Gender Equivalence

Some progress has been made on the GE book, but it keeps getting pushed back due to other bits of work that have taken priority. I took time off writing the GE book to put together a self published article omnibus book.

The omnibus book is called Tech Book 1 - Published articles Oct 2006 - June 2008 by Michael Reed. Even though this book is about tech, it does contain two gender politics articles, rehashed versions of two of the articles on this site. If you follow the links to the oldish articles entitled ARTICLE: Defining equality and ARTICLE: Attacking feminism: why should a geek care? you can read the updated versions that I created for the book.

[edit: In addition, please note that, although a self published book, it is still a valid, citable source complete with an ISBN number. If you are writing about or researching male rights, it might  be handy. Look over the PDF version of the article. It contains UK-centric information about affirmative action, female involvement in open source software development, education and feminism. Lot's of handy (and fully cited) facts and figures.]

If you like, you could buy a copy of the book by visiting my main website. Or, if you’re feeling a bit hard up, you can download a free e book copy by clicking here (PDF format 6.5 megs).

[sanitised to remove the name of the website - you know who you are ;-)]

A few days ago (at the time of writing), a news site that I sometimes contribute to linked to an article about gender issues affecting women’s entry into IT. The article was quite provocative and I think that I’m being fair when I describe the tone of the article as “feministic”. Anyone who knows me well can probably guess what happened next… I decided to make “gender issues in IT” the topic of my fourth article for that site.

Unfortunately, this article was rejected. And through the experience, I think that I’ve learned a few things. I’ve taken the criticism on board, and the truth is that the article could have been better executed. The subject matter is important to me and the article - in both conception and execution - isn’t representative of my best efforts. However…

[imported from the old site]

Although it might not be immediately apparent, I see a connection between the subjects of ‘tech’ and ‘gender’. In a way, it’s a bit like class-struggle: we geeks make the world what it is as we invent everything but, I wonder, do geeks do very well in the sex wars? I would hope that tech-geeks would be interested in the subject matter of my book. Does an ‘average geek’ ever get upset when when he observes ‘men’ being criticized in the media again. Are we really that inferior? The principle idea behind Gender Equivalence is that men and women are equals in matters such as morality, intelligence and romantic sensibility and I hope that fellow geeks would agree with that.

All in all, I suspect that a fair proportion of my fellow geeks will have had the same experience of saying ‘but that doesn’t make sense…’, quietly to themselves when they are confronted with yet more media feminism.