Category Archives: Media
“All crossword editing involves judgment calls about language and its use that could hardly be called politically neutral, and, ultimately, the question of a word or phrase’s “puzzle-worthiness” is a negotiation between the constructor’s voice and that of a publication’s house style… A list of terms rejected by the white, male, longtime puzzle editors of major newspapers in the past ten years… we begin to see a pattern: they refer to women…”
“Sensity AI (formerly Deeptrace Labs) has reported on online deepfake videos since December 2018 and consistently found that 90–95% of them are non-consensual pornography. About 90% of them are of women.”
“Consistent with related studies, our work suggests that gender biases in multimodal AI may stem in part from the fact that they are trained on public images from platforms such as Google and Wikipedia, which are rife with gender bias according to our measures.”
” the rise of images online significantly exacerbates gender bias, both in its statistical prevalence and its psychological impact. We examine the gender associations of 3,495 social categories (such as ‘nurse’ or ‘banker’) in more than one million images from Google, #Wikipedia and Internet Movie Database (IMDb), and in billions of words from these platforms.Continue reading ““Consistent with related studies, our work suggests that gender biases in multimodal AI may stem in part from the fact that they are trained on public images from platforms such as Google and Wikipedia, which are rife with gender bias according to our measures.””
“Sensity AI (formerly Deeptrace Labs) has reported on online deepfake videos since December 2018 and consistently found that 90–95% of them are non-consensual pornography. About 90% of them are of women.”
“Global News BC anchors conducted an experiment to see what would happen if they wore the same outfits every day for a week…
While no one sent in messages about the men, the women received a flood of emails from viewers.” https://www.adweek.com/tvspy/canadian-broadcasters-wear-same-outfit-for-a-week-to-see-if-viewers-notice/
“By shoving Pitchfork into GQ, Condé Nast has furthered the same harmful social assumption on which Wenner operates: Music is made by men, for men. Or, at least, the music worth paying attention to is.”
“Why no Joni Mitchell, for example, since she surely is one of the great singer-songwriters, most original thinkers and most brilliant lyricists of the rock era? Wenner dismissed the suggestion.
She “was not a philosopher of rock’n’roll … She didn’t, in my mind, meet that test.” Other women, say, Madonna, Erykah Badu, Carole King, Stevie Nicks, Tina Turner? “Just none of them were articulate enough on this intellectual level,” Wenner explained.” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/19/jann-wenners-bias-against-women-and-black-musicians-is-shocking-but-not-surprising
“Neville witnessed the prejudice Scott and other women have to contend with.
“They are not just general disagreements,” the former Manchester United defender told The Associated Press. “They are not saying ‘That’s a wrong opinion Jill.’ They are actually saying you shouldn’t be commenting on this because you are a woman.” https://apnews.com/article/gary-neville-jill-scott-social-swap-soccer-23d6aaa08ba7d8c5e0fd4c2335606145
“We’ve seen this time and again, Meta taking down content by and about people of color,” she said. “While similar content by and about white people remains up.”
“For a large sample of actively-publishing economists I document that women are less than half as likely to have a biographical entry on the English-language Wikipedia than men.”
“Users belonging to the activist group created almost 100 new pages on female economists in my sample until 2019. As the number of pages on female economists in my sample totals at around 250 pages, they account for around 40% of those pages.” https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4540744
“For starters, nearly all of the imaginary women generated by the site have cartoonishly large breasts… Even more disturbing, some of the images omit faces altogether, depicting headless feminine figures with enormous breasts”
““I’m in the arena trying stuff,” Halm tweeted. “Some ideas just need to exist.” Luccioni points out that no, they absolutely do not.” https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5ywp7/you-know-what-to-do-boys-sexist-app-lets-men-rate-ai-generated-women
“In terms of the number of articles with any mention, gender differences predominate, with men being more likely than women to have publications with mentions in 16 of the 22 fields examined…Among the dimensions of social influence, media attention (news) exhibited the highest level of gender neutrality, whereas social media attention (Twitter mentions) demonstrated the least gender neutrality.”
“From the gender bias in celebrity memoir coverage to problematic portrayals of middle-aged women and the sexist pressure on female pop stars to constantly reinvent themselves, Girls, Interrupted critically examines how mainstream media keeps failing women and explores what we can do to fix it”
“The study, led by Dr. Stacy L. Smith, examined the top 100 grossing films in each year from 2007 to 2022, covering 69,858 speaking roles. While the female share of leading roles rose to a record 44% in 2022, the share of overall speaking roles stood at just 34.6%, marking no improvement from 2021 and only 4.7 percentage points higher than 2007.”
“the idea that Twitter helped democratize academia “was a bit simplistic” because social media created a space where academic celebrities thrived. Even when it helped to diversify science, he says, it did so through the reinforcement of the same kinds of hierarchy. “Rewards flow to those who are known, valued and heard while those who are unknown, unvalued and unheard struggle to increase their standing”
“Mansplaining is something which most women on the internet have experienced fairly frequently. It is exhausting. It is patronising. It is the background hum of patriarchy.”
