(MINOR UPDATES) Nicole Sullivan, with ostensible reluctance, contributes yet another mishmash of contradictory opinions about the supposed underrepresentation of “woman in technology” (sic).

• Equal yet different? First of all, it can’t be simultaneously true that women and men are equally suited to “technology” jobs and also that women have specific immutable characteristics that need to be catered to. These, however, are among the suggestions in Sullivan’s piece.

• “Merit” is a misnomer. Hence “women[’s] being unable to compete on merit” means nothing. But the airy dismissal of merit as a real issue incurs collateral damage. There isn’t any dispute that typical female brains differ from typical male brains, though the extent of the differences is disputed. Susan Pinker, in The Sexual Paradox, characterizes the differences as significant, while Lise Eliot, in Pink Brain, Blue Brain, argues that within-sex differences dwarf between-sex differences.

  But Pinker and Eliot agree that there is more variability in male brains as a whole, an effect that can be inelegantly summed up by saying there are more idiots and more savants among men. Some of those savants have exactly the qualities needed to program computers – actually caring about programming computers, for one, and a willingness to expend virtually unlimited time on the abstractions implicit in computer programming. That’s an immutable physical characteristic unevenly distributed among men and women.

  Hence there is no neurological basis to assume men as a whole and women as a whole are equally suited to programming computers, to isolate one task in the broader “technology” field. More men will have the job’s exceptional requirements. (Pinker explores these and related issues; read her book and Eliot’s.)

• Child-rearing isn’t discussed. A large coterie of employed women drop out of the workforce at roughly equivalent points in their lives to have children. It’s a biological imperative and a choice. “Primary responsibility for children” is a euphemism; most women with children choose to have them.

  Of course all sorts of flextime and other workplace adaptations can reduce the effect of these career gaps, but career gaps they are. A not-atypical woman who takes several years off to raise a child will always be at a disadvantage in an industry overrepresented by male savants who not only have no interest in fatherhood but barely any discernible interest in other human beings. (They’re happy to work nonstop, aren’t they?)

• Hostile work environments are real and, evidence shows, are nearly impossible to alter to the satisfaction of critics. I am one of those critics: I have repeatedly inveighed, for example, against the hostile “design” choices of quasi-Aspergerian nerds. The effects of those choices continue to be seen every day even after umpteen investigations into the plight of women in technology. (That means two more blog posts will do nothing.)

• “Underrepresentation” is an insulting concept. Who exactly gets to decide how many women should hold down jobs in a certain field? Who then gets to decide when too few women hold down those jobs? In short, who says women are underrepresented in technology? Who sets the quota?

  I don’t exactly hear complaints that men are underrepresented in kindergarten teaching and nursing. (Actually, there are men in nursing, but many of them are gay. So are lots of male teachers. Perhaps that explains why this is a topic women’s advocates do not want to discuss.)

• In a free society, there are exactly as many people who choose an occupation as there should be (QED). These choices can later be frustrated by poverty, recession, lack of open jobs, and of course on-the-job discrimination or unequal treatment.

  Any claim that women are “underrepresented” in a job is actually an order issued to women to make a career choice other than their own. It is an order, to paraphrase Sullivan, to become not a veterinarian’s aide but a vet, not a dental assistant but a dentist, not a medical assistant but a doctor. It’s also an order to fire men to make room for women, since no job category has unlimited growth (and to achieve a desired 50/50 split would require hiring nothing but women for years or decades). That’s what you’re really saying when you make the claim that women are “underrepresented”: That women haven’t made the right choices and that men need to be displaced.

  As Pinker explains in detail, the actual goal isn’t 50% female participation in every job. Nobody at all is asking that 50% of the worst or most dangerous jobs go to women. (Some on Pinker’s list, adapted from another source on p. 229: fisherman, logger, metalworker, construction worker, roofer.) What people are really doing, Pinker argues, is spotting the most desirable jobs held by men and demanding that women get half of them.

