On emotional labour

My awesome wife who's awesome wrote an amazing tweetstorm earlier tonight about the unpaid emotional labour women are socialised to do, and it’s made me pensive about a few things.

First up: I am absolutely guilty of a lot of these things. I hope less so recently than I used to be, but I have enough self-awareness to admit that yes, I have said and done these things. (She promises me it wasn’t directed at me, but that doesn’t mean I’m innocent—and I think I know her well enough to know she’d never subtweet the Hell out of me like that—but I think even that is part of the truckload of unpaid emotional labour that she, as a woman, has been brought up to do) And to be quite honest, if you’re a guy… you’ve done these things too. If you look at me and think to yourself, “well, I don’t think I’m like this,” you almost certainly are like that. Only if you can specifically identify things you do that are not like that… you’re like that.

Because, honestly, guys are socialised to do exactly that. And you even see a lot of it in what jobs in tech are coded as being “inherently” oriented toward men or women. QA and project management, which are both roles that require diligence, attention to minute detail, and an aptitude for predicting someone’s needs before they are aware of it, are coded as and performed by women much more than most other roles in the tech industry. Of tech roles within a tech company, they’re the only positions that I’ve consistently observed having anything close to gender-wise parity.

So why do I think that guys are socialised not to do this work? Because, let’s be honest, it is work. I had an opportunity to fill in for my team’s project manager (who, it’s important to point out, is a woman) late last year, and holy mother of God that job is hard. Like, Nintendo-hard. And at least she’s getting paid for it, but I guarantee she’s been doing this her whole life, because that’s what society’s taught her to do. And I haven’t. Instead, I’ve grown up around a lot of media that’s suggested that one set of gifts (chocolate, teddy bears, and diamonds) will satisfy any woman I may be involved with (here’s a hint: that’s a load of crap), and an escalating and never-ending series of ostensible jokes along the lines of “bitches be cray” when her birthday, or anniversary is forgotten.

And why the hell shouldn’t they be? Seriously, think about it for a minute. The person who you’ve decided to open up to and be most vulnerable with comes home on your birthday, or on the anniversary of the day you got married, and they have no idea what’s happened today, however long ago. They can’t bring it to mind at all.

Wouldn’t you be upset? I would be. I have been.

Long story short, just like math and art, the everyday things that women “just seem to do better than men” are things that they’ve practised, constantly, since they were very young. (Men have, conversely, been raised to ignore those things.) Anything you do every day of your life, for about as long as you can remember… yeah, you’re going to be pretty damn good at. Doesn’t make it easy, just habit. (Professional athletes are a great example of this) If you really want to show some kind of appreciation for the women in your life, and all the things they do for you… do them yourself.

We need a role model

So Notch (along with all the other founders, it seems) has resigned his position from Mojang, and publicly distanced himself from anything to do with Minecraft, now that he's personally worth in excess of $1B USD.

Why? The screed he left is a bit rambly, but seems to boil down to not wanting the responsibility for the overall Minecraft community. Some other of his writings definitely convey that he’s got pretty sick and tired of dealing with managing Mojang and all the extra issues that come with it. But he doesn’t want to have anything to do with Minecraft any more. He says, at the end, “Thank you for turning Minecraft into what it has become, but there are too many of you, and I can’t be responsible for something this big.”

I’m sorry, Notch, but you don’t have that choice. You are responsible for something as big as Minecraft, because you made it, and you put your name on it. You’re responsible for a one-hundred-million-strong user base, which means over the course of the last five years, you are invariably responsible for inspiring more than a couple of people to become programmers. I don’t think Star Trek had an audience that big when it was in production, and it’s only too easy to find stories of the actors—not even Gene Roddenberry, but James Doohan and Nichelle Nichols—talking about how fans approached them, repeatedly, at conventions, telling them that the show had changed their lives and given them a career (and in one case I can recall, Doohan saved a young woman considering suicide).

You’ve established a subculture within gaming, Notch, and it’s one that seems to have a level playing field amongst genders and ages. Your game does what no other game does, and considering the fucking shit show that is gaming culture right now, you owe it to the world to show that, in fact, some gamers can treat people with mutual respect. You are a role model, and this is the time, of all times, to act like one.

Minecraft’s great. I have the Pocket Edition demo on my iPad, and I pop it up every now and then. I’ve been considering shelling out the $7 to be able to play it properly. But if you’re going to act like this… you know, maybe I don’t want to.

Come back to Minecraft, Notch. Your audience needs you.

Women don't join this industry to fulfil your fantasies

It’s been another bad day week for men in the technology industry being complete and total shitheads to women.

Admit it, guys, we didn’t have very far to fall to hit that particular point. But last Friday uncovered a few particularly horrible examples of just how poorly some men can regard women, and how quickly others will come valiantly leaping to their defense.

My day opened up with being pointed to codebabes.com (no link, because fuck that). Describing itself as a portal to “learn coding and web development the fun way” CodeBabes pairs video tutorials with scantily-clad women, and the further you progress in a particular technology, the progressively less and less the instructors are wearing. As if software development wasn’t already enough of a boys’ club that has used busty women to get people to buy things (whether it’s the latest technology at an expo, or the latest video game), now somebody’s had the brilliant idea of having PHP and CSS taught by women in lingerie.

The project doesn’t even pretend to have any particularly noble purpose in mind. Above the fold on their site, the copy reads, “The internet: great for learning to code [and] checking out babes separately, until now.”

The mind boggles.

