The first issue of Cerise, a new online magazine for women gamers, is up now. It covers “video games, tabletop games, and live action role-playing,” from the under-represented point of view of women. Topics include how to make your own miniatures, and the future of gender in games. Plus tips for video game designers wanting to attract female gamers, and an article explaining how all gamers can rip the head off of the “boys’ club” stereotype in video games.

And they’re looking for submissions for their second issue. They want to know how you got dragged, kicking and punching, into video games (or tabletop games, or LARPing):

Do you have a story to tell about an experience or two that shaped your identity as gamer? Do you want reflect on the good and bad of being a young gamer, or talk about what games helped get you into gaming, or think about the first character in a game that you really got attached to and why?

Submissions are due May 15.

I was surprised to see that my sister Andrea’s blog featured some greeting card copy I wrote way back in 1993 for VooDoo, MIT’s humor magazine. (My all-time favorite VooDoo headline, not yet online, is “MIT Pistol Team Beats Yale Fencing Team”.) My premise was that the cards offered in the campus bookstore did not meet the needs of MIT students (such as “sorry about your wrists”) and suggested some more relevant cards. Here’s a teaser:

I have enjoyed our electronic correspondence

Whenever my terminal notifies me that I have mail,
I eagerly check whether it is from you.
If it is, my heart races as I read and reread it.
It annoys me officemates that
I laugh aloud at your witticisms
and audibly groan at your criticisms,
But I care about you more than them.
I fondly remember the times we used “talk'’.
I confess that I saved away phrases of yours
that I was unwilling to let go.
I think we should meet each other in person some time.

I also slipped in some feminism:

You don’t belong at MIT (to most students)

I don’t know anything about your intelligence,
your grades, or your experience,
but that won’t stop me from telling you
that you don’t belong at MIT.
You were only admitted because you are
a legacy/woman/underrepresented minority/Iowan.
I realize that by saying this without knowing
anything about your abilities,
I imply that no member of your group is qualified,
but I say it anyway.

I found a great post and discussion on crying in the scientific workplace at A Natural Scientist via another fine blog, Am I a woman scientist? Jenny F. Scientist describes the double bind of being socialized as a girl that it’s all right to cry, but that in the science lab, don’t even think about it.

Not that crying is something that anyone plans on doing. And actually, with the exception of Rosie Grier singing “It’s All Right to Cry” on Free to Be… You and Me, I got the message growing up that crying is most definitely a huge no-no. And I knew that because I cried easily. I was the kid of whom teachers would say, “She’s very sensitive.” I didn’t really understand the phrase at the time, but I figured it wasn’t good, because I was the weirdo and the kids who called me “crybaby” were the norm.

(more…)

It’s been quite the week of gossip and spectacle for us living here in San Francisco. There’s been Gavin Newsom, Queen Mary 2, and Gavin Newsom again. Not much more to say about these than what’s already been said (my reactions were, “What the hell was he thinking?”, “Whoa, that’s a really HUGE ship!”, and “Ah, so that sort of explains why he wasn’t thinking. I hope he gets the help he needs.”

But astronaut Lisa Nowak just did Gavin Newsom a big favor by doing something even more bizarre and of even greater national—nay, international—newsworthiness. After all, Newsom may be the mayor of a major American city*, but being an American astronaut carries global cultural cachet. Astronauts are international cultural icons. We all read or saw The Right Stuff. American astronauts were first to land on the moon. Astronauts Sally Ride and Judith Resnik inspired me during my formative geek years as the first and second American women to go into space.

(more…)

And speaking of Liz Henry, she wrote a great piece about being a blogger for other, the magazine which Annalee and I publish. It’s a great exploration of blogging and geek culture, and how bloggers are making the world a better place. We just posted it online at othermag, and you can read it here.

The book reading at City Lights bookstore in San Francisco this past Thursday featured a lineup of contributors who wrote about the gaming and fantasy side of the geek realm, along with editors Annalee and Charlie. (It’s funny how the split happened that way—initially I had thought it would be cool to read at City Lights, what with its place in literary history, but it wound up that it made more sense for me to read at Modern Times on Feb. 1, which is more weighted towards the science geeks anyway.)

Even though I wasn’t reading, I decided to go anyway because I thought it would be cool to meet as many of the other contributors as possible and get them to sign my copy of the book—which is an appropriately geeky impulse, is it not? Besides, my husband was off on Easter Island and I had some serious procrastinating to do on some writing. So off to North Beach I went.

The cozy poetry room upstairs filled up with a crowd of nearly 100 people (I’m guessing) split pretty evenly between male and female. For some reason, my initial reaction was to be surprised by that—I guess I was expecting a more exclusively female turnout—but it just shows how I need to realize that there are more and more people who realize that feminism is not just a women’s issue but a human issue. So it was great to see the broad range of support.

(more…)

Last night, at the first San Francisco reading for She’s Such a Geek, a snippet of conversation went something like this:

Annalee: Kristin, your recent blog posts have been great! We’re looking forward to more!

Me, with a shrug*: Aw, well, I’m just picking at a wound that’s been festering for the past ten years.

Annalee: Well, if that’s the case, then let the blog be your lance!

And you know, Annalee had taken the metaphor about as far as it could go.