“How to pretend
like you are caring and sensitive”

I doubt the sincerity and intellectual honesty of men who claim to be upset over this issue. I think they’re just trying to look caring and sensitive. And I think every proponent of this cause is engaged in hypocrisy.

• I’ve explained this already: Women aren’t more important than other groups who face barriers to employment (to use the employment sphere as our area of interest). I want more people with disabilities in employment, and I won’t presume to dictate where they should work. If they want to work in technology, then I want those people with disabilities working in technology.

  Now tell me why I shouldn’t want that, or why I should want what you want instead. Tell me why women are more important than disabled people. Because you think they are? If so, you’ve just admitted an intent to discriminate against people with disabilities.

• How about gay males in technology? It’s not going to happen, because of the typical gay male’s bridge brain, with its combination of female and male characteristics. About as many of us are interested in, and actually capable of focussing on, abstract, inhuman technical concepts as women are. That’s my conclusion based on a lifetime of observation and from reading between the lines in published research.

  Even if you discount my theory of causation, evidence on outcomes backs me up. All the research papers I am reading (for my upcoming bibliography on lesbian and gay economics) that evaluate job sector show gay males “underrepresented” in technical fields compared to straight males. That is exactly what you observe in your day-to-day life, at least if you have any gaydar at all, and exactly what I would expect.

  Now tell me something else: Tell me why somebody, even if it isn’t me, should not want more gay males in technology. Because you want more women in technology? Your wish trumps everyone else’s?

In cases like this, the aphorism I first heard from Irshad Manji comes to mind. Push these competing interests too far and your ship runs aground on the shoals of “my ideology is better than your ideology.”

• Proponents of women in technology insistently maintain their cause is just, implying no other cause is.

• I dispute that “more” women “need” to be in technology and state that more people with disabilities should be.

• Others may hold that more gay males should work in technology.

We can’t all be representing the most disadvantaged group. Eventually, my ideology starts to look better than your ideology or vice-versa. At that point, rational discussion has ceased.

In a free society, I have no objection to the pursuit of one’s preferred career interest – and you shouldn’t either. Insisting on a numerical outcome is beside the point. Yet we hear about it over and over again. These complaints, articulated for the umpteenth time, will produce the same result they always have: None.

The computer does not know you’re a girl

Everything else is up for discussion. We are not having a discussion because self-styled advocates for women in technology don’t want one. They think there’s nothing to discuss: Women deserve half the jobs, end of story. I believe it is just barely possible to take issue with that precept. Your fundamentalism isn’t better than my fundamentalism.

Last Wednesday (2010.07.21), I attended a flesh-presser for the Paralympic, and I guess Olympic, team. It was intended to fan the flames of excitement for London 2012. (Photos.)

I found out about it only by chance and was pretty sure that, unaffiliated with CTV as I am, I’d be unwelcome, but I RSVPed with Marie-Hélène Cayer of the Canadian Paralympic Committee and showed up. The so-called Real Sports Bar, next to the Air Canada Centre in the exurban hinterlands of the waterfront, was the hangar-sized venue. I am quite sure this is the first and only time a dude in a power chair will have been displayed on the 50-foot “television” display they’ve got on their main wall, which spans both floors. (We were up on the mezzanine deck.)

After noticing the place had the second-nicest wheelchair washroom I’d ever seen, albeit without hand dryer or towels, I asked the greeter where Cayer was. He didn’t know. Or anyone from the Paralympics. That he didn’t know either. So I looked around and said the obvious: “I’ll just go over where the wheelchairs are and figure it out from there.” I introduced myself to everyone, adding that I was the only writer there who came solely for the Paralympics, a claim no one refuted.

I had, as ever, precisely no trouble chatting up these elite athletes – even afterward, when by sheer coincidence the only place to sit was on the couch with the two biggest guys in the place. (Swimmers. With the wingspan of a condor.) Elite athletes are possibly the only group I have never had a problem talking to. I find them refreshingly normal; they find me funny. But to be thought of as funny, pace DV8 Physical Theatre’s MSM, is the fate of any aging homosexualist, one greeted with resignation at best. It’s the role of a gay uncle reduced to easy quips at family gatherings. An air of bemusement is so facile as to amount to a defence mechanism.