“We discovered that anyone who frequently posts, regardless of their gender, comes across as a person who seeks attention and validation. But this projected sense of neediness only translates to perceived femininity in men.”
“In what has effectively become a hostile environment for female voices, these menacing virtual acts are understood as online manifestations of conventional violence against women.”
“The ultimate decision-maker in these layoffs, Elon Musk, has a history of making hostile and demeaning comments about women,” Liss-Riodan said in an email. One such comment she cited was: “it is more important for women to have babies than careers.”
“when it comes to being underestimated because of presenting as a woman, I can say after 30+ years and 4 countries, I am a fucking expert. Then imagine being constantly told that this is just my ‘perception’ (and you probably have too).”
“This blog is for other women or non-binary folks working in the data/coding/tech sphere to submit and share their experience anonymously.” https://sexismincode.wordpress.com/
“On average, over the whole dataset, only 34.52% of faces displayed in a movie are detected as female.”
“But it’s not hard to see how social media and a rise in misogyny are, in fact, related. Social media sites trap girls in spirals questioning their attractiveness and self-worth”
“When I interviewed girls for my 2016 book…almost every one of them had a story about the misogyny she’d encountered online– everything from having posts commented on in a disparaging, sexist way to having nude photos non-consensually shared” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/28/teen-girls-are-struggling-social-media-tiktok-instagram
“last week Pokimane spoke about it on stream, addressing comments that she somehow deserved to appear in deepfake pornography because she posts selfies. “It makes no difference what you post or what you do,” she said.”
“Speaking up about harassment and industry abuses is a double-edged sword for marginalized people online—which is why many women, including some of the most popular online personalities in the world, choose not to comment on the ways harassment infiltrates their daily lives.” https://www.vice.com/en/article/z34pq3/deepfake-qtcinderella-atrioc
“Researchers at the University of Cambridge reviewed more than 1,400 films released between 1920 and 2020 and whittled them down to the 142 most influential movies featuring artificial intelligence. Their analysis identified 116 AI professionals. Only nine of these were women, of which five worked for a man or were the child or partner of a more senior male AI engineer.”
“The voices of thousands of women journalists worldwide have been muffled and, in some cases, stolen entirely as they struggle to conduct interviews, attend public events and keep their jobs in the face of relentless online smear campaigns.”
“In the immediate wake of the controversy over her ouster, Mirko Bibic, the chief executive of Bell Canada, issued a statement that said, in part, “the narrative has been that Lisa’s age, gender or grey hair played into the decision. I am satisfied that this is not the case.”
“Online abuse and workers’ treatment concern people of all genders. Women, however, pay a unique price for social media violence. Recent research from The Economist shows fear of new aggressions pushed nine out of ten female victims surveyed to alter their digital habits – 7% even quit their jobs.”
“In two photos depicting both women and men in underwear, Microsoft’s tool classified the picture showing two women as racy and gave it a 96% score. The picture with the men was classified as non-racy with a score of 14%.”
“It’s a representational harm…. ‘In this case, it would be an idea that women must cover themselves up more than men and so that ends up creating this sort of social pressure for women as this becomes the norm… ‘ Mitchell said.” https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/08/biased-ai-algorithms-racy-women-bodies
“I was rethinking and understanding that perhaps when I delivered a manuscript to the New York Times Sunday magazine, I did not have to put up with the idea that my editor gave me a choice: I could go to a hotel room with him in the afternoon, or I could mail his letters on the way out,” Steinem tells Sajet. “I mailed his letters, but thanks to changed consciousness, I realized it wasn’t right. I didn’t have to put up with it. I could speak up about it.”
“Twitter influencers in academic medicine were found to be disproportionately male: significantly fewer influencers were female at all levels of professional status. “
“Lensa’s terms of service instruct users to submit only appropriate content containing “no nudes” and “no kids, adults only.” And yet, many users—primarily women—have noticed that even when they upload modest photos, the app not only generates nudes but also ascribes cartoonishly sexualized features, like sultry poses and gigantic breasts, to their images.”
“Unlike men, female politicians are often named by their first names and are described in relation to their body, clothing, or family; these findings suggest how societal expectations for women affect their public perception as political players.”
“Still, much like her devoted audience, one does not tire of spending time with Elsie Robinson, nor stop wondering how many other women, with equally compelling tales, have also been lost to history.”
“Medusa is also a survivor of rape. The assault on her body is compounded by a curse from the goddess whose temple her rapist profanes. No one punishes the rapist god, of course, but Medusa is given snakes for hair.”
“Beauty may be subjective, and yet society continues to promote stringent, unattainable ideals that—for women and girls—are disproportionately white, slender, and feminine.”
“Online hostility towards women is intended to intimidate and silence, and often, that’s just what it does.”
“When a culture discourages women’s participation, we all lose. And online spaces have been notoriously bad at correcting abuse.” https://medium.com/@OpenSexism/is-it-social-media-if-no-one-hears-you-scream-ccc27d55f851
OpenSexism 