Disturbing stuff happening at the University of Waterloo

Normally I try to focus on the positive for this blog, but I think it's important to be aware of this story:

For just under a month, women at University of Waterloo have been terrorized by an anonymous propagandist who claims that women’s “defective moral intelligence” poses a serious risk to the planet. ... [The communications] have bit by bit advanced the thesis that women should not be educated as highly as men, and that universities should not teach gender equity, because woman’s deceptively weak exterior hides her evil interior. When women are educated and treated as equals, according to the propagandist, they pose a real danger to the planet.

While everyone hopes these are just delusional rantings and will stop at that, women at UW are understandably worried that this is a precursor to violence like the massacre at École Polytechnique in Montréal.

Having been the target of such ravings in the past, I really feel for the women at Waterloo. You try to convince yourself that it's not a threat to your safety so you can continue your life, but you really can't be sure. They've had to shut down the university’s volunteer-run Women’s Centre and LGBT student centre out of concern for the volunteers' safety, and that seems like the right choice to me but must be frustrating at a time when women might want more support available to them, not less.

Read more, including how poorly the administration has responded to the threats, at Hook and Eye: How we're 'celebrating' International Women's Day at the University of Waterloo

Blog inciting hatred against women ruled legal

It turns out that Canadian laws against incitement of hatred were written to protect minorities, and do not include women: Blog inciting hatred against women ruled legal.

Yet Another Inappropriate Conference Talk

Remember that Rails CouchDB debacle a couple of months back? Wouldn't you believe it, but yet another clueless presenter has gone and upped the ante at Flashbelt.

Read about it here, and see my reaction here.

Feel free to light up the blogosphere on this one. If a big stink is made every time someone tries to get away with this, they'll eventually learn. I hope.

You put WHAT on your slides?

The vast majority of time, I don't have to think about sexism. But every once in a while, someone crosses the line. It sounds like this is what happened at a Ruby on Rails conference recently:

The second low point was Matt Aimonetti’s talk “CouchDB + Ruby: Perform Like a Pr0n Star.” It is unfortunate that he took this joke too far. What might have been a short, juvenille, eye-rolling bit of humor continued throughout the talk to become increasingly disturbing.

Awkward. Definitely awkward:

Then I encounter a woman’s thonged rear on the screen at a conference, 20 feet tall, and I remember, oh yeah, people like me don’t belong here.

But, honestly, this sort of thing happens often enough that I hear stories about it all the time. So why am I posting about this one? Well, this time, someone helpfully collected a selection of thoughts from actual women on the subject, and it's pretty illuminating, even funny:

What about a presentation about writing code on deadline: “Delivering Like a Birth Mom.” Or how about graphic images of up-close breastfeeding in a talk titled “Nursing Your Projects Along.” I have four kids. I breastfed. I’ve hunted. I even like porn! But two great tastes don’t always taste great together, and that is the point that so many seem to have failed to make, or to get.

The quotes include some great commentary on the usual "it's a joke!" defense:

And if people don’t “get” your “jokes,” the correct response is not “There’s something wrong with you” but rather “Lemme take that one back to the drawing board.” Teachers don’t get to blame their students, writers don’t get to blame their readers, and comedians never get to blame their audience.

And they talk a little bit about how sometimes the responses in the aftermath are much more problematic than a few softcore porn slides:

The key is the right to complain safely. When complaints are predictably met with accusations of “overreacting”, “political correctness”, and “intolerance”, the resulting message is: Be like us, be silent, or leave.

I feel a bit like an onlooker at an accident scene reading this stuff after the fact. But it is rather fascinating to see the reactions. Unsurprisingly, they are varied, although most tend toward unimpressed with the slides and the talk.

One of the women who tweeted about this commented that it reminds her some of a previous incident in another community, so I'm going to end with a choice comment from the post she linked:

It is an unfortunate situation that often people when they're told, "hey, would you please be polite?" they respond with "NO, BECAUSE THAT INFRINGES UPON MY HUMAN RIGHT TO BE AN ASSHOLE!"

Inappropriate

Yesterday, I had a CU-WISE poster removed from the lab in which I teach.

It was one of our older First Year Experience posters, which had the face of a young woman in a classroom on it. It had been defaced some time ago with the words "psychology student" -- the implication to me being that a pretty girl couldn't possibly be in CS.

It irked me, but I didn't bother to do anything about it. Frankly, Carleton does do photo shoots where they take whoever volunteers and shoot them pretending to be students of which ever department needed photos; maybe she was a psychology student who someone knew?

But this week, someone had added further defacement to the poster in the form of pornographic stick figures, labelled so you could tell exactly what they thought their very male computer science student should be doing to the female psychology student.

Um, yeah. Not Appropriate. I had the defaced poster removed.

It boggles the mind that I even had to do it.

"IT Security Girl of the Year"

I came across this blog post about the dubious IT Security Girl of the Year contest, and thought I should share the story.

The short version: FRHACK, a french security conference, was offering an award for "IT Security Girl of the Year."

It was a rather tastelessly advertised award, it could be said: Check out the advertisement here. It certainly says "pinup girl" a lot more than "competent security professional" (right down to, apparently, having the award handed out by a former beauty queen!)

And then FRHACK threatened legal action against the person who posted that screenshot along with critical commentary, because the image contained copyrighted material. The obvious suspicion is that it was a way to censor any controversy.

But a little research later, turns out FRHACK didn't own the copyright of the image in question. They wound up being the ones asked to take it down, while the blogger was allowed to keep the screenshot to go with the post about how inappropriate it was.

I'm kinda appalled by the award to begin with, but also amused by how this particular story worked out in the end!

(For more details here's the original post.)