I came home from the library today with the following:

Hackers (Steven Levy)
Doing IT: Women working in information technology (Krista Scott-Dixon)
Silicon Valley, Women, and the California Dream (Glenna Matthews)
Love, Power and Knowledge: Towards a feminist transformation of the sciences (Hilary Rose)

I am trying to make sense of how I came to be a woman working in the man’s world of hacking, free software, and community technology, and also of the implications of where I have positioned myself in that world – outside, as an engaged and yet critical observer. This is in some ways a gendered position (I am not by any means “one of the guys”) but it is a negotiated one, as the critical position also brings with it certain power, or as Donna Haraway argues, the trial and privilege of the “partial perspective.”

Then I got this article from a friend. According to it, my chances of getting married go down as my IQ goes up, regardless of whether I’m comfortably holed up in the pink ghetto of the marketing department or butting heads in tech or R&D. Apparently, men are just plain intimidated by smart successful women, and feminism’s promises are perceived as not only wrong, but counter to evolution. I hope that the troubling social changes the article points to are taken as an indication of the necessity for feminism and not its irrelevance.