Anya’s character was far too flat for most of the series. Anytime she was on screen seemed less real.
How do you define smart? Or practical? Is it practical to spend hundreds of dollars on a handbag or shoes or fashionable clothes, but not on Star Trek memorabilia or comic books or computer games? Is it smarter to know how a spreadsheet works or what clothes work with each other in a fashion sense?
Actual second for the slightly autistic / obsessive bent defining someone as a ‘geek’. I drive my fiance nuts sometimes with the way I can focus on IT problems and work to the exclusion of all else, like I don’t even honestly hear her come home and we live in a small flat. And I’m only slightly a geek - I work in the business / customer relationship side of IT. 
ZebraShaSha writes:
> The main difference between a freshman at Georgia Tech and a senior is not
> what you have learned, what you have failed, how many classes you passed
> even if you failed every test, or how awesome you did at some LAN party.
> Mostly, it’s the difference between sitting in Brittan after a month your freshman
> year and counting 10 girls to the 50 guys and remarking to the people you’ve
> met (all guys) how weird it is. Not only that, but you witness, several tables
> away, another group of guys doing the same thing: counting, laughing, looking
> distressed. However, when you have a month left to graduate, maybe, maybe
> you’ll stop and go - man, in my 50 + class on analytical aerocivil wizardry, there
> were no females. Most, however, don’t realize - they become institutionalized.
This paragraph is such a structural mess that I have problems trying to understand what claim is being made here. I think it’s that the proportion of women in engineering is very small. This is probably true. Note that this is quite different from the claim that I made, that the proportion of women in math these days comes close to half. So why has the proportion of women in math increased over the past forty years from a fairly small proportion to nearly half while in engineering it’s gone from almost nothing to a significant but still relatively small proportion (maybe 10% to 20%)? I contend that this shows that the proportions in technical fields never had anything to do with the relative abilities of the sexes in the fields. They had to do with the image of the professions. Math was once thought of as a male profession, but now it isn’t anymore. Computer science isn’t as much thought of as a male profession. Engineering is still thought of somewhat as a male profession so there is still significant differences in the number of men and women going into the field.
Let’s face it; to a large degree it was simply a matter of sexism. In modern times, it’s much harder to get away with that kind of bigotry, with the result that the gender proportions of a lot of professions have changed quite a bit.
As for the more intellectual ones that are still heavily tilted towards one gender or another; I believe that is primarily ( but not entirely; sexism is weakened not dead ) a matter of preference. Short of shoehorning men and women into careers they don’t want by force, you aren’t ever going to get gender equality in the numbers sense in all professions, because men and women simply have different tastes, on average. That doesn’t stop some women from being say, engineers, being good at it, and enjoying it; but it does mean that there aren’t ever likely to be nearly as many women as men inclined to even try.
speaking as a woman geek … =)
Lets see - I have been doing mmorpgs since everquest was new, I beta test games for fun, am planning on going to BlizzCon in October this year, love SF cons expecially when they have my favorite authors as GOH, and took multiple years tracking down an obscure album that was stolen from me over 20 years ago to buy back the actual disc that was stolen from me [i recognize the very specific damage to one corner of the cover, it was nibbled on by a parakeet] off Ebay and track someone down to rip it onto cd so I could actually listen to it again =)
46 year old woman. [sorry guys, married…and I dont have a younger sister just like me!]
I agree with this statement. Any company is so ultimately terrified of lawsuits for sexual harassment that overt sexism, whilst not erased from people’s minds, is very much erased from any sort of corporate or educational policy.
Speaking in generalities and anecdotally, women in tech companies are in marketing, HR, and customer management - areas that reward creativity, inclusiveness, and political awareness of people’s interactions, which together are traditional ‘women’s’ values. Men are engineers, technicians, sales, and business leaders - areas that reward focus, obsessiveness, technical know-how as well as drive and sometimes aggression, traditional ‘men’s’ values. So I would argue that women tend to gravitate towards roles that work with their core skill set, thus making success more likely, just as men do - I won’t take a job that just doesn’t work with my character and desires and I have no interest in marketing or HR other than the girls.
I don’t think it’s some sort of conspiracy to keep women out of tech, just that they can do better elsewhere.
So far in this thread, the ‘geek’ label seems to be only applied to people who dive way into SF, sword-and-sorcery fantasy, and role-playing games.
How does it look if the definition of a geek is widened a bit, to, say, people with degrees in scientific fields, math, computer science, and the like, or people making their living in those sorts of fields?
Speaking as someone who makes his living as a statistician, there are lots of women statisticians these days.
I think you’re wrong, there - not what I was assuming. People as you describe - sci-fi fanboys or fantasy types - I would call ‘nerds’ rather than geeks.
