss is a woman.

It’s a really marked change from all the engineering jobs I’ve had in the UK, which were almost unilaterally sausage parties.

Yeah my college CIS courses were like 20 men and 2 women in every class.

But my dev team is actually 3 women and 2 men right now.

Stele wrote:

Yeah my college CIS courses were like 20 men and 2 women in every class.

But my dev team is actually 3 women and 2 men right now.

When I was in school only aerospace and chemical engineering had any decent numbers. (25% and 50% respectively). I heard that after the biomedical program started, they were a majority of women. STEM fields vary widely in my experience when it comes to male v female ratios. We have more female chemists here at work, but more male chemical and polymer engineers. The office in general is about 40% F to 60% M in the technical positions.

California's Kamala Harris is the first Indian-American woman and the second African-American woman to become a U.S. senator.

turns out over gendering roleseverything tends to cause problems when one gender up and outs for a day;
How Vital Are Women? This Town Found Out as They Left to March

krev82 wrote:

turns out over gendering roleseverything tends to cause problems when one gender up and outs for a day;
How Vital Are Women? This Town Found Out as They Left to March

Great article, finally got a chance to read it, but struck by an interesting section...

“I did have to laugh at the irony of my wife marching for equality in New York while I was missing the game and cleaning out the refrigerator,” Mr. Politi said.

A few folks on Twitter have been like "Let me fix that for you, you had to be a parent." Yes. That's what he's saying, but he had to be a parent on a day he's supposed to be working, because writing about sports is his job. Kind of disappointing, of all the examples in that article, how that specific one became kind of a joke when taken out of context.

Like that article is about supportive and progressive husbands... how did that become the article to pick at that way?

Am I the only dad who read that story and wondered what the big deal is? I mean, my dad is far from Mr. modern progressive but even he had no problems taking care of me in the 80s when my mom had to spend a Saturday at some mandatory teacher seminar. Maybe the real problem is how parent scope creep now requires kids to attend seven different activities on the weekend or elaborate birthday parties that might as well be formal affairs.

I mean, my dad was a lazy asshole who wanted as little to do with parenting as possible. But, I also know that is not really representative of all parents. It's a cliche of masculinity and patriarchy that needs to be smashed down with the rest of the patriarchy... most of my friends' dads, by comparison, were active participants and parents.

But, like you're in a town that was so overwhelmingly blue and not put off by Hillary (like 84% Hillary means not that many Bernie or Busters, which sadly had its own share of misogyny during the election) and with a bunch of dads who do help, including one who specifically noted, "the only difference this weekend is she's not here with me. So rather than us doing this together, it's just me, and that's weird... but I support my wife doing what she's doing."

I feel like the story was reaching for the cliche, then failed... possibly because they picked an area that has already moved beyond some of those gendered expectations. Amusingly, I think the article would be a great counter point to the weird resurgence I've seen the last two days of political commentary that hearkens back to the "typical suffragist family while mom is away" sh*t of the last century (Like, nope, real dads got this, maybe get your head out of your ass)... but I actually saw some folks I know who marched posting the clipped portion and laughing at that paragraph instead. Very weird.

It's definitely regional and generational.
My dad was good and probably helpful overall (especially when my sister and I were older), but I'm 95% sure he never changed a diaper until my son was born.
My wife and I are probably 50/50 now that she's not the primary food source and that seems to be pretty common with my peer group. However, I also ran into areas where it was still heavily loaded on mom's side.

jdzappa wrote:

Am I the only dad who read that story and wondered what the big deal is? I mean, my dad is far from Mr. modern progressive but even he had no problems taking care of me in the 80s when my mom had to spend a Saturday at some mandatory teacher seminar. Maybe the real problem is how parent scope creep now requires kids to attend seven different activities on the weekend or elaborate birthday parties that might as well be formal affairs.

