I’ve been a bit lax in updating this space with my latest columns, so here’s a quick rundown for you. I wrote about a cool new mapping tool, Safe2Pee.org, which allows users to share information about establishments where restrooms are gender-neutral. For trannies and gender-ambiguous people, going to the bathroom in a public restroom can be a frightening experience — sometimes they’re ridiculed, confronted, or even kicked out of a restroom because they don’t look like “proper women” or “proper men.” Safe2Pee is a high tech solution to this annoying social problem.

I was on a gender politics binge, so the following week I wrote about representations of astronaut Lisa Nowak in the media. I was pleased and surprised that nobody blamed her breakdown on her gender. Instead, her crimes were explained in the context of job pressure — just the way they would have been if she’d been male. It seems strange to be happy about sensationalist articles about a woman who assaulted somebody, but I thought it was a heartening moment in the evolving public image of a female geek.

Finally, I wrote about a bizarrely retrograde study out of Stanford that “proved” men act exactly the same in virtual spaces (like SecondLife) as they do in real life. The study made the New York Times and many other major media outlets, and yet nobody bothered to check on the researchers’ methods, which were shaky to say the least. Check it out if you’re interested in watching me debunk bad science made worse by gender bias.

Also, Charlie and I were on the Robert Scoble Show talking about our book She’s Such a Geek. We had lots of fun, and wound up talking a lot about how men and women need to network with each other more.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 13th, 2007 at 12:50 pm.
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