Now, in recounting this tale I confront another structural obstacle related to age. I have been covering events like these (often exactly like these) for 15 years. Who wants another excruciating minute-by-minute recap? Frankly, nothing that interesting took place, and if you were on the Twitters, you read my disposable aperçus already.

But I will in fact report something. I said I found out about the whole thing by chance; I meant by somebody retwitting a Twit from Brian McKeever, the ♡ ADORABLE  ♡ superstar Paralympian. McKeever turned out to be the MC of the show, a welcome, even gutsy, decision from the Olympic braintrust, associated as it is with corruption and exclusion. (It is advisable to read Andrew Jennings’ books.) Yet this is the country whose Olympics was the first to operate Pride Houses on both the Vancouver and Whistler campuses, so maybe we aren’t ashamed of our minorities.

And if ever there were an athlete with a disability to get behind, it’s Brian McKeever – and his brother Robin, of course, since their class of blind skiing is a true team sport. (Brian McKeever didn’t win three medals at the Vancouver Paralympics; they both did, in the same way that driver and brakeman of the two-man bobsled get the medal.) He shatters the public perception of “disabled athlete” simply by failing to be in a wheelchair. Disabled sport contains multitudes. It’s a blessing and a curse, but something it isn’t is guys in chairs.

The McKeevers are dashing, charming, affable. In Brian’s case, I wonder if such is his core self or if he’s working really hard to be chipper all the time and will someday end up feeling like he’d been forced to paint on a happy face for all these years. This too amounts to a defence mechanism. Even if defensive, this charm offensive really works. The McKeevers are gold-plated assets to what the elite of this industry would call Paralympism. And they’re all ours. Work these boys for all they’ve got, I told Ms Cayer of the Paralympics.

I am not simply recounting conventional wisdom. I am not telling you what I saw on television. (We TiVoed the entirety of televised Paralympic coverage. There is only so much disabled skiing a man can watch.) Instead, I’m offering my firsthand experience. I got Brian McKeever’s attention, said hello, then complimented him on beating the odds by wearing ironic facial hair and getting away with it. “Well, with the blind guy, he might’ve missed a spot,” he affably quipped without missing a beat. I complimented him on having that line at the ready, then gave him a manly pat on the shoulder and left.

Ms Cayer sent me an effusive and heartfelt note two days later. I was amazed to receive this kind of attention. I shouldn’t be; the Paralympics deals with the value and scarcity of attention every day.

Imagine Adam Greenfield happy again.

Ending one’s exile on that godforsaken ice floe is going to be a good start.

(UPDATED) Why are newspapers doomed? Maybe they aren’t, but if they are, could it be because they take the wrong advice, like Mathew Ingram’s?

Here’s what I sent along to Globe and Mail publisher John Stackhouse a month ago. I led with “I’m not sure anybody in-house has the guts to tell you any of the following. So let me be the first.”

As you read the following, keep score and let me know if I’m actually wrong. I’ll wait.

Comments must be eliminated on news stories

Your paper was misled for years by Mathew Ingram, who put the Globe in an untenable conflict of interest by part-owning a technology conference while also covering the technology field as a “journalist.” You let that slide, which tells me you trusted him too much.

Here’s another example of that: There is and should not be a “conversation” in news reporting. “Join the conversation” is a meaningless Internet buzzword, one that carries the same credibility as a lecture from an SEO consultant. If we accept for a moment that a news story is a recitation of facts, then it’s of no interest whatsoever what somebody with a net connection thinks of those facts.