But I should have known that a woman who wrote an entire book about monsters and capitalism would have some grotesque imagery at her fingertips to parry with.

I will blog more about last night’s reading later….

*Of course, from all those years of being called a brain accusatorily as if it were a crime, I learned to be modest and self-deprecating about receiving compliments. Part of the acculturation!

I told the truth in my essay “Job Security” in She’s Such a Geek, but what I didn’t tell you is that it’s not the whole truth. Yes, I did have the debacle of my first research project, and that shook my confidence about my chances for success in the highly male-dominated field of physics. My interactions with certain male students and the messages rattling around my head about women’s abilities influenced me to decide that it would be for the best if physics and I parted ways sooner rather than later. These things are all true.

But the trouble with narrative is that the writer has to select the details that support the major arc of the story and leave out the extraneous bits. I didn’t tell you in the essay that my particular research group was exceptionally gender-balanced. There were actually three women in my research group, out of six or seven grad students total. The undergraduates who came in to do thesis projects also had a fairly even gender ratio.

(more…)

I’d like to point y’all to a posting about She’s Such a Geek and the ensuing discussion over on SSAG contributor Suzanne Franks’ blog, Thus Spake Zuska. Suzanne, aka Zuska, wrote about someone who asked her for suggestions for books about women in science. Zuska suggested a couple of books, including SSAG, but the person responded that they didn’t feel our book was appropriate to put into high school libraries.

Zuska suspects that the “inappropriateness” of the book is due the fact that several essays have to do with sexuality and the female geek and perhaps some frank language. And she goes on to argue that you can’t have an honest discussion about women and science without acknowledging these issues. Here’s an excerpt of what Zuska writes:

A “role model” book for young girls has to address sex and sexuality. It has to show what it’s like to deal with the vast majority of boys who are intimidated by smart women; what it’s like to deal with the ever-present comments on your sexuality in the workplace; what it’s like to discover your sexuality within and because of your geekhood. I think these are the kinds of true life stories that can help girls, as much as or more so than one more nicely varnished volume about the handful of women who’ve won the Nobel Prize.

Writing about the intimate and personal lives of women geeks, and putting that writing into the hands of young girls, is a political act with the possibility for great reverberation. So it’s no wonder some people are going to be reluctant to find such writing “appropriate”.

Of course, you should read her complete entry.

Zuska is right that the truth isn’t very easy or welcome, because it can be a threat to the status quo. She’s talking here about the discussions of sex in the book, but I also think it’s important to talk about how science and technology careers are sold to girls as well. The thing is, the thinking seems to be that to inspire girls to keep up with science and technology, you have to keep it relentlessly positive, talking about how many opportunities they have and how great it is to be someone who’s succeeded in one of these fields. And it’s true—girls really do have lots of opportunities in the scientific and technical fields if they stick with it, and many women do succeed there. Inspiration most definitely comes from having good things to aspire to.

But not every female science/technology career thrives, and for a variety of reasons that can be very different from why men leave. It could be said, with apologies to Tolstoy, that happy careers are all alike, but every unhappy career experiences its own set of obstacles and setbacks. And I think that we shouldn’t sugarcoat the very real issues that a girl could face in her future if she’s considering going into some of the tougher technical careers.

(more…)

I think that Time magazine got it right when they named you the person of the year for the way that people are bringing all their perspectives online via social networks, blogs, podcasts, and videos. I especially appreciate and applaud the blogs written by a number of anonymous female scientists and engineers who give the dirt about what it’s like to be in their position. (Three examples are FemaleScienceProfessor, ScienceWoman, and the still-new Am I a Woman Scientist?, but each has links to plenty more such blogs kept by women in many different disciplines and at all levels of science from grad student to tenured professor.)

I wrote my essay for She’s Such a Geek because I wanted girls who were considering science as a career to learn from my mistakes. I believe my main mistake was that I didn’t talk to enough people to learn what a physics career really entailed before I committed to that path. Partly it was because I didn’t really give enough thought to issues pertaining to balancing work and personal life as an undergraduate—academic achievement had been priority #1 for me up until then, and I didn’t see anything changing any time soon—and also it was partly because I didn’t feel like there was any faculty member I could have opened up to and ask these things if I’d even known to ask them. Talking to a professor (and they were all male in the engineering and physics departments where I was) felt so intimidating compared to talking to the secretaries and admins there, who despite being warm, fabulous people, couldn’t give me the mentoring that I didn’t know I needed.

So my advice is, find female scientist mentors any way you can—and until you do, read these female scientist blogs. If you’re in a department where there’s only one or two female faculty members, you still can’t expect them to be able to mentor you. Those women have their research to do, just like every male professor in the department, and they probably have to work even harder to make sure that their work is perceived as equally competent to their peers’. Until you find the professor or postdoc or senior graduate students who you feel some chemistry with and who can give you practical, caring advice, you could do a lot worse than read these blogs telling the good, the bad, and the ugly about the lives of female scientists in academia today.

(Also note that this Dec. 19 NY Times article about some of the issues that female scientists are discussing today. It’s definitely progress that people are discussing issues such as unconscious bias, which weren’t even acknowledged when I was an undergrad and graduate student. I’d love to discuss this in a future post, because if I’m honest I internalized some of these biases myself—it would have been hard not to, being raised Catholic.)