Being Geek Chic is the yammerings of a Midwestern nerd named Elizabeth Giorgi. My vision impairment is real, which is frustrating because I really would like to see a 3D movie.
Send questions, requests and ideas to [email protected]. Please put your complaints on a napkin and toss it.
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Note
22nd November 2011
Lady Geek(s) of the Week: Stacy Smith & Stephanie Gall
A new study released by USC today proved a theory that we’ve all known to be too true in our current movies: women are underrepresented in film. Here’s a snippet from the paper:
In a survey of the top 100-grossing movies of 2009 — including “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” and “The Twilight Saga: New Moon” — researchers found that 32.8% of the 4,342 speaking characters were female and 67.2% were male, a percentage identical to that of the top-grossing movies of 2008.
Smith and Gall worked with Marc Choueiti and a team of undergraduate researchers to identify a scary set of information that we as consumers really need to start to pay attention to.
Here’s some charts from the study, which can be found here.
They show a scary reality, which isn’t just that women are under-represneted in the films themselves as well as behind the scenes, but that when they are represented, they are represented in ways that focus highly on sexuality.
In fact, some of the statistics on the prevalence of sexy attire at ages as low as 13 is really unsettling.
So what do the researchers say about this?
Smith said:
“Viewing sexualized images of females in film may contribute to self-objectification in some girls or women, which in turn may increase body shame, appearance anxiety and have other negative effects.”
If we don’t start talking about this, things will never change. I’m thankful studies and research like this is happening, so we can all be more educated about what we watch.
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Note
18th October 2011
Lady Geek of the Week: Nancy Etcoff
Would you believe that if you wore more makeup, your colleagues would think your more professional? That your boss would believe you were more competent? That potential clients would perceive you as more capable? Well, that’s the results of Harvard psychology researcher Nancy Etcoff’s latest study.
The results are shocking to say the least. Paid for by Proctor and Gamble (known for making CoverGirl cosmetics), the study confirmed that women who swapped au natural for the blush brush and lipstick tube not only were considered more competent, but also more amiable, respectable and trustworthy.
There is some indication that women that wear makeup feel more confident and therefore behave more confidently, however, the New York Times run down stated that the woman in the study weren’t allowed to look at their made up face before being analyzed by a panel. Here’s how it went down:
The study’s 25 female subjects, aged 20 to 50 and white, African-American and Hispanic, were photographed barefaced and in three looks that researchers called natural, professional and glamorous. They were not allowed to look in a mirror, lest their feelings about the way they looked affect observers’ impressions.
One hundred forty-nine adults (including 61 men) judged the pictures for 250 milliseconds each, enough time to make a snap judgment. Then 119 different adults (including 30 men) were given unlimited time to look at the same faces.
When most people hear the word “research,” they think stem cells and elaborate science experiments, but this kind of research about human behavior is critically important to our understanding of our culture. I can’t help but wonder if this same experiment were done 40 or 50 years ago that we would have had the same result.
Congrats to Etcoff for discovering something that has struck me every single day when I applied my foundation each morning. …I can’t help but think: “this is what I have to do to get respect in the workplace?” with every swipe of the sponge.
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Video
19th August 2011
A giant space blob glowing from within? How could I not post it!
Here’s the details:
A new research study has shed light on the power source of a rare vast cloud of glowing gas in the early Universe. The observations show for the first time that this giant “Lyman-alpha blob”—one of the largest single objects known—must be powered by galaxies embedded within it.
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Quote
16th August 2011
“When a woman’s goal is to be romantically desirable, she distances herself from academic majors and activities related to science, technology, engineering, and math.”
~ Sad results of a new study at U of Buffalo.
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Video
11th August 2011
New research from the University of Minnesota (woot, my alma mater!) proves that there is a gender imbalance on Wikipedia. Not just in the number of editors (only 1 in 6, or roughly 16% identified as female), but in the content itself. The researchers believe that this is a direct trickle down effect, in particular because women that did edit reported not returning to perform more edits later.
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Link
11th May 2011
You are what you read: You can be a wizard too!
Psychologists at the University at Buffalo studied the phenomenon by having 140 subjects read excerpts from the Harry Potter or Twilight books and answer a questionnaire. They found that when absorbing a story, we can psychologically become a member of the characters’ social group, and the process provokes feelings of satisfaction similar to what we’d experience after a making a real connection with another person.