Any technical / specialist role could be ‘geeky’ though. I am definitely strongly into the ‘geeky’ spectrum (high availability storage is pretty inherently geeky) but not a nerd - I don’t play with storage arrays in my spare time. And what I said above applies there.
Since we’re diagnosing and solving all of geekdom’s problems by way of anecdotal evidence…
When I was a chemical engineering student in the late 80s, half of the students in my department were men, half women. My co-op now is in the same program at Mizzou, and apparently the women have taken over (slightly). Chemistry in general is like that.
As to various types of cons, the attendees at the ones I’ve been persuaded to attend may or may not have been over populated by out-of-shape Comic Book Guys (and their female equivalents), but I really didn’t notice if there were more sedentary types there than I see at the Y.
Because every time I was more appalled by how much they all stank Personal hygiene worse than any of the Asperger’s-like engineers I used to take classes with (or, now work with). But at least that wasn’t gender-unequal, either.
I was just going by the examples given in the thread - heavily tilted towards Star Wars stuff, debating Battlestar Galactica on message boards, going to cons, gaming, and stuff like that.
I’d say it depends on the environment. It might be norway-spesific, but shegeeks here are only “few”, not “mythical”.
The reenactment crowd seems to be 30/70 split between guys and gals, with the boys atleast as sewing-obsessed as the girls (making chainmail is technically “knitting”, so that might scew the numbers some.)
Live Roleplaying (of the scandinavian/norwegian variety. Very different from american LARP. We jokingly call it Laiv, and it is very geeky) is probably split the other way, with a slight overweight of girls.
The local (Oslo) gaming con (Arcon) probably has something like 20% girls. I think the Bergen (Raincon) and Trondheim (Hexcon) cons have similar numbers, although I’ve only personally attended Arcon.
I’m girl geek myself, so…
Might as well throw one more anecdote on the pile. I was a freshman at the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1999. That year the school was crowing about the fact that the male to female ratio finally dipped below 3:1 (it’s currently at 2.2:1).
But that ratio was for all full-time students. In my major (IT), there were only a handful of women. But in the science department (which I think we can all agree is pretty geeky), it was probably 80-90% women. So while men have an advantage, they don’t have a huge advantage and it really depends on the major.
But I think the real disparity is (as others have said) in the looks department. Shegeeks are HOTHOTHOT to male geeks, but most are still relatively attractive compared to “normal” girls too. It’s a lot easier to hide your geek status if you don’t outwardly look like a geek. And male geeks are much more likely to look like a geek.
Yes, but to this female geek male geeks are HOTHOTHOT!!! And the best looking one’s mine, glasses and all!!
I’ll stop drooling on the keyboard now.
Well then, since the question seems logical and not too off-topic: what’s the difference between geeks and nerds, besides that only nerds have movies named after them? 
This has been discussed a couple of times before (I’ll skip on finding the threads, if it’s all the same to you). The tentative consensus is that geeks obsess over trivia, entertainment, and other non-productive activities like games (D&D), TV series (Whedonverse), movies (Star Wars), while nerds obsess over productive things like physics, chemistry, history, programming, and such. Both tend to focus on intellectual or at least non-physical pursuits, and social skills may or may not be present.
What surprises me is how many differences there are in where people draw the line between geek and nerd. The above seems to be the most accepted version, though.
Those strikes me as fairly arbitrary and not generally accepted definitions of the words “geek” and “nerd.” Incidentally, does anyone have the proportions of degrees given to men and women (say, in all American universities) in various technical subjects for all years (or at least some years) over, say, the past forty or so years? No, the proportion at your university isn’t good enough. I’d like to be able to quote definitive statistics and not my personal guesses.
…
I agree. Around here, the distinction seems to be one of action. “Geeks get it done” and all that. Nerds obsess, but they may or may not actually produce anything from this obsession. Geeks invariably do produce.
[Meaningless side note] One of the favorite shirts my Forensics Team has is the the one that says (front) Speech Geek (back) Hey, at least we’re not Band Nerds! [/msn]
How are looks a skill?
Well, …
wearing colors that flatter your skin tones
wearing styles that flatter your body shape
cutting or styling your hair to accentuate your eyes & cheekbones, and minimize your nose (for example), and in general flatter your face shape
cosmetics:
choosing colors appropriate to your coloring and the occasion
applying lip-line to make your lips fuller and better defined
applying blush to highlight cheekbones or thin a full face
applying eye color to widen close-set eyes and enhance the natural color
using darker/lighten colors to lengthen a broad nose, define a chin line, accentuate cheekbones and eyes
and doing all this with a light enough hand that you don’t add a full eighth inch to your face
These are all skills.
And ‘to the right’ in the standard usage for a bell curve depicting variation in a population, when compare to another population for the same characteristic.