Sexual-minority women (SMWs) in China are often subject to strong stigmatization and tend to have limited opportunities to connect with other SMWs in offline contexts. Although dating apps help them connect and seek social support, little is known about SMWs’ practices of self-disclosure and connection-building through those apps. To address this gap, we interviewed 43 SMW dating-app users in China. We found that these SMWs developed distinctive self-disclosure strategies, such as posting non-facial photos and implicitly disclosing their whereabouts by blending location information into photos that only those in the know could understand, to avoid interference from aggressive acquaintances and other risks of unintentional disclosure of their SMW identities. Moreover, they used dating apps not only to recognize other SMWs offline and build relationships with them, but to exchange emotional support in the process of SMW identity development. Our findings have design implications for supporting SMWs and improving their online dating experiences.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3517624
This paper investigates how the conceptions of gender in memes are central to socializing at hackathons. Drawing on a multi-sited ethnography of seven hackathons, I provide insight into how references to memes and informal technology culture shape interaction in local manifestations of this culture. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, I show how vocabularies and artifacts of technology culture move between on and offline spaces. These findings have implications for HCI research that investigates questions of materiality in computer-mediated communication. Second, I show how even the mundane memes of technology culture can reveal the toxic masculinity and ideology of Incels. By tying these internet memes to a physical context, I unpack how humor can reveal and perpetuate the enduring masculine dominance of technology. I end with recommendations for increasing inclusivity at hackathons, based on how HCI is uniquely positioned to understand how Internet symbols and interactions manifest offline.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3517627
Conference authorship, attendance and presentation is a key measure of quality in the HCI academic, yet we know conferences are not equally accessible for reasons that have nothing to do with quality. In this paper we examine two axes of diversity: gender, and geographic location (of both authors and conferences) and examine how they affect participation at major HCI conferences. Diversity in a group is associated with better outcomes from its work, and HCI has made numerous contributions to increasing representation in other communities. Reflecting on our own situation can produce recommendations for the planning of future HCI conferences, and identify challenges of representation that the HCI community should endeavor to address.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3502106
Women make up approximately half of the workforce in ride-hailing, food delivery, and home service platforms in North America. While studies have reported that gig workers face bias, harassment, and a gender pay gap, we have limited understanding of women's perspectives of these issues and their coping mechanisms. We interviewed 20 women gig workers to hear their unique experiences with these challenges. We found that gig platforms are gender-agnostic, meaning they do not acknowledge women's experiences and the value they bring. By not enforcing anti-harassment policies in design, gig platforms also leave women workers vulnerable to bias and harassment. Due to the lack of support for immediate actions and in fear of losing access to work, women workers ``brush off'' harassment. In addition, the platforms' dispatching and recommendation mechanisms do not acknowledge women's contributions in perceived safety for customers and social support for peer workers.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3517524
People write personalized greeting cards on various occasions. While prior work has studied gender roles in greeting card messages, systematic analysis at scale and tools for raising the awareness of gender stereotyping remain under-investigated. To this end, we collect a large greeting card message corpus covering three different occasions (birthday, Valentine's Day and wedding) from three sources (exemplars from greeting message websites, real-life greetings from social media and language model generated ones). We uncover a wide range of gender stereotypes in this corpus via topic modeling, odds ratio and Word Embedding Association Test (WEAT). We further conduct a survey to understand people's perception of gender roles in messages from this corpus and if gender stereotyping is a concern. The results show that people want to be aware of gender roles in the messages, but remain unconcerned unless the perceived gender roles conflict with the recipient's true personality. In response, we developed GreetA, an interactive visualization and writing assistant tool to visualize fine-grained topics in greeting card messages drafted by the users and the associated gender perception scores, but without suggesting text changes as an intervention.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3502114