Girls Have Cooties

Professor Meraz's lecture focused on the gendering of the Internet. I think it’s pretty safe to say that people have experienced some form of gendering or sexism in their lifetime, whether consciously intended and/or perceived or not. We all go about our lives with notions of what men “do” and what women “do”, they seem to be imbedded in our very upbringing. How many girls can honestly say that growing up they weren’t bought Barbie dolls while any male siblings/friends were playing with toy cars and robots? I know I couldn’t. How many male children do you know of that are bought little kitchen sets? Easy Bake Ovens? Those were like gold to a female child, I just about had a heart attack when I opened up one of those bad boys for Christmas one year. I am not passing judgment of what children necessarily want, or even focusing on children in this situation, but merely using this as an example of what we are learning from our parents and what they have learned from theirs; so much in life becomes genderized and it translates into the workplace, education, personal lives, etc. Meraz gets the lecture going by bringing up “The Incredible Shrinking Pipeline” and defines this term as one referencing “the decreasing percentage of women in the computer science field.” I want to reference a story Professor Meraz brought up at the end of lecture about a girl who was leaving the classroom (opting to drop out) and was followed by the professor down a stairwell. The professor’s intent was innocent and one with the goal of trying to understand where she was coming from and what he could do to help her stay in the class and succeed. Short story made shorter, she was frightened by his aggressive approach. The point of this story was that there really are no female role models in male dominated positions such as computer sciences and online blogging.

There are decreasing percentages of women in the field because it is easier to go where your gender is, so it seems. It is easier growing up to have an Easy Bake Oven like the rest of your friends than showing up with a toy car and being excluded. Even these two examples of childhood toys can be related to the video game phenomenon that Professor Meraz addressed. She used the video game “Diner Dash” as example of the types of video games geared towards the female population. That is that those types of video games encourage domestic activities, working, taking care of something or someone, basically perfecting multitasking and not relaxation, which is something men’s video games are geared towards; entertainment and unwinding. The Easy Bake Oven is a miniature of what domestic behavior is, in society, to come while the toy car is representative of the male entertainment and relaxation.

I especially liked Professor Meraz’s examples of women who made huge impacts on the Internet and blogging sites/usage and how despite their efforts they were framed in the news and media in such a way that made them appear to be the typical damsel in distress, reaching the conclusion of a new blog site, etc. only by the means of their knight in shinning armor. We discussed framing in class with the infant being bitten by rats and how different ways of wording the story lead us to point blame, offer praise, and take action against different people(s) each time. The framing of stories about these ladies is prime examples of this. Mena Trott, a woman who essentially came up with the entire concept of Movable Type – the second blog site (Blogger being the first) – was hardly credited with anything at all because the framing of the story of her and her husband Ben’s success portrayed her input as being insignificant and almost irrelevant in comparison to her husband’s development of the site.