Gender

Trans Pride Brighton – Streaming to 50,000 Viewers

I’ve spent the past 7 months working with Trans Pride Brighton to organise their first ever livestream Pride event. Trans Pride Brighton has been going since 2013 and is the largest Trans Pride event outside the USA. This year’s online festival showcased the work of trans, non-binary and intersex performers and activists to an audience of 50,000 people. We even made it onto the Twitch homepage! Check out the event here.

Mapping Feminists Coding Practices Symposium

I spent yesterday up at the University of Sussex at a free symposium hosted by the Feminist Approaches to Computational Technology (FACT///.) research network. Despite being one of my local universities I don’t make it up to campus nearly often enough, so it was great to meet some of the researchers based at the Sussex

Meet: Seattle Attic

Seattle Attic is a feminist makerspace in the suburban Fremont neighbourhood of Seattle. Since opening in 2013 they’ve inspired various other feminist hackerspaces to open around the US, including Double Union in San Francisco (which I wrote about in an earlier blog post). The Attic aims to be a welcoming place for women to work

Meet: Mothership HackerMoms

Mothership HackerMoms is a women’s makerspace in Berkeley, California, just across the Bay from San Francisco. Its aim is to provide a community and co-working space for women with childcare responsibilities who otherwise would find it hard to have time to work on their own projects and may end up staying at home and becoming

Meet: Double Union

Double Union is a feminist hackerspace in San Francisco, located on an industrial estate in the Potrero Hill neighbourhood next door to the building that used to house the offices of the Mythbusters TV show! DU was originally inspired by another feminist hackerspace, Seattle Attic, which aimed to be a welcoming place for women to

Delusions of Gender and Technological Ability

When I tell people about my PhD—that I research ways to make technology more engaging for women—I usually brace myself for a reply like this: “Why would you bother to do that? Everyone knows men are just better at technology. It’s science!” It happens more often than you would think, and more often than I’d

Accessing the Means of Production

A key problem created by gender imbalances in the tech and engineering industries is that it means fewer women than men have access to the means of designing and producing technological artefacts. If most programmers and engineers are men, then most software and hardware is going to be designed by men. As the sociologist Judy

Seriously, Why Do We Still Have Different Academy Awards for Male and Female Actors?

I hate gender-specific job titles with the power of a thousand suns. As well as perpetuating the idea that there are only two genders that everyone has to fit themselves into, it seems so derogatory to shove an ‘-ess’ on the end of a regular job title just because somebody who identifies as a woman