Newspaper comments are a proven failure. Nobody seems willing to admit that comments cannot be made to work. No amount of moderation will solve the problem, and you can’t afford the amount of moderation necessary just to appear to be addressing the problem. Comments on news stories are structurally untenable and, after a decade’s empirical data, do not, cannot, and will not work. They need to be eliminated completely and without apology.

You owe nothing to your readers but good coverage. Something you certainly don’t owe them is an invitation to a “conversation” they will go ahead and ruin.

(Op-ed pieces are another matter entirely. Heavily pre-moderated comments could work there.)

The question is: Which newspaper will be the first to admit reality and turn off comments? Why can’t it be the Globe?

Type and copy are atrocious

• I know your predecessors hired Nick Shinn to design custom typefaces for the paper, but they aren’t sufficient. Among other things, subhed faces don’t even have a bold italic.

• Next let’s talk about copy. Why is it I find a dozen copy errors (up to and including a proper name misspelled in a hed) in each Saturday Globe? I helpfully post photos.

  You allegedly have a copy desk, but some of its editors (like Carl Wilson) are too busy writing Céline Dion thinkpieces for rival publishers to actually edit copy. Your copy desk needs retraining by the experts.

Carl Wilson wrote in (2010.07.19) to ask “quick: what section do I work for?” without actually answering that; deny that a publisher not owned by his day job’s publisher could possibly be a “rival”; and, while not denying a connection to the “gallery of typographical errors,” didn’t admit to it, either. (Then he wrote back again in response to this very graf and stated “yes, and then you can ask me if I’ve stopped beating my wife.”) I wrote him back asking further questions, and eventually, at long last, finally, got him to state that “I primarily do structural and substantive editing, not readback or proofing.” Hence I have no hesitation clarifying, at Carl’s request, that atrocious type and copy at the Globe are not necessarily or even often his fault and that none of the nearly 200 errors I posted on Flickr are necessarily attributable to him. And then he wrote in again to attest that none of his freelance work interferes with his work for the Globe: “That would be in breach of the rules here.” (There. We friends again, Carl?)

• The Globe makes the classic New Yorker mistake of thinking it understands the English language well enough to write its own style guide. Just as examples, names of periodicals really are italicized and titles of songs really aren’t. The Globe isn’t too good to follow strict CP style. It would help if you didn’t pretend otherwise.

Actually, a magazine would be a great idea

I know the new Globe won’t really be a daily magazine, but why the hell shouldn’t it be? You need to blow up the newspaper paradigm to survive in the 20th century.

After a meeting with Quill & Quire editor Stuart Woods in April, I sent along a solicited query for a short-term column in his publishing-industry journal. It would teach Q&Q readers what’s involved in creating electronic books. Read the series and you’d go from zero knowledge to, say, 80% of what you actually need in order to create a real E-book. This is 80% better than nothing, I contend.

Now, what do you think happened to this proposal, which, I reiterate, was solicited?

Issues

• Book people are generally afraid of computers (Windows users especially, and with reason). They generally don’t know how to use computers beyond a barely functional level (often not even that well, in my own direct experience).
• Nobody has attempted to explain E-book concepts in the two ways necessary to make them comprehensible to book people:
  • Those with a copy or editorial orientation need everything explained, step by step, in prose. You have to start absolutely from scratch and assume no technical understanding.
  • Those with a design orientation need everything explained graphically, with illustrations and pictures but barely any blocks of text.

Unless Q&Q is willing to bankroll the design and production of full-scale posters, which could actually generate revenue for me, the designer, and the magazine, Q&Q really has no choice but to concentrate on readers with an editorial orientation.

Time-limited series

This thing is not going to go on forever. It should be billed up front as, say, running through 2010 and that’s it. E-books won’t go away starting in 2011, but by that time a new angle is going to be necessary.

There has to be a defined endpoint or the technically unsophisticated people who are the intended audience will think there is no end to the topics they have to learn about. They’ll feel overwhelmed and they’ll tune out.

Topics

We’re building from the bottom up. We’ll teach you everything you need to know to construct an E-book, from individual characters to the final package readers enjoy on whatever device they prefer to use.

