Women's magazines ignore technology and demean women
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I think this is a typical mistake feminists make. Instead of understanding and accepting what women want, they represents their view of what they should want and blame all other factors (stereotype anyone?).
An interesting point, the magazines are (primarily) written for women by women and as they are not a compulsory purchase I suspect that if there was a demand for tech news in them there would be (I suspect if it increased readership and hence advertising revenue they'd cover ancient Latin if there was the demand).
Making an issue of a womans magazine carry tech to balance misogyny is as strange as getting Linux Format to carry a recipe for buns.
All that said of course this is a Guardian piece and they do tend to write this kind of stuff to insite controversy (in many ways the liberal daily mail).
Isn't it demeaning to perscribe adult women which magazines and which content to like?
Tech magazines are written for a predominantly young male audience, not for a broader audience.
Women who buy women's magazines are women who first and foremost are interested in reading magazines. Out of that subset of women, one can begin measuring who are interested in women's magazines. I would assume the percentage here becomes quite large. I'll leave it up to a potential child to find that magic number and whether or not it can be representative of women in general.
Although, quite frankly, I am quite tired of this kind of "woman analysis" as if there's something inherently wrong with women in our society.
This is not asking for a Pink Power Wired; it's saying that the publishers of “women’s” magazines are leaving advertising dollars on the table and potentially missing the needs and/or interests of their purported audience by ignoring technology purchases and dealing with them in a non-sexist, adult way.
Quite specifically, this article isn't about you—especially if you're a man. It's about how the magazines, their advertisers, and manufacturers are missing an opportunity to be more meaningful and targeted toward the needs of their audience, which is increasingly more sophisticated than the magazines themselves.
And as others in the comments have said, magazines are really about delivering adverts to customers.
Yet there is plenty of tech advertising aimed at me.
In addition, the key metric is probably not tech spending, but tech creating, which is often not measured in dollars. We've all probably run into guys [1] who produce impressive code using a five-year-old laptop who don't spend much on "tech." Maybe a couple bucks a month for hosting, but that's really it.
[1] A note on the language used: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2010/03/21/hey-guys-read-this/ .
The fact that I sit at Vim all day cranking out Ruby and Python (for work and for open source etc.) is irrelevant to whether I buy a smartphone. Apple getting £500 from my mother for a new iPhone is no different than them getting £500 from me. In sales, the key metric really IS spend rather than creativity/interest.
While you're right that yes, tech is less frequent and higher ticket, it's worth huge money, and advertising is useful for the majority of buyers (not HN readers basically)
Here's a nice article[1] about why an ad campaign for women's watches appeared in the Economist, an magazine with readership 90% men.
[1] http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/11/luxury_branding_the_f...
The original story is unclear about whether it counted just articles in the magazines or adverts as well. It does mention the tech adverts in one magazine but the general tone is about tech 'coverage' - as in the choice of the content. Which would seem to exclude ads, since I'd bet the magazines would accept advertising from whoever pays them enough.
I would guess that a study of the adverts would show a whole lot more tech products, as marketing departments can't have failed to notice that women buy their products too.
The could have articles (you know, incitements to spend money disguised as articles) on "how an iPhone gal could date an Android-using guy". You can't stop vapid, consumerist magazines from being vapid and consumerist, but they seem to be missing a trick with their target audience.
The iPhone is now available in several colors and finishes, there are tech-mirroring trends in beauty (matte finish nail polish, metallic finish makeup, etc), and wearable tech is becoming a thing. I'd say the line between tech and fashion/beauty is pretty well blurred. And technology hasn't been "ultimately utilitarian" in a long while.
Apple does do some marketing, but it's not like they sell a phone for ten times what it costs to build. Software is a little different - B2B relies on direct sales.
Games are probably the closest thing you'll find to fashion and cosmetics. I guess you could compare fashion magazines to gaming magazines.
The most damning evidence
It makes me think that these magazines are not actually designed to optimally interest their readers, but simply to grab their attention and then mold it to their advertisers interests.
The whole point of the editorial content in trade publishing is to sell advertising pages.
