Good morning everyone,

I hope you are having a good Friday! I hope you are as stoked as I am for some amazing women and their amazing work.

If there is a red thread that runs through Fem Fri as a project it is the idea that our thoughts and words are powerful even when we feel like they are not. That's why I'm so excited to share an exclusive interview with experimental sociolingust Kelly Wright, who uses machine learning to look at human bias. There's so much in this interview – including but not limited to a description of how it feels to make a model with ninety six percent accuracy – but let's start with this remarkable pullquote:

You get all kinds of words you wouldn't expect. "Rolex" only occurs in the white corpus. Athletes of both races have endorsement details with Rolex, but sports writers only talk about it when it's white players. You could write a lot of words associated with race, and never get to Rolex. But you can see it with an analysis like this.

https://medium.com/@Vincennes/interview-with-kelly-wright-sociolinguist-8878ddd857ae?sk=6f6b4c30f7db6949d1981b5476eb85f5

Kelly also wanted to make the point that these models are not hard to build. Are there unconscious biases that you want to look at? You can totally do that! You can do that this weekend. Kelly made a guide for us; if you do your own analysis based on this let me know:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1p3Mess6vaYUMrIOB-g9OrFAPMD_aBzjQ/view?usp=sharing

Here's a great piece from Autostraddle about talking with your friends, family and colleagues about racism and anti-racism. It's practical, calm and fact based, which are also the things it advises its readers to be:

People’s minds are rarely changed when they are confronted with a lot of information that conflicts with what they already know and/or believe. They usually have to be guided carefully and gently out of their comfort zones, hands held by someone with whom they have an existing relationship, toward understandings that conflict with their current beliefs. When I was in graduate school getting my teaching credentials, we learned that children have a “zone of proximal development,” or ZPD. I think it applies to adults too.

https://www.autostraddle.com/how-to-talk-to-your-white-friends-and-family-about-racism/

Finally, while we are talking about changing minds and changing how language is used, here's Kennedy Mitchum, who wrote an email and as a result Merriam-Webster is changing its definition of "racism":

“I kept having to tell them that definition is not representative of what is actually happening in the world,” Mitchum told CNN. “The way that racism occurs in real life is not just prejudice; it’s the systemic racism that is happening for a lot of black Americans.”

https://www.theroot.com/a-missouri-woman-got-merriam-webster-to-agree-to-update-1843981946/

Have a great day, lovely people.

A xx.