My parents certainly weren't the pinnacle of feminism while I was growing up, but my mom worked in the evenings and my dad worked during the day, so my dad spent a lot of time taking care of me on his own. Overall though, I've read reports where women are, even now, still responsible for the majority of the childcare burden, so that's probably what this article was trying to get at, even though the examples weren't really all that good.

I didn't get the impression from the article that the town shut down at all. My thought while reading is that what happened to that town is going to be the same when a large part of the workforce is gone regardless of gender. It would be more interesting to hear from the women of that town, as in did they feel they returned to 200% more work due to their absences? Did the men leave a lot of things for "mommy" to deal with while the men believed they put in their fair share? Or was it really just no big deal for that particular town and the article is trying to make it into something more than it was?

Hey everyone, just a PSA that Plan B has a pretty long shelf life. Apparently up to 4 years (according to the last paragraph here)... And look right here! $34 for a 3 pack is pretty inexpensive!

Anita Sarkeesian has been doing this thing where she will showcase a woman from history on her youtube channel. I think they are worth watching. She did this with he last few videos so they are easy to find.

Baron Of Hell wrote:

Anita Sarkeesian has been doing this thing where she will showcase a woman from history on her youtube channel. I think they are worth watching. She did this with he last few videos so they are easy to find.

I Kickstarted the CRAP out of that (if you're talking about Ordinary Women). It's really great.

Eleima wrote:
Baron Of Hell wrote:

Anita Sarkeesian has been doing this thing where she will showcase a woman from history on her youtube channel. I think they are worth watching. She did this with he last few videos so they are easy to find.

I Kickstarted the CRAP out of that (if you're talking about Ordinary Women). It's really great.

Yeah that is what I was talking about.

I think we can all agree this is a step back:
Russia has officially decriminalized beating your wife
I don't even...

Yeah. Every time I think it's probably unfair to categorise Russia with cold war comic-book levels of villainy... they do sh*t like that.

To be fair, that's the Duma's ruling, and it's firmly under Putin's influence. Most of the people have moved on to the 21st century. Still, it's very chilling.

Arkansas Law Allows Men to Block Their Wives' Abortions, Since It's 2017 and Women Are Still Property Apparently

in which Arkansas sentences desperate women to even more secretive and dangerous methodologies. Given the ways things are going I fear this could become a federal thing soon enough, can the feds do that down there or is it state by state only?

Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber

As most of you know, I left Uber in December and joined Stripe in January. I've gotten a lot of questions over the past couple of months about why I left and what my time at Uber was like. It's a strange, fascinating, and slightly horrifying story that deserves to be told while it is still fresh in my mind, so here we go.

I joined Uber as a site reliability engineer (SRE) back in November 2015, and it was a great time to join as an engineer. They were still wrangling microservices out of their monolithic API, and things were just chaotic enough that there was exciting reliability work to be done. The SRE team was still pretty new when I joined, and I had the rare opportunity to choose whichever team was working on something that I wanted to be part of.

After the first couple of weeks of training, I chose to join the team that worked on my area of expertise, and this is where things started getting weird. On my first official day rotating on the team, my new manager sent me a string of messages over company chat. He was in an open relationship, he said, and his girlfriend was having an easy time finding new partners but he wasn't. He was trying to stay out of trouble at work, he said, but he couldn't help getting in trouble, because he was looking for women to have sex with. It was clear that he was trying to get me to have sex with him, and it was so clearly out of line that I immediately took screenshots of these chat messages and reported him to HR.

Uber was a pretty good-sized company at that time, and I had pretty standard expectations of how they would handle situations like this. I expected that I would report him to HR, they would handle the situation appropriately, and then life would go on - unfortunately, things played out quite a bit differently. When I reported the situation, I was told by both HR and upper management that even though this was clearly sexual harassment and he was propositioning me, it was this man's first offense, and that they wouldn't feel comfortable giving him anything other than a warning and a stern talking-to. Upper management told me that he "was a high performer" (i.e. had stellar performance reviews from his superiors) and they wouldn't feel comfortable punishing him for what was probably just an innocent mistake on his part.

It, uh, escalates from there.

Good grief