Back when I was a columnist for Computer Shopper (in the UK, circa 1999-2005, during the golden autumn of the computer magazine publishing era -- before direct PC sales over the internet gutted it) the ABC audited circulation of the mag was around 135,000 readers (multiply by 5 for an equivalent US readership). Cover price was on the order of £2.35, so you could expect revenue of £317,000-odd per issue from paid subscribers/store customers. Around 120 pages consisted of editorial content, plus up to 550 pages of advertising. (This ratio holds in the US, too, where to take advantage of printed matter bulk postal rates magazines had to have no less than 20% editorial content mixed in with the ads.)
I don't have exact revenue figures, but a half-page black and white ad in CS sold at the time for roughly £2000. So, ignoring the premium for colour and blow-in ads, we can approximate the advertising revenue to £2.2M per issue. In actual fact, colour ads sold for a lot more, so the revenue per issue would be closer to £3M.
The take-home here is that at most 14% of the magazine's revenue came direct from the readers -- indeed, the readers were probably getting the colourful 650-page object for the cost of printing alone. The remaining 86% -- or more -- of the magazine's revenue came from advertising.
Now, from a business perspective, whose interests do you expect to weigh more heavily on the mind of the publisher -- the readers, or the advertisers?
Also, ad sales in print computer magazines fell off a cliff after 2001 and never recovered. (Last time I looked, the ad page count in CS had dropped to about 200 pages, from a peak of nearly 600 pages.)
The drop was due to (a) lots of the smaller PC OEMs merging or going bust (a mag could only sell so many 12-24 page glossy advertising segments to Dell or HP), (b) the rise of internet advertising on the back of home broadband (over a 56K modem ads were painful; with 512K and up broadband they were tolerable and far more effective), and (c) dwindling profit margins.
Oh, also CS had two distinct customer bases: the hardcore folks who bought it for the specialist columns (the UK mag, unlike the Ziff-Davis Computer Shopper, had stuff like assembly language programming tutorials and an Atari ST enthusiast's corner as late as 2004) and who propped up the ABC circulation figures by subscribing (and whose ABC figures in turn were used by sales to convince advertisers that the magazine was worth purchasing space in), and the newsstand casuals, who wanted a new PC, would buy an issue for the ads, buy their PC, then never buy another copy. And of these latter, according to market surveys, only 15% ever installed any software on their machine: they bought from OEMs with Windows and Office pre-installed along with a bunch of not-quite-crapware, and used what they'd bought as-is.
The former vanished first, to places like Slashdot, Hacker News, and more recondite corners of the web. And the latter dried up as google made it easier to find cheap PCs via the internet.
You can walk in any supermarket / drugstore and find a cosmetics selection at which point advertising influence kicks in. You are familiar with the advertised brands in the offering and more likely to buy them.
Tech on the other hand is a $300 upward proposition a peace. That's far outside the impulse buy zone, which is why advertising this works differently. Much more product placement and bundled distribution channels (phone shops) in play here.. and caries.
For a tech company women are at best 50% of their target market. For a cosmetics company, women are the market. Their Excel sheets just show they can bid higher on the ads than tech.
Technology provides functionality (beyond luxury) used in everyday life, so it doesn't have to advertise as much. Cosmetics have to advertise to just stay alive.
My sister, when researching baby monitors, had to resort to male-dominated forums. She was interested in the technical details and experiences of these before buying, but women-forums only ever covered aesthetics and feelings towards the topic.
You could say my example is anecdotal and worthless, but what I am describing is a large statistical pool with both sides represented. And this isn't exactly news, you can be as offended as you'd like, but every single area of our society barring the higher echelons of science tells us this same story.
The fact that you think it's offensive makes you the offender. I should think most of the world couldn't care less. Myself included, it's just a matter of interests.
Disclaimer: I know every rule has plenty of exceptions.
Noting an arbitrary difference, like say "those ten guys are very interested in that woman's behind, while those ten women are clearly focussing on what this man is saying" is just observation (and not a reflection of my real world view, merely an example). Anyone who attributes negativity to either of these observations are betting offensive.
