We all know the stereotypical image of us geeks. It's that of a man sitting in his mother's basement, surrounded by comic books, computer screens, and empty bags of Doritos, playing WoW or Counter-Strike while wearing a headset connected to Ventrilo and shouting obscenities, racial and homophobic slurs, and insinuations regarding the mothers of the guys on the other end. He has no friends outside of the internet, will probably never get a girlfriend/wife, and spends his whole day on message boards yelling about how the latest film "raped" Star Trek, or how S*****n was the most ASB bullshit in history and would have been a disaster for the Nazis. (Sorry if I'm hitting too close to home for some of us here.)
Well, my challenge is to flip that image. With a POD no earlier than 1945, make it so that stereotypical "geek culture" -- science fiction, gaming, comic books, 4chan -- is dominated by women, with male geeks being something of a curiosity. I'm not just talking about having both genders being roughly equally represented in geekdom, something that we're starting to see now. I'm talking "no boyz on teh interwebz", as the title so eloquently puts it. Have most of the leading figures in geekdom be women. Have their be demands on 4chan for "dick or GTFO". Bonus points for a POD after 1980, and for a timeline.
One route that I could take for this is to not only have a more successful feminist movement, but to have feminist leaders latching onto technology as a means of liberation. They can point out that, over the past century, modern technology, from vacuum cleaners to microwave ovens, has greatly reduced the average woman's domestic workload, and institutions like schools and day care mean that she doesn't have to do as much work raising a child, thus allowing her to take on a job outside of the house. Science and information technology are fields where the male advantage of physical strength, which has kept men on top for millennia, don't apply, meaning that the playing field is level between men and women. (I would be surprised that they didn't do this in OTL, but then again, nobody saw the computer revolution coming. Back in the '60s, everybody, from politicians to sci-fi writers, was fixated on nuclear technology, space travel, and The Bomb. Indeed, as late as the turn of the millennium, the Internet was seen as a passing fad.) Anyway, in the '70s and '80s, millions of young women start entering science and computer-related fields, forming the bedrock of the industry. Women like Hedy Lamarr, Grace Hopper, and the ENIAC programmers become heroes of the feminist movement.
So far, you've got a computer industry that's not necessarily dominated by women, but one in which they are fairly well-represented as compared to OTL. You don't have anything close to the female domination of geekdom that the challenge asks for. One route I was thinking about with regards to this would be to have the anti-feminist backlash in the '80s somehow extend to the computer industry. Working with computers would be seen as "girly" or "women's work," much like teaching or nursing. However, I don't necessarily know that there would be as much of a backlash in TTL. For one, not as many women are entering traditional male-dominated fields like business, due to the fact that more of them are entering IT, a relatively new field that hasn't been the "domain" of either gender. Also, even if there is something of a backlash, the boom of the IT field in the '80s and '90s would attract just as many men as women, for the same reasons that it did in OTL.
Any other ideas?
Well, my challenge is to flip that image. With a POD no earlier than 1945, make it so that stereotypical "geek culture" -- science fiction, gaming, comic books, 4chan -- is dominated by women, with male geeks being something of a curiosity. I'm not just talking about having both genders being roughly equally represented in geekdom, something that we're starting to see now. I'm talking "no boyz on teh interwebz", as the title so eloquently puts it. Have most of the leading figures in geekdom be women. Have their be demands on 4chan for "dick or GTFO". Bonus points for a POD after 1980, and for a timeline.
One route that I could take for this is to not only have a more successful feminist movement, but to have feminist leaders latching onto technology as a means of liberation. They can point out that, over the past century, modern technology, from vacuum cleaners to microwave ovens, has greatly reduced the average woman's domestic workload, and institutions like schools and day care mean that she doesn't have to do as much work raising a child, thus allowing her to take on a job outside of the house. Science and information technology are fields where the male advantage of physical strength, which has kept men on top for millennia, don't apply, meaning that the playing field is level between men and women. (I would be surprised that they didn't do this in OTL, but then again, nobody saw the computer revolution coming. Back in the '60s, everybody, from politicians to sci-fi writers, was fixated on nuclear technology, space travel, and The Bomb. Indeed, as late as the turn of the millennium, the Internet was seen as a passing fad.) Anyway, in the '70s and '80s, millions of young women start entering science and computer-related fields, forming the bedrock of the industry. Women like Hedy Lamarr, Grace Hopper, and the ENIAC programmers become heroes of the feminist movement.
So far, you've got a computer industry that's not necessarily dominated by women, but one in which they are fairly well-represented as compared to OTL. You don't have anything close to the female domination of geekdom that the challenge asks for. One route I was thinking about with regards to this would be to have the anti-feminist backlash in the '80s somehow extend to the computer industry. Working with computers would be seen as "girly" or "women's work," much like teaching or nursing. However, I don't necessarily know that there would be as much of a backlash in TTL. For one, not as many women are entering traditional male-dominated fields like business, due to the fact that more of them are entering IT, a relatively new field that hasn't been the "domain" of either gender. Also, even if there is something of a backlash, the boom of the IT field in the '80s and '90s would attract just as many men as women, for the same reasons that it did in OTL.
Any other ideas?