"Twee and retro have been seeping into feminism for a couple decades now, gaining potency. It’s all about cute dresses, felten rosettes from Etsy, knitting, kittens, vintage lamps shaped like owls, Lesley Gore. And yes - a lot of cupcakes." This reminds me of a