Annalee Newitz and I were lucky enough to have the chance to go down to the Google.com headquarters and read from She’s Such A Geek recently. Also joining us were Ellen Spertus and Jenn Shreve, two contributors to the book who work at Google. Instead of reading my piece about being a health care policy wonk, I decided to read from a new piece about being a science fiction writer. Anyway, Youtube has finally posted the video of the event, and it’s online here.

When a guy tries to negotiate for better pay and benefits, male bosses just accept it as normal behavior. But when a woman does the same thing, the men considering her for a job are likely to decide she’s “not nice” and decide they don’t want to work with her. So women who actually stand up for themselves and ask for decent pay and benefits are less likely to get the job. Or if they do get the job they’re applying for, they’ll start out at a disadvantage, among coworkers who think they’re “not nice.”

That’s the gist of a new study reported in the Washington Post (via the Washington Monthly.)

“What we found across all the studies is men were always less willing to work with a woman who had attempted to negotiate than with a woman who did not,” [researcher Hannah Riley] Bowles said. “They always preferred to work with a woman who stayed mum. But it made no difference to the men whether a guy had chosen to negotiate or not.”

As I mentioned back in February, I’ve had two speculative fiction writing careers: a fairly awful one as a boy, and a somewhat better one as a girl.

Around the time I started flexing my girl-muscles, I stopped writing so much science fiction and switched to literary fiction.* This was a good move, because my speculative fiction mostly really sucked.

I spent a few years in a writing group, where the guys mostly wrote science fiction (Space battles!) and the women mostly wrote fantasy (Bards! Anti-abortion vampires!). As a guy, I wrote science fiction too, but my efforts were never quite nerdy enough.

“The science should be the main character in your story,” one guy in the group told me a few times. “Your actual human characters should have, like, conflicts and stuff. But the science is the star.”

I tried really hard to make the science the star of my stories. My first dozen or so science fiction stories were pretty “plot oriented” in any case.

I was very proud of myself when I first learned how to write endings. I’d gotten pretty good at beginnings, and okay at middles, but I had an ending issue. My early stories had a pretty pat formula: the protagonist faces a problem involving science (usually in the first sentence) and struggles with it for about 2,000 words. And then the protagonist resolves the conflict (usually in the final sentence.) Eat your heart out, Raymond Carver!

So it was super helpful to start writing literary fiction instead. Not just because science couldn’t be the star of a story about roccoco design. I also needed to make sense of my bizarre new habitat. Moving to San Francisco and changing from a polite boy to a foul-mouthed girl, I found identities latching onto me like barnacles. I needed to model the world I’d come from and the world I’d found myself in, and figure out how humans operated in both places. I needed a field guide for the alien creature I’d become.

In many of my “literary” stories, weird things still happened. People still had conflicts, albeit without any pat resolution. The universe remained a ludicrous enemy to people. I tried to map not just the sharp edges of our alleged reality — but also the contortions people take on to avoid those edges.

One major benefit of literary writing: people assumed everything I wrote was autobiographical. And yet they also felt free to psychoanalyze the “me” in my stories, in a bracing way. One literary-magazine editor called me up and talked for an hour about a story he was publishing. He felt my trans protagonist suffered from “phallic access” problems. He had some great ideas for how to make the story more emotionally real and intense, but he also wanted to get to the root of my character’s penis envy. It sort of reminded me of the way my old writing group would nitpick my science and assorted plot devices. Plus, it was like free therapy!

As my stories got stranger and more tangled, I started reaching for metaphors that would let me probe into the heart of their emotional chaos. If only there was some way I could work in some story elements that were both surreal and yet concrete! I groped for a way to reify the strangeness of “real” life and take my characters beyond normal experience. And little by little, I found myself writing speculative fiction again.

Soon enough, I was thinking about going to conventions and rejoining the ranks of the science fiction nerds. The only question in my mind was, would they accept me as a girl? Especially a strange girl whose stories were a bit betwixt and between?

* Yes, I know genre dividers are really imaginary and meaningless. And the genre lines are never as tidy as people like to pretend. Lots of literary writers dabble in speculative fiction, and people like Kelly Link and Jonathan Lethem have won mainstream literary cache. At the same time, the death of genre boudnaries is greatly exaggerated. The New Yorker and Analog haven’t merged yet. For the most part, speculative fiction and literature target different groups. Most speculative fiction remains noticeably nerdier, and dorkier, than most literary fiction. And both literary fiction and speculative fiction each still has its own set of unexamined assumptions and tropes.

According to an article in the Calcutta Telegraph, 30 percent of local cyber criminals are women:

Women are not just victims of cyber crime. An increasing number of them are committing the crime themselves. “We have registered complaints against eight women in the past year who allegedly committed crimes using their personal computers or laptops,” said Gyanwant Singh, the deputy commissioner of police (headquarters).

Most of the women are young and from well-off families. “They are educated and also tech-savvy,” Singh said.

Crimes include identity theft, credit card fraud and sex work. Even a year ago, police say they only came across women who were victims of cyber crime, not perpetrators.

