We are all abuzz at the Clayman Institute about our forthcoming conference, Gendered Innovations in Science and Engineering II, on March 13 and 14. The conference is free, no registration required, and everyone is welcome.
We have some great speakers lined up, including Diane Greene, the CEO of hot Silicon Valley company VMware, who will be talking about women's experience of the Valley's entrepreneurial culture. I am particularly looking forward to the first panel of the first day, Women in Gaming and Virtual Worlds. Our panelists, Sheri Graner Ray, Vladlen Koltun, and Nick Yee, will be talking about how women as users influence the creation of video games and virtual worlds; plus how they impact the development of this media market as software engineers and creative artists.
I also hope they will have time to get into a discussion of why men so often choose to have a female avatar, when the reverse is not true of women! Is it because they want to play with gender identity, or is it just because they get more "free" stuff as women? Apparently the the owners of the King of the World MMORPG, Aurora Technology, recently banned men from having female avatars. How bizarre is that?
(Disclaimer: This story may not actually be true - see Ars Tecnica for skepticism on this story: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070927-chinese-mmorpg-banning-cross-gender-roleplayers.html. But it is still a good story, and the fact that it spread across the internet with such alacrity suggests that it resonates with a good many users! Maybe there are a lot more men out there pretending to be female than you might think!!)
Find out more about our conference at http://gender.stanford.edu
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