Every one of these photos was taken by a female photographer. Daniella Zalcman has been a photographer for 10 years, and she’s long since lost count of how many times she’s heard a photo editor explain how he’d hire women if he knew where to find them. So she’s showing them. In no uncertain terms.
Read More: This Website Highlights the Work of Female Photographers to Fight Sexism In the Industry
(Source: Wired)
For every story you hear about investors behaving badly, there are far worse stories that many women wouldn’t dare to tell. “The most common thing I hear from other women is: ‘Oh the stories I’ll tell once I’m far enough along that I don’t have to worry about being shamed,’” says Kathryn Minshew, co-founder of the job search and career advice site The Muse.
For women who have experienced this bias—and there are many—the simple act of talking about it is taboo. There’s a notion that acknowledging the problem only exacerbates it. No one wants to be known as the woman who cried sexism for fear of being labeled a tattletale, a liability, or, at the very least, not worth the trouble. And yet, it’s only through these stories that we can begin to understand that the statistics aren’t the result of some fluke or mass oversight, but a very real problem that needs to be solved.
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The Internet is now where we socialize, where we work. It’s where we meet our spouses, where we build our reputations. Online harassment isn’t just inconvenient, nor is it something we can walk away from with ease. It’s abhorrent behavior that has real social, professional, and economic costs. And the big social networks where most Americans spend time online—Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and the rest—aren’t doing nearly enough to address the problem.
[MORE: Curbing Online Abuse Isn’t Impossible. Here’s Where We Start]
Earlier this week, a Tumblr called the Hawkeye Initiative posted a story about an employee at game publisher Meteor Entertainment who pranked her CEO, Mark Long, by swapping out a poster of a scantily clad female mechanic for a custom poster of a scantily-clad male mechanic (illustrated by fellow Meteor employee Sam Kirk) and waited to see the reaction. After the initial surprise, Long thanked her for “calling [him] on [his] bullshit” and decided to hang the posters side-by-side in the office. The story went viral, making the rounds at nearly every major gaming website and scoring nearly 200,000 page reviews. The employee, who goes by the pseudonym K2, spoke about the prank for the first time with Wired, and about what the internet’s reaction to it could say about the best way to approach the gender problem in the gaming industry.
[More: How Brosie the Riveter Can Help Solve the Gender Problem in Gaming]
