I dislike shopping, home sales parties, any type of “shower” (baby or bridal), and admittedly, the Stooges.
I love gory horror, Mafia movies, fishing, and watching boxing and baseball.
Yeah, but can you hock a lugey?
Not in mixed company. 
I don’t think anyone has said it is stereotype threat all the way down. But being the “oddball” is not a position anyone likes to be in–even when there isn’t a stereotype threat to contend with.
I’ve had to deal with the stereotype threat. But the stereotype threat isn’t nearly as exhausting as always feeling like an outsider to a pre-established culture.
Let’s take your coding example. Let’s say there’s a woman who is a capable coder, but she–being your typical girl–was not allowed to hold herself up in her bedroom 24/7. Her parents encouraged to play sports and socialize, in addition to learning to code. And she is a good programmer.
But she decides that she’d rather not study programming in college, because she knows she doesn’t want to deal with the stereotypical culture associated with programmers. She likes coding, but not to the exclusion of everything else. And she doesn’t want to be associated with people who are that obsessed.
Perhaps if the culture was not one of aspie obsessives, maybe it would be more appealing to women (and others as well). The primacy effect, more than stereotype threat, could explain the “lack of preference”. That is to say, whoever dominates a field first (obsessive males) gets to dictate what the culture will be and who gravitates towards it.
Interestingly, though, men haven’t always been the rulers of computer programming:
When programming was “women’s work”
There used to be a time with psychology was also dominated by men. Back in those days, it was believed the field just wasn’t appealing to women. And now we see how crazy that notion is.
I agree with you that women are probably less likely to be as highly specialized in their interests as men are. But there’s no good reason to think that specialization translates into higher competency or that it is needed for mastery of a subject.
Agreed although I lump much of that in to the laziness of assuming away the distribution. That form of laziness is underpins the creation of cultural standards that are very binary and reinforces the confirmation bias to stick with them.
This one is!
This one does!
I’ve known non-conformist men who were beaten for their oddballness… but that was back in the 1970’s when beating homosexuals was also seen as acceptable, and indeed the two groups were assumed to overlap much more than they actually do.
Speaking as a life-long tomboy subjected to all sorts of crap due to my “unladylike” interests - there has long been an assumption by some folks that if you aren’t a stereotypical girl you’re either a bull dyke or “worse” (transgender, both, whatever).
Actually, a lot of the GUYS were complaining about the chainmail bikinis and how ridiculous they were. A substantial number of male WoW players do in fact play female characters. Enough so that there was yet another vocal sub-group who wanted to forbid people from playing a character a different gender than their real-life gender. Which, of course, leads to the whole problem of how in the world you’d enforce that, but yes, there are men/boys out there threatened by someone playing a cartoon character in a different gender. Also, because I think it skeeved them out that they sometimes discovered that the “girl” they were hitting on/harassing was actually a guy.
Word. Some people argue that fewer women are interested in STEM, for example, but the actual cause of the low numbers is institutionalized sexism and the way we socialize girls that divert them away from STEM. Some girls stop getting involved in science classes because they’re being told implicitly and sometimes explicitly that girls don’t like science or aren’t good at it or that it’s a boy’s thing. (Remember the Barbie doll that said “Math is hard”?) Some women drop out of STEM careers because trying to have a career in an industry which still doesn’t take you very seriously, pays you less than the guys, and limits your advancement opportunities because “girls aren’t good at science” is a frustrating, uphill battle that not everyone wants to take on and fight every workday of the rest of their lives.
This.
No, they aren’t. It doesn’t matter why females are less interested in video games in general, or in the kind of game you’re selling specifically, you have to deal with the fact they aren’t. Unless you manage to have a say in how children are raised (assuming that this different level of interest is purely cultural) in order to make sure girls and boys we’ll be equally interested in your games when they’ll turn 15.
Game companies don’t get to change the cultural mold, they have to deal with the cards they’re handed. And presumably there are more people who won’t buy your game if it lacks the bikini than people who won’t buy it because it does include the bikini.