I should think aesthetics and personal feelings with regards to baby monitors can be helpful, in my example however, it wasn't. You chose to think it negative the female dominated forum judged differently than a male dominated one, if that's the case you are offending, not me.
w.r.t cosmetics and aesthetics, don't forget that humanity invented cosmetics and jewellery way before most of the practical technologies. Whether that was a male (warrior paintings) or female thing, I don't know.
"luxury", as you put it, is what makes us humans, do the useless, for the sake of it, create cultures around that stuff. We have that strive deeply embedded inside us.
A source for illustration: http://www.macrotrends.net/1372/auto-and-light-truck-sales-h...
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2010> 2,648,456
2009> 2,633,248
[0] http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2010/vm...
Technology is more expensive. Hey, women spend more on cars than cosmetics, should they include car columns too? Buying a laptop, an iPhone and a tablet or something will cost way more than a year's worth of make up, doesn't say anything about a person's real interests.
Also, the average British woman is not the average Women's magazine reader. It's more likely that readers of women's magazines 1. don't spend as much on technology, or 2. if they do, it's simply the case of buying an expensive smartphone or whatever to listen to music or browse Facebook.
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=t3+magazine&tbm=isch
There's a theme there.
"Not fun" (direct quotation).
In majority, women want artistic fun rather then numerical fun.
Again, in majority, women has no interest on benchmark number stuffs, and more interested in which app look more beautiful. Such as "Best sexy looking app top 10" rather than "World fastest super-computer top 10".
In other words, their behavior has not been changed. Only the medium has been changed. It was fashion and beauty stuffs before, and now it just expanded to electronics.
Ie - it could be a case of major conspiracy on the part of publishers (who are all women btw) to keep their readers away from tech. Or they could simply be giving their readers what they want.
They don't. Which is evidence that there is no such unfilled niche.
We're not talking CACM here; we're talking tech magazines that, for the longest time, celebrated conference booth babes.
Reality is that which doesn't go away if you disbelieve or dislike it.
Reality being that which doesn't go away if you dislike it, the reality is that there are no mainstream tech/gear magazines—online or print—that don't use a hypothetical young male as the primary audience for that magazine, doing a disservice to both those young men and the young women who might be interested but aren't interested in the editorial slant involved.
Reality being that which doesn't go away if you dislike it, you're a guy—as am I—and we don't actually get to say that something we like is not sexist in its nature. There are things that I will read that I know are sexist (and not care that they are because I want to read them anyway), but I don't get to pretend that they aren't sexist just because I like them.
Reality, indeed.
If they aren't buying the currently best-fitting magazines (even though they just partially fit the need), then they are showing with their wallets that they don't really want it; and the magazines are completely right to do as they do now instead of throwing resources to serve a nonexistent/tiny market.
If all the women buyers would go to the magazine which currently has the least "male slant", then they'd be 90% of the audience for that magazine, which the publisher would immediately see and they'd get attention.
If noone prints anything even remotely acceptable but the readers would really want it - then they'd get that need filled on online media. Is there a booming audience of women tech bloggers writing for women readers and getting huge audiences + ad income that would justify targeting a magazine directly at that?
There will be articles written by women for women only if they actually put their money where their mouth is - if someone (+ millions like them) are not going to buy the resulting magazine, then saying "there should be a mag like that" is empty talk. Even if it's unfair and sexist, if the buyers aren't there then such magazines don't have a reason to exist - that's reality.
There are just no women reading it. So you might consider the possibility, that maybe - just maybe, women are just not into this stuff. And that women publishers are savvy enough to know what their readers want covered.
Anyway IMO, Alexa stats are not that much trustworthy…
Men's magazines tend to cover far broader interests than women's magazines.
Tech magazines, on the other hand, almost exclusively cater to a young male audience.
As a rule, shit loads.
I used to subscribe to Men's Health / Fitness, a Motorcycle Magazine and another tech one (T3 or stuff, I can't remember) - and they'd all be on the bookshelf (dozens and dozens spanning a couple of years).