Today’s San Jose Mercury News has an incredibly depressing article about the scarcity of women directors in Hollywood. (By contrast, female directors are common in Europe.) But this part of the article, for me, was by far the most depressing and rage-causing:

Actress Julie Delpy has wanted to be a director since she was 17, when she wrote her first script. In 1992, having acted for great filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and Krzysztof Kieslowski, she went to the NYU film school. She did well and graduated eager to get behind the camera. Years later, all she had to show for it was a short film and a indie feature that never saw theatrical release in the United States. She also had a drawer full of scripts that reflected her love of science fiction and other nongirlie topics. She couldn’t get any of them produced. “I was kind of losing hope,” she said. …

“This is why my first film is a romantic comedy,” said Delpy, now 37, with evident exasperation. “It is only because it is the first time people will give me money to make a film. People will trust a woman to do something with a relationship more than they will to do something with a war story or science fiction.”

“I would sell out to direct a big action movie if I had the opportunity,” she said. “I love to take risks, and I think I would do a great job. My dream is to do a science fiction movie, like ‘Close Encounters of a Third Kind,’ like ‘Blade Runner.’ But you need money to make ‘Blade Runner.’

I sometimes love small movies about relationships, which the article says are the only kind of movie that female directors are “allowed” to make. But honestly, a lot of romantic comedies and family dramas feel really cookie-cutter to me. And, as you can probably guess, I love science fiction. I would way rather see Delpy try to make another Blade Runner that she feels passionate about, than a dumb Woody Allen/Nora Ephron knockoff that she’s just doing because people expect it of her.

Why does Steven Spielberg get to make dozens of increasingly braindead films, when Julie Delpy doesn’t get her shot?

Tooting my own horn slightly… I wrote a piece on feminist bloggers responding to sexism in superhero comics, which is in the new issue of Mother Jones. There’s been a great surge among feminist comics blogs and online communities. The comics industry has gone from blithely ignoring feminist concerns to responding to them openly. At the same time, though, weirdly dehumanizing imagery and storylines remain very prevalent in superhero comics. The article’s not online yet, but should be within a few weeks.

Contrary to essentialist stereotypes, women speak roughly the same number of words as men. The female “chatterbox” stereotype is the counterpart to the idea that men are more laconic, but also more logical and better at sciencey stuff. There’s never been any proof of those stereotypes, and now there’s proof that they’re wrong:

Researchers recorded the daily conversations of 400 university students in the United States and Mexico over a period of several days. They found that females spoke about 16,215 words each day, and males uttered an average of 15,669 words, which was considered a statistical dead heat.

It seems like a minor victory, but this actually knocks out one of the keystones of dumb stereotyping. And maybe now that we all know women’s words are no cheaper than men’s, everyone will be just a little more likely to stop and listen when women talk.

Science Quiets Myth Of ‘Chatterbox’ Females [via Washington Post.]

“Geeks may be the consummate outsiders in our cliquey culture,” writes Keely Savoie - and then she goes on to reveal that she’s one of us. The science and culture writer’s review of She’s Such a Geek for Bitch Magazine was the Powells.com July 1st Review-a-Day entry. She writes:

As a longtime geek myself, I know it takes no small amount of courage, fortitude, and blind passion to endure, let alone flourish, in such a vacuum. She’s Such a Geek fills that void with 23 tales from intrepid and undeterred women who gamely tell the tale of the issues they have had to confront.

Thanks to Bitch, Powell’s and Keely for spreading the word!

“Everything around us has an invisible reason for existing. That’s why I like science,” the twelve-year-old girl narrator says at the start of the trailer for Future Weather, a new movie in progress. “I like science because it helps you measure changes, changes so small they’re barely visible to the naked eye,” she adds later. It looks like a really interesting film, with a protagonist who feels like a real kid, not a Hollywood kid. It’s about a girl who wants to help stop global warming, and then her mom disappears.

Not only that, but they’re one of the first films to go carbon neutral:

Future Weather will be the first carbon neutral film shot in Pennsylvania, but our green initiatives won’t end there. Our goal is to create a viable blue- or “green”-print for other local films to follow by testing inventive new green initiatives and creating partnerships with local business with sustainable practices.

Our goals are to conserve energy, reduce emissions, renew materials and finally, offset our unavoidable emissions. We will work with guidelines set forth by such groups as the Environmental Media Association and partner with an ecological consultant to create a practical plan for implementing green practices at our various locations. We will examine everything from our modes of transport to the solid waste we generate to the materials we use, including food, water, paper and cleaning supplies, and strive to use the ecological aternative. We are looking into obtaining alternative energy sources including solar power and biodiesel.

They’re trying to raise donations to finish the film.

Future Weather (via Zuska)

For the third year in a row, the National Medal of Science recipients were all men, according to a release from the Society for Women’s Health Research. Out of 97 winners over the past ten years, only ten have been women, the Society notes. Says Society CEO Phyllis Greenberger:

When the significant and ongoing contributions of women in science go unacknowledged, it can discourage even the best and brightest women from pursuing a career in these disciplines.

The Society is sponsoring the RAISE project, aimed at making sure qualified women are nominated for awards in science, medicine and engineering. The Society also offers its own award for women who make advancements in women’s health research.

But nothing else can substitute for calling out the National Science Foundation for its blinkered sexism. As usual, Zuska is on the case, and she attracts comments that are a mixture of illuminating and depressing. There’s also a link to a fascinating study on “Nepotism and Sexism In Peer Review.“