Middle East | Saudi Arabia | Culture

Apple and Google Accept Saudi Smartphone App Which Tracks Women’s Movements

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Apple and Google are facing criticism for hosting a Saudi Arabian smartphone app on their platforms which allows men to track women’s movements and “stop them leaving the country.” According to Insider, the app, named Absher — which is available on Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store — is “a government web service which allows men to specify when and how women can cross Saudi borders, and to get close to real-time SMS updates when they travel.” The SMS feature reportedly notifies men “when a woman uses her passport at a border crossing or airport check-i
Europe | France | Health

French woman wins disability grant for ‘gadget allergy’

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A French court has awarded a disability grant to a woman claiming to suffer from a debilitating allergy to electromagnetic radiation from everyday gadgets such as cellphones. The applicant, Marine Richard, 39, hailed the ruling as a "breakthrough" for people afflicted by Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (EHS). The condition is not recognised as a medical disorder in most countries, including France, but sufferers insist that exposure to mobile phones, wifi routers, televisions and other gadgets cause them anything from mild discomfort to life-ruining disability.
International | Crimes

Hackers Are Sneaking Into Women’s Webcams and Posting the Footage on YouTube

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Here’s more evidence that you’re not a tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy theorist if you cover your webcam with a post-it note. According to a new report by digital rights group Digital Citizens Alliance, hackers are hijacking the webcams of women and girls and uploading the intimate footage to YouTube for profit. The report, which was released at the Black Hat conference, describes how hackers known as “ratters” use a special kind of malware called a remote access trojan, or RAT, to gain access to a victim’s computer and control their webcams. Trojans account for 70 percent of al
North America | United States | Crimes

Meet Brianna Wu: She’s risking everything to make gaming safe for women

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Brianna Wu is a female video game developer who has received more than 44 death threats in the last five months. Why? For daring to lead one of the largest professional game-development teams of women in the field, and for speaking out on women in tech issues like Gamergate. Last weekend, when a man in a skull mask posted a video on YouTube about how he planned to kill her, Wu had her last straw. (Gamergate supporters have already released her home address and sent her threats that caused her to flee her home.) She wrote an article for Bustle earlier this week declaring “I’m doing eve
North America | United States | Education

Gender balance in small groups makes a big difference for women in STEM

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A new study published in PNAS reports that female engineering students who are exposed to a higher percentage of female peers in small group interactions have increased levels of motivation, greater verbal participation, and feel more confident in their engineering career aspirations. This finding could have far-reaching implications for the gender imbalance that currently exists in engineering and related fields. This gender differential begins during education. In their first year of college, women are less likely than men to state an intention to pursue STEM education, and those numbers
North America | United States | Science

Report: Disturbing drop in women in computing field

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Almost all of the women on Fortune’s Most Powerful Women list — including those not at tech firms — had majored in STEM studies. PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, for instance, had a triple-major bachelor’s degree in physics, chemistry, and math. Mary Barra, chief executive of GM, was an electrical engineering major. A new American Association of University Women review of more than 380 studies from academic journals, corporations, and government sources shows a big employment gap in computing and engineering. In some fields, the gap is actually widening over the years — not shrinking.
International | Crimes

14 Women Sailed to Sea to Investigate Plastic’s Toxic Impact on Hormones

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Last November, an all-woman team set out to sail the Atlantic, collecting samples of seawater and plastics as they went. They travelled from Lanzarote to Martinique over three weeks, some of them barely having stepped on a boat before. Their mission, which they named Exxp​edition, was to shine a light on several “unseens”: the unseen plastics and chemica​ls polluting the oceans; the unseen women vastly underrepresented in science and adventure; and the unseen research on women-specific diseases, which they feel has a low public profile. Some studies have shown that we have ove
North America | United States | Business

Silicon Valley’s diversity problem goes beyond hiring practices

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Workplace diversity advocates hope to shine a spotlight on the industry’s hiring efforts, which remain abysmal. At Twitter, only 10 percent of tech jobs in its global workforce belong to women. Among its U.S. employees, just 4 percent of those lucrative positions are filled by black or Latino people. The numbers aren’t much different at places like Facebook, Google and Yahoo. Even Apple, which can point to above-average diversity, still counts just 20 percent of its tech hires as female, and black or Latino workers make up only 13 percent. Anecdotes of implicit gender bias reinforce wha