Whenever my any of my previous significant other(s) would thumb through them - they would always comment on how much more practical and informative they were - literally everything was put there in some way to help you become a better person; from fitness tips and guides, to the business insider interviews and "lifestyle" hacks / articles, down to the insider information on upcoming gadgets / vehicles and what not.
These was in comparison not just to the top selling female magazines (Marie Claire / Cosmopolitan etc), but with the equivalent female magazines (Female Fitness etc). I haven't read any of these magazines recently (in about 3 years, since the onset of tablets and whatnot), so I can't comment on how they are now but it definitely came as a bit of a surprise to me to see how different they actually were - and how they actually continued to reinforce an incredibly old fashioned female stereotype; I don't know how else to describe it other than the "dumbing down" of information targeting females, and a subtle encouraging of various fashion / gadget trends that need to be followed to "keep up with the times".
I couldn't help but question it all, and wonder why women would actually buy them ... and then my mind would wander over to women's issue's and how magazines that make them question their image and self-worth, talk down to them and greatly encourage the whole celebrity / paparazzi environment whilst touting feminist ideals etc etc ... it's a whole other world that I am in no way equipped or educated enough to think about; a giant paradox thrown inside pandora's box.
You mention how the top womens magazines "reinforce an incredibly old fashioned female stereotype", well these mens magazines are arguably worse considering the primary content is boobs, toilet humour and football.
Loaded and Nuts are 'lad mags' - 15 to 25. They're not for grown up men.
The biggest, and by far the most profitable Man's Magazine is Men's health. It has a little tech, lots of workout/fitness stuff, a lot of diet stuff, and some fashion.
(not sure if FHM still exists so can't comment there)
If anything is disgraceful those are disgraceful, by comparison "look at the tits on that" magazines are not, hell if you measured the body shape of the women in the "disgraceful" mags compared to Cosmo I wonder which one would have the most realistic average body type.
Pornography is legal and they are not (under most definitions) even pornography and there is nothing wrong with sexual urges or wanting to see the naked human form.
n.b. If you do this regularly you'll be able to make pretty accurate predictions about 30% of the magazine by reference to 70% of the magazine.
>> The disconnect between how the glossy mags choose to fill their pages and how British women actually spend their money suggests that traditional publishers are out of touch with their readership.
...except that, apparently, such women also spend their money on the magazines being criticized. Which seems to say the publishers are in touch with what their readers want.
Obviously not all women buy such magazines, but those who do are not being forced to.
Read D. Tannen, You Just Don't Understand: Men and Women in Conversation -- she's long been a prof at Georgetown. There learn that girls and young women want to get security from memberships in groups of other girls, and one of the main ways a girl/young woman can do that is to bring to the group some juicy gossip. So, they gossip. Yes, they do gossip. And drawing from the movie Jurassic Park, yes, "They do form herds.".
For technology, that's things. In simple terms, in year 1, month 1, nearly week 1, in their crib, the girls are trying to get emotional connections with adults via facial expressions, and the boys are trying to hack the latch on the crib and write C++ code to automate the toy fire truck on the floor.
The girls are interested in emotional connections with people, and the boys are interested in things. The boys are seeking mastery over the physical world, and the girls are seeking care taking via emotional connections with men who have mastery over the physical world.
The girls are interested in fashion and cosmetics both to attract men and also to fit into the groups of other girls they want to be part of.
Can women do technology? I don't have much insight into what the real limits are, but I've seen a wide range from (1) having a super tough time with 8-9th grade algebra to (2) work with programming languages, starting with no real background at all, totally blowing away some of the brightest people in computing. But, I've nearly never seen a girl or woman who actually likes something technical.
Again, basically the women's magazines are correct: What girls and women really like is belonging to groups of girls/women and making emotional connections with other people. And that's what girls/women use technology, radio, TV, magazines, cell phones, social media, for -- to belong to groups of girls/women and to make emotional connections with other people. For the technology itself, the girls/women don't care, don't care any more than they care that it was a Diesel powered 18 wheel truck that delivered their women's magazine, cosmetics, cell phone, laptop, skim milk, etc.