Maybe the marketing guys are fools who don’t know what they’re doing and it never occured to them that they could remove the bikinis and attract hundred of thousands of bikini-hating female geeks, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
I horrified my best friend’s other friends at her baby shower because there was a game where we had to melt the ice cube around a plastic baby.
So I put it in the microwave.
Well, what the hell else was I supposed to do?
In case it’s not obvious, I hate shopping, home sales parties, showers, and when women and men at parties segregate by sex and the women talk about shopping and kids and reality tv bullshit.
I think this gets back to things that are NOT binary but more of a spectrum, albeit a spectrum brightest on the extremes.
There were times when I was very young, when told “young ladies don’t do that!”, I would angrily say “Then I won’t be a young lady!”. Apparently this was not the correct response! Some might have interpreted that as I wanted to be a boy, but I didn’t want to be a boy, I just wanted to do the same things as boys. When you’re very young, though, you might have trouble articulating that, which, combined with adults with very narrow viewpoints, could cause problems.
Of course, that is the very reason why, when someone is gender-questioning, no permanent alterations are made for quite some time. While I’m sure that can be frustrating for genuine transgender people it does act as a filter for those who aren’t but, due to not conforming to stereotypes, don’t quite fit the mold considered normal. This is even more critical when it comes to children who often have trouble articulating their inner states well.
That said, I don’t think it’s a huge risk. Especially now, as opposed to when I was a child, there are sufficient adults in the public eye who don’t conform to old fashioned gender stereotypes that open minded people can accept a more nuanced approach to gender/social/whatever roles.
The more society mandates strict gender roles the more people will fall outside those pigeon holes.
The thing is, “gender nonconformity” is not and never has been defined solely as “transgender”. That’s why we have long had terms like “tomboy” and “sissy”, through much less flattering and more insulting terms, long before we ever get to “transgender”.
Hellooo… sock darner, here. But yeah, I’m weird…
I think a lot of those biology-based differences are similar to differences in, say, height. In general men tend to be taller and women shorter, but we’ve all met extremely tall women and extremely short men. In general each gender has certain preferences and interests but not conforming exactly should be seen as no more pathological than a woman being six feet tall or a man five feet tall, or for that matter no more peculiar than being left as opposed to right handed. Just normal human variation.
For decades I played male characters in video games because I had no choice. Then, starting with one of the Myst games I could customize my character to not only have the same gender, but to look quite a bit like myself… and ever since I’ve been playing almost entirely female characters because I now have that choice. I didn’t even realize I had that preference until I had a choice.
It’s not that I would never again play a male character, but it sure it nice to have a hero that looks more like me than not.
Um… well, that’s an interesting question.
As noted, in the later Myst games you had a lot of customization options so you could make your character look a lot like yourself if you chose… or like someone completely different (which can also be appealing).
In World of Warcraft my main character is female but… she’s a 8 foot tall bovine biped with horns, hooves, fur, and a tail so I’m not sure how “womanly” you’d consider her. She is, most decidedly, more gracile and more humanly proportioned than the males of her species. WoW has a considerable number of character races like that - not human, but with the females more human looking than the males.
Which is a point a lot of people have made: in that game, you often aren’t even playing a human. Wonder how that changes the question?
WoW only requires cooperative play if you’re raider - PvP doesn’t require it, and there is sufficient solo content that one can achieve very high level as a solo player, such as max character level and considerable in-game goals and achievements.
That said - 10 years ago when I started playing it wasn’t uncommon for women players to either play a male toon or avoid situations where their actual voices could be heard by other players. There were a number of times I was in a casually formed group where the other players were stating they’d never group up with a woman playing the game because women sucked at combat or whatever, never realizing that they were playing with a girl behind the keyboard.
It was equally amusing when those yahoos joined the guild for a raid and found out our top tank was >gasp!< a girl in real life!
So yes, the social/stereotyping/adolescent crap does exist and is a factor. It is not, however, the only factor at work.
Or maybe they could do the radical thing (like WoW did, eventually), and allow players a choice. In WoW, you do have the option to change the appearance of your armor. This means that some people choose to wear the chainmail bikini forever… and others choose never. Huh, what a notion, try to appeal to everyone!
