The Bluestocking, Vol X: Unicorns, Victorians and Stereotypical Men
Hello!
The newsletter has a Silicon Valley flavour this week, for reasons I don't fully understand. Just think, by tomorrow the Labour leadership race will have ended, on its 4,543,342nd day. I can't really remember a time when the Labour leadership race wasn't happening.
Helen
The march of the unicorns
Engineers and venture capitalists insist that things are different now. In the past, they’ve suggested, people were just trying to get filthy rich. Now they are trying to “make the world a better place.” They are quite emphatic about it, too. Last year, Fortune reported that one of Airbnb’s executives said that he would love to see the company win the Nobel Peace Prize.
Is there another dotcom bubble? You'll certainly hope there is after reading this piece. (There's a great swipe at the glorified delivery and chore companies, too: "As one technologist overheard and posted on Twitter, 'SF tech culture is focused on solving one problem: What is my mother no longer doing for me?'")
... and the man who makes them
When the couple met, in 2005, at a New Year’s Eve dinner thrown by the leading investor in eHarmony, they talked for six and a half hours. She told me that Andreessen satisfied most of the criteria on her checklist: he was a genius, he was a coder, he was funny, and he was bald. (“I find it incredibly sexy to see the encasement of a cerebrum,” she explained.) For his part, Andreessen felt that “she was spectacular! My biggest concern was that she wanted to live a jet-set life.” In one of the seventeen e-mails he sent her the next day, he asked, “What’s your ideal evening?” She responded, “Stay home, do e-mail, make an omelette, watch TV, take a bath, go to bed.” Before their second date, he delivered what she calls “a twenty-five-minute monologue on why we should go steady, with a full intellectual decision tree in anticipation of my own decision tree.” They were married nine months later.
Reading that piece led me to go back to a New Yorker article I'd skipped at the time - about venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. I sometimes feel like Silicon Valley is the universe's special gift to profile writers; everyone there is so bonkers in such a compelling way. Also: what a cranium. It's beautiful.
Picture Yourself As A Typical Male: The terrifying psychology of "stereotype threat"
As it turns out, there is zero statistically significant gender difference in mental rotation ability after test-takers are asked to imagine themselves as stereotypical men for a few minutes. None. An entire standard deviation of female underperformance is negated on this condition, just as a man’s performance is slightly hindered if he instead imagines himself as a woman.
If you've read Cordelia Fine's book on gender, you might be familiar with the idea of "stereotype threat". The basic concept is that if you take a test right after being asked to think about an aspect of your identity that is associated with being good/bad at such tests, it dramatically affects your score. So say you take a maths test after filling out your ethnicity: that benefits Asians, about whom there is a general cultural assumption that they are "good at maths". Similarly, women suffer when they are reminded that they are women right before doing a Manly Test, like rotating blocks or reading a map. Obviously, this has huge implications for test designs, but also for everyday interactions: like my personal beef, the way they initially divide Apprentice candidates based on gender.
Quick links: Hey, over-achievers! Slate has short articles on all the classes you should have taken at university. This Wikipedia list of suffragettes and suffragists provides much joy - who decided "Sophonisba" was a name? - as does the BBC collection of archive clips on the subject. (Mrs Pankhurst? "Quite mad, you know," says Asquith's daughter.) Deborah Cameron on the history of the word "suffragette". Wow, the Mercator projection is unflattering to countries around the equator. Why videogames are so homogenous. Uh-oh, Emily Nussbaum isn't bowled over by the Colbert Report. The intertwined history of pockets and technology. An enjoyable rant about the Americans who "choose to live as Victorians" (and the original, baffling piece here). When white poets pretend to be Asian to get published. An old but fascinating piece on right-wing American men who just happen to enjoy dressing as women, and the special cruise they go on together.
Guest gif: Jeremy Corbyn breaks the fourth wall
Thanks for reading! Comments, queries and more Jeremy Corbyn gifs to helenlewisbook@gmail.com