Just because the women's magazines dish out material based on stereotypes does not mean that the stereotypes are wrong.
I'm a woman who's been programming for years, and I really, really like technology. I'm currently at hackerschool, and nearly half the current batch consists of women who like technology. It's not such a rarity.
And no, I don't read "women's mags", and spent my teens reading various Linux and technology magazines.
>starting with no real background at all, totally blowing away some of the brightest people in computing.
That's pretty much an acknowledgement of your existence as an exception to the general rule.
Did you know there are -despite this (I assume) man's statements- men who are not the least bit interested in technology and "things"? I hardly see them being offended on behalf of their whole gender like yourself.
I'm not offended (much less 'on behalf of my whole gender'), I'm surprised. Don't bring your own baggage into other discussions randomly.
I am "serious". I'm very, very, very serious, fully, 100%, iron clad, totally serious. It's one of the most important lessons I had to learn in life, a lesson I didn't know and had to learn, the hard way, a very, very hard way, and the cost was high, very high, a major fraction of my whole life.
What I said about babies is a slight exaggeration of some recent, solid research. It's correct. Nearly every parent with anything like an open mind and both boy and girl children comes to the same conclusion, finds that such differences between boys and girls are so totally obvious that no one should fail to understand them.
The girls like dolls, and the boys like fire trucks. And this usually holds even if the boys and girls are treated just the same. Why? Early in the crib, the girls are interested in emotional connections with people, and the boys are interested in things.
Tannen describes some more research on the differences already at age 5.
I'm correct: What I'm saying about nearly all girls and women is 100% absolutely, positively, totally rock solidly correct. Sorry 'bout that.
You are very, very different. I've never seen such a girl. As I indicated, I've seen girls who could do technology very, very well (I was married to one; she was Valedictorian, Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa, Woodrow Wilson, NSF, and Ph.D.), but she didn't like it. The story did not end well.
If I had a daughter, then I'd encourage her to be a very traditional female, including thinking about clothes, hair, and makeup. But I'd also try to get her well informed on people, men, relationships, marriage, family, parenting, emotions, psychology, socialization, and art. And for a career, I'd suggest something involving people, maybe being a bookkeeper, accountant, CPA, nurse, K-12 teacher, etc. No way would I sacrifice her life trying to shovel sand against the tide.
There's a big reason I don't have a daughter or any children or now even a wife: I was far too slow to understand the usually rock solid differences between boys and girls.
Maybe someday I will write a book covering what I wish I'd known -- Girls 101 for Dummies -- Boys. Could do a lot in 100 pages.
If I did have a daughter, then I'd conclude that she needs a good life; for that she needs a good marriage; and a good marriage is based on "offspring, security, and care taking", and extra credit for knowing the source (hint: it was a woman, and past President of the American Psychiatric Association).
Knowing and liking Linux won't by itself keep you from having a good life as a woman, even an otherwise quite traditional woman. Still, nearly no girl or woman actually likes technology -- they like people, not things.
The results with differences in children are there, but the claims of innateness are overstated (not false, merely overstated) - children are treated differently, in terms of how they're talked to and bounced around, even in their first week of life. I don't believe the social differences in their treatment have absolutely no impact.
I hate forcing people into 'traditional' roles - and those roles tend to be an idealized version of how people think their grandparents lived, anyhow. I'm in favour of letting people be people. I think children should be encouraged to follow their interests, and learn how to interact in at least one culture, but not forced into moulds for the sake of ideology. If someone wants to learn about fashion, makeup, or piloting fighter planes, great; if there are statistically significant differences in who is doing what, fine; if you're forcing people into one thing or another based on traits that correlate (such as their gender), stop. Don't force someone to chose a profession based on their gender and opposed to their interests, whether you're shovelling sand with or against your society's tide.
Good lives can include good marriages, and probably do for most people, but don't necessarily have to; people are diverse. I'm sorry to hear your marriage ended unhappily, but I would hazard a guess that it wasn't purely due to you not understanding women as a group, and at least partly not understanding the needs of the particular woman you were married to; the two may have been similar, but certainly were not identical.