Likely article topics:

1. Myths. Disabusing you of a few notions about electronic books.
2. A new way to think about books – structurally. Think bones, not clothing.
3. Character encoding. The smallest atomic component of an E-book is a character, and you need to learn just how simple it is to get characters technically right.
4. Language. How to properly express the actual human language of a book. Especially important for bilingual books, but people get this wrong all the time.
5. E-books are miniature Web sites. The commonality between electronic books and the Web. (Has nothing to do with hypertext fiction or similar pipe dreams of the previous century.)
6. Structure (many entries). Learn how to look at a manuscript and assign the right structural elements to every part.
7. Images. Of course E-books can contain pictures. Here’s how to handle them properly.
8. Tables. Don’t believe the hype: “Complex” books with tables are readily produced in E-form.
9. Accessibility. Who needs alternate formats? E-books are almost automatically accessible to disabled readers, a market you can own immediately.
10. Templates. Automate the whole process.

Rex Reed eviscerated Inception as a feverish, unwatchable jumble. But you know what else Christopher Nolan did? Refused to let the studio send out tapes for captioning and description. Until the movie opened, that is.

As WGBH described thrice in its newsletter:

It doesn’t happen often – and in fact we can’t recall the last time it did – but the director of the film Inception did not provide advance work materials so that we could create captions and descriptions in time for its debut today. We’ll work as fast as we can once we get the film. To be safe, and because once we caption and describe the film the data still needs to go to another company for creation of access discs for theat[re]s, we’re estimating the availability of captions and descriptions for the week of July 26. Hopefully it will be sooner.

Because obviously Nolan’s masterpiece is such a game-changer nobody outside his trusted ecosystem could possibly get an early glimpse. (Because what would happen then? Somebody might issue a Twit documenting how bad it is?)

Anybody feel like filing a human-rights complaint? I say that only half in jest.

100 Years of Menswear by Cally Blackman stunningly proves my point that less text is more when it comes to design books.

I will start out by giving Blackman credit for actually treating the topic of menswear, a difficult, neglected corner of the fashion demimonde that repels maladaptive invert fashion designers purely by virtue of having to deal with men instead of other girls. (Watch the episodes of Project Runway in which contestants, most of them maladaptive inverts, are flummoxed by the task of dressing a man. It’s like Top Chef contestants forced to go vegan.)

You can dress a woman in any kind of ridiculous confection you want, but what are the options for men? Shirting, pantalon, cravat? Not hardly, Blackman proves, largely through pictures. There’s a preface of a couple of hundred words, and each of six thematic periods (in which design and chronology are collapsed and mingled) gets a two-page intro, but that is pretty much it. The only way to read this book is the best way to read Jencks’s books about postmodern architecture – by looking at the pictures and reading the cutlines, where not a word is wasted.

I gather it took forever to assemble this collection of photographs. I can see why. Any topic you will have heard of before will be illustrated by a picture you haven’t seen before. There are a few headshots of leading fashion designers and one or two movie posters (the Shaft poster is in Italian!). But the quality that creeps up on you as you devour every page – you will not skip a single one – is how deliciously unfamiliar, unanthologized, unhackneyed the photographs are.

• Garments originally worn for sport.

  

• “Head cutter Mr. Smith fits a jacket at Henry Poole in Savile Row.”

  

• “Pink raw-silk trilby.”

  

• This will quite likely not be the photograph you expect of 1980s Calvin Klein undergarments. (Top right.)

  

• The clarity and concision of Blackman’s cutlines:

  

  Don Johnson as Crockett in Miami Vice. The pushed-up sleeve became not only a possibility through softer fabrics and tailoring, but also a sartorial emblem of 1980s fashion (1984–89).

Tara Ariano (q.v.): “Canada, where I remain a citizen.” (What’s her dishevelled husband doing with a “USA” sparkler-banner on his head and the joyous expression of a man who has finally arrived?)