Ahem. Girls Who Code.
Again, if Barbie says Math Is Hard, how common is it for a teenager to be able to throw off that socialization?
Try me. I love the brothers Horowitz and Mr. Feinberg. You can keep your Curly Joe and the other guy. I’m partial to Shemp.
Ahem…that link doesn’t quite convince me.
I clicked on it, and found myself immersed in a girly world: where everything is pink, and all the girls are smiling in happy social groups, having a good time with their friends while they do a few techie things. It’s a good, upbeat site dedicated to helping girls learn the STEM curriculum .
But I’ve never heard of a female coder living the geek lifestyle that marshmallow describes. I think that really is a male-only thing.
Well now I’m in love. Even other men don’t like Shemp as much as I do.
Thank you. Very interesting.
True - you can make it to max level, but if you want to see the end game content, it’s primarily raid content. Granted, Blizzard has gone out of their way to make even end game raid content accessible to anyone who wants to take a stab, but it still requires either cooperative play or that you wait several years for it to be soloable. The game is actually pretty rich in solo content, but there are definitely some major aspects of it that are essentially dependent on cooperative play (essentially all of modern PvP, for example, is team-based).
This is slightly less true in this expansion - which is one of the reasons this expansion has not been popular, actually. In this expansion, it’s not actually necessary for you to ever stir your ass out of your garrison to hit max level (and even get the raid gear). Interestingly, this has driven a whole lot of players away from the game.
Also, to return to the topic at hand, Blizzard is actually one of the game companies who are making a real effort towards inclusiveness or at least actively avoiding exclusiveness at any rate (one of two big gaming companies doing so I can think of offhand), and have been for some years now. There’s still plenty of stuff in there for the chain-mail bikinis crowd, but it’s purely optional these days, which is a nice change.
This worries me, too.
I have a friend who is struggling with his gender identity who is frustrated by how binary the norms are. I think he’s going to settle on being a non-gender-conforming guy. A sissy. But that’s a really hard choice, and not one the trans community really supports.
Another example of Blizzard having a clue, or at least being open to listening, was the ending quest for the Pandaran starting area where the quest text varied based on the gender of the character - it was rightly pointed out that the original version for the female toons was sexist and Blizzard actually did change the wording. And apologized. It wasn’t the biggest issue (and predictably there were some who got hot and lathered over them changing something that “minor”) but it did show that they weren’t entirely clueless and have some respect for their playerbase.
Truth. They are at least making an effort, which is more than many game companies are doing. Interestingly, I’ve noticed with WoW in particular that as time goes on and more content is released, the content released has been increasingly. . . egalitarian in tone. More and more often, one sees major characters (both heroes and villains, actually) who are female. I sort of appreciate that they didn’t do the thing where all the female NPCS are some combination of damsels to be rescued or shining Heroes Of Light And Perfection. Several of the major NPCS in the most recent expansion are not only female, but on the antagonist side of things. The female NPCS are interesting - and often flawed - characters, not just McGuffin-style ciphers.
I have to give Blizzard props for at least attempting to improve the things that are in their control. There’s not realistically much they can do about controlling the more obnoxious playerbase, but they do make an effort where it’s possible for them to do so.
To be fair to the game industry as a whole, it’s only fairly recently that the topic of sexism in gaming has really been getting any attention - and there are definitely examples of large gaming companies essentially going “Shit. We totally are doing that. Our bad - let’s see if we can do better.” and then following up by actually attempting to do better. I think the one productive thing that the whole stinking GamerGate fiasco did was shine a light on the whole issue. As much ugliness as there was in that whole mess, there were a lot of both professional (or well-known) male gamers and professional game designers who came out publicly on the “This is terrible and we’ve been at least peripherally complicit in allowing it to continue” side of things.
I’m at least marginally hopeful that more companies will head in a Blizzard type of direction with their games - after all, games (and major content expansions of games) are in production for pretty substantial amounts of time before release - so change can be pretty slow.