Purely anecdotally, I'm in a happy relationship with a man, like technology far more than even the average male open source programmer, and don't care at all about fashion, makeup, gossip, or hair. I'm not 'traditional', and I have no desire to be; I am happy.
All or nearly all your arguments are fine. You are the first woman I ever heard of who actually likes technology. I doubt that Marissa Mayer really likes technology; maybe screen layouts, colors, and UI/UX but not actual technology. Congratulations on your liking what you do and doing what you like.
My wife was a big challenge. I met her when she was 18, first saw her socially at 20, and married her at 22. At 20, she looked fine, and she had two younger sisters that also looked fine. And her mother looked like Bismarck's church, cooking, children, sewing (in German, all start with 'K' but I don't want to go to the trouble to get the umlauts typed in correctly so give you the English translation).
But my evaluation was seriously wrong. It turned out, if knew some of what to look for, her mother had cut off essentially all communications with her husband and with everyone else talked only about trivia such as the weather. So, the parents had no intimacy between their ears. I failed to see that until years later. Otherwise, the family looked terrific.
Alas, all three of the girls started to encounter serious problems near age 22. That's just the way some of these things work. See it? Now, sure. Then, no.
There was next to nothing I could do. The only option for her and us was that she regard herself as dependent on me, be subordinate to me, look to me for nearly all direction and thinking, for what she was to do, day by day, nearly hour by hour, have me make requests, show her how to accomplish the task of the request if she didn't already know well, let her do what I had asked, and then get praise and approval at the end.
This solution did work; I never tried it, but in effect we tried it by accident and it worked well. But, she was very angry about that solution, so angry she just would not accept it.
I never tried to get her to follow this solution, and maybe that was a mistake of mine, asking too much of her. When I married her, my view of her capabilities was very high, the polar opposite of the solution I described.
But, how she lived before I met her actually was close to that solution: Her parents and school teachers and professors made the assignments, and she did them with high diligence and, then, got her self-image and self- esteem. Her big problem, where she stumbled, dropped the ball, tripped over the ball, fell on the ball, and lost the ball was just when she was given some independence and expected to work out for herself what to do.
There was more to the situation, but there was no easy solution except the one that she was so angry about she would not accept it.
Technology can be fun, involving, and profitable -- go for it!
Geek culture is a niche and it is more healthy to deal with it as such, promote stars female and otherwise.
I am sick of people being divisive on this issue, we have women coders that like to put make up on and look pretty. However I also have friends, dudes and dudettes who don't really care about tech beyond very easily usable iPhone. Brandishing fact that magazines don't give adverts about iPhones is much like saying that woodworking magazines that do not give adverts about family cars with automatic everything(IMO). iPhone is the easiest phone to use compared to older dial a number phones so I am not sure where argument stands here.
As well fashion industry stands by itself as far as I know it and they don't really care to change their ways just because they say so.(re: movie: Devil wears prada).
If I subscribe to woodworking or mechanics magazine, I am not sure I'd care to see adverts for game boy or Playstation.
Given that I am all for women in technology - however I think that making the rest of the world think(like general purpose womens magazines) is presumptuous that people are into nerdy stuff and computing.
my 2c.
I don't know if this is a case of Oslo syndrome, but this kind of peer pressure plays a big role in keeping people down.
The same thing (though probably not quite as harmful) happens with men. Men aren't all supportive of men finding their own way either. If you don't do and like the same stupid things your peers feel forced to do and like, you get ridiculed.
The editors of these titles are disporportionately Women.
Please clarify.
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But this is far from atypical, as a little google-fu whill show you. And if you look into some research, some additional things will emerge: eg What attracts the media to woman-on-woman (WOW) bullying is the fact that women are targeted at a higher rate by female bullies (71%) than by male bullies (46%). I won't belabor the point. Merely pointing out an empirical irony relevant to the headline and the context of this discussion. This is not counterfactual (nor apologetic) to other types of bad behabiour, but it is oddly not widely understood (it appears).
