websites

F

“Toys for girls”. I support a charity which shall reain nameless. I looked at its on-line gift shop over the weekend to find under under “Gifts” it was divided into sections including “Gifts for girls” and “Gifts for boys”. Oh, great – gender stereotyping for children I thought, expecting to see toys on these pages. The page gifts for girls was aimed at women (I am supposing) including things such as shopping bags. The gift for boys site became “gifts for guys” on the page. It included magazine subscriptions, calendars and the like. I truly found this offensive and upsetting. I was buying a calendar. Was this OK? Why call me a girl? I thought of emailing but decided the personal approach was better and I then phoned the (female) person who dealt with the shop. She took offence that I thought the site was sexist and was not willing to listen to even why the term girl was offensive. I felt belittled yet again. Somebody was attacking me because I had pointed out the problems with the website. I was told the comments will be passed back to the shop, but that no-one else had complained. I am not holding my breath. Sadly, I was halfway through filling in a form to do voluntary work for this charity. Now I am not sure.

XTina

Thursday I tried to get Start Up Funding, but as soon as I went to use the slide show, I was mocked as if I didn’t “know” how to do a slide show, BEFORE I EVEN DID IT OR STARTED TALKING! Of course I knew – I had it even saved it to the desktop. Most of the room were males as well. That makes me wonder if it is because of my appearance. I don’t think they even knew what it would be about before, right? It also is about a website… and well, I feel sexism each day. From mechanics, to websites. If you notice, all the main websites I think were founded by males…