First of all—even if we were going to ignore everything about how socially backwards this idea is—is just isn’t an effective way to accomplish anything semi-productive. Did they not learn anything from trying to get off, playing video game strip blackjack? Or any other game where the further you progress, the more you see of a nude or semi-nude woman? Because this idea is clearly derived from those. The problem with those games is that in order to reveal the picture you want, you have to concentrate on the challenge you’re presented, but the more you concentrate on the challenge, the less aroused you are. The aims are in complete opposition to each other. If you’re trying to make learning a new technology a game, make sure that the technology is the aim, and the game is an extrinsic motivator. If you’re trying to look at naked girls… well, there are lots of opportunities to do that on the web.

But this problem is so much bigger than just being an unproductive way of trying to do two things at once.

What’s the catchphrase, again? “The internet: great for learning to code [and] checking out babes separately, until now.” These two things are implied to be mutually exclusive—that outside of the site, beautiful women and learning to write software have nothing to do with each other. That, were it not for these videos, beautiful women who look good in lingerie would have nothing to do with writing software.

So, if beautiful women who look good in lingerie would other have nothing to do with writing software, we can further assume that the creators are implying—and equally importantly, that their users will infer—that women know shit about computers (if I may coin a phrase).

Now, that being said, I’s quite sure that the women who are presenting these videos actually know what they’re talking about. There’s nothing more difficult than trying to convincingly explain something you don’t understand, unless you’re a particularly talented actor with a good script (see: every use of technobabble in the last thirty years of science fiction television). And I’m not trying to suggest that they should be accused of damaging the cause of feminism in technology. Why? Because there is nothing about this site that suggests to me that the idea was conceived of by women. The whole premise itself is simply so sophomoric that I can’t come to any conclusion other than that it was invented by men, particularly when the site’s official Twitter account follows The Playboy Blog, Playboy, three Playboy Playmates… and three men.

Software development, in most English-speaking countries, suffers from a huge gender gap, both in terms of staffing and salary. Sites like this will not do anything to close that gap, because all this says to a new generation of developers is that a woman’s role is to help a man on his way to success, and to be an object of sexual desire in the process—their “philosophy” flatly encourages viewers to masturbate to the videos.

What makes it that little bit worse (Yep, it actually does get worse) is that, on reading their “philosophy”, the creators also make it quite clear that they recognise that what they’re doing will offend people, and they don’t care. They say, “try not to take us too seriously”, and “if we’ve offended anyone, that's really not our goal, we hope there are bigger problems in the world for people to worry about.” Where have I seen these arguments before? Ahh, yes, from sexist men who are trying to shut down criticism of their sexist bullshit. The next thing I expect to see is them crying “censorship”. I’m not trying to prevent them from saying their repugnant shit. I would, however, like to try to educate them about why it’s hurtful, and why it’s something that they should know better than to think in the first place.

As for the rest of us, we need to make it clear that there’s no room for these attitudes in today’s software industry. That when somebody suggests visiting sites like this, they get called out for promoting sexist points of view. That when someone posits that a woman only got an interview, or even her job, because of her anatomy, that they get called out for thinking that she isn’t fully qualified to be there. If this industry has any hope at escaping the embarrassing reputation that it’s earned, we have to do better. We have to have to the guts to say, “that shit’s not cool,” to anyone who deserves it. Stand up for what you believe in.

The only limitation has been in your mind

A few days ago, Infinity Ward announced that the upcoming Call Of Duty: Ghosts would provide an option for players to inhabit the online mode of the game either male or female characters. Finally! About 14% of US Army personnel are women, and women are further underrepresented in Xbox and PlayStation users at 10%, and Infinite Ward has joined the ranks of enlightened game publishers, like BioWare, who recognise that they ought to reach out to all their customer demographics, not just the biggest one, because it's the right thing to do, even if they are a bit late to the party (2013, guys).

Right?

I want to believe that, really I do. The only problem is that producer Mark Rubin has gone on record explaining that the reason that CoD has never before offered women as playable characters was a technical limitation in the engine. Memory and processing requirements have, until now, been far too significant to provide players with the option of using multiple meshes in online play.

I might be able to believe that, if this were, I don't know... 1996. If I'd never played Quake 3 Arena on a sub-1-GHz system, which comes stock with a wide variety of meshes, and provdes players with the option of installing their own meshes, which would be seen by all players in the arena, all over the world. If I didn't own a copy of Halo 2, which allows players to appear on Xbox Live as either a Spartan or a Covenant Elite. If there wasn't a wealth of evidence supporting the fact that the technology has been out there to do exactly that for almost two decades.

Mark, if your engine can't handle showing characters with two different meshes in this day and age, on modern hardware, you are simply using the wrong engine, or you are abhorrently misusing it. But I find that hard to believe; if your engine was as shitty as it would have to be for your excuse to be realistic, then the Call of Duty franchise wouldn't be remotely as popular as it is.

Just admit it, Infinity Ward. You haven't offered women as playable characters because you didn't consider them a sufficient demographic to justify the expense of creating a second mesh (which, incidentally, would have been... What? 10K? 20? And what's your budget on these games?). You'll feel better, because you can also admit that you've been doing the wrong thing, and you want to make it up to the devoted women who play your games. That you want to encourage more women to play your games (because why wouldn't you? At 51% of the population, it's a huge market). That women deserve a hell of a lot better than the shit they receive from both the gaming industry and community, each and every day they play the games they love to play.

Anything other than the most bullshit copout to (dis)grace my screen in the last several months.