When you make a statement like that on a place like this I expect you to do your homework before you click the comment button. You do us all a disservice by making a ludicrous claim and then backing away from it, because it encourages others to pander anecdote as fact.
Since this topic starts to bleed into the HN-no-go-zone ("women in tech"), its worth not "belaboring the point" because that soon tends to lead into a meaningless debate[0]. If you have some contra-evidence or a counter-factual to put forward, it would be interesting to see it. But seriously, I don't need to do your homework for you. If you don't have something to show, arguing "i don't understand" or "i don't see it" is dis-ingenuous.
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[0] This is a distinct topic to the more-common flame-wars around Women's STEM aptitude and/or promotion potenial.
And then claiming others are arguing from ignorance. LOL.
(1) Definitions: Misogyny is manifested in many different ways, from jokes to pornography to violence to the self-contempt women may be taught to feel toward their own bodies."
(2) Its clear from (1) That the media and workplace bullying are included in the definition.
(3) Its clear from the construct of 'many of the worst', that this refers to a non-trivial number, but need not be exclusive. So, the verbal threshold means 'many but not neccessarily all, and in any event not amount we need to further specify or approximate in specific percentages'. But, for the sake of it. The data I reference earlier implied that despite the higher proportion of total 'work bullies' in the workplace being men, a woman is as likely to be bullied at work by a woman. So, from the perspective of women, this is indeed a non-trivial amount. We can be reasonably say then that the 'some of the worst' bullies are other women, because this makes up half of the pool.
You are ignoring severity of misogyny, and instead referring to number of misogynists. Correct?
I'm saying, magazine (female or male) editors are by far not the worst, nor that common, among the TOTAL population of misogynists.
But by all means go and fight the "misogynist female magazine editor" fight... I'm sure it's worthy.
But lay off the ad hominem attacks, they just make you look like a jerk. (See what I did there ;) )
studies have shown that the more attractive an adolescent girl or woman is, the more likely she is to become a target for indirect aggression from her female peers.
“Women are indeed very capable of aggressing against others, especially women they perceive as rivals,” said Dr. Vaillancourt, now a psychologist at the University of Ottawa. “The research also shows that suppression of female sexuality is by women, not necessarily by men.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/19/science/a-cold-war-fought-...
If one woman in a group of women has a nicer job, handbag, husband, x than the other women in the group, their stance will to the lines of "that fucking bitch! She doesn't deserve such a nice car".
If one man in a group of men has a nicer job, watch, wife, whatever than the other men in the group, their general stance will be "damn! I also want to be _as good as him_".
Women pull down, men work up.
Same shit at places of work: women will fuck shit up for other women with talk behind their backs and what not, no matter how competent or efficient the target his. I haven't yet heard anyone air the observation that men do this also. At most it might sound like "god what an asshole, but he sure gets shit done fast".
It does suggest that, but it also suggests that they're in touch with the "beauty and cosmetics" companies who spend money advertising in their magazines. Anyone got any data on how much technology companies spend advertising in women's magazines?
> "One of the magazines we studied, Glamour seems to recognise the value of advertising with 6.3% coming from tech companies. In this regard the publisher is somewhat ahead of the trend."
(Side point: Jumping on a "problem" you found in the first paragraph, and ask a question answered a few paragraphs further in, looks rather like you're interested in confirming your bias that this article must be wrong. That isn't a good way to learn about how the world works - If you're only reading HN to feel good, no problem, but I come here to learn stuff.)
Not that some of them don't, but that's not how society expects them to behave (wrongly, of course), and most people hate standing out.
If somebody is making "The mistake of assuming technology magazines have male only readers" and it is everybody who works for or with the tech magazine in question
I do get what you are saying but you are literally judging the magazine by it's cover.
If I was the editor a tech magazine and knew my readership breakdown was 70/30 then I would be inclined (given that I have to have either a woman or man on the cover) towards putting the woman on the cover.
I really don't know if it is a good idea. I wouldn't personally invest in it, but maybe I'm off base.
These are the same women who make Romantic Comedies popular, you can't complain romcom has too many beautiful people and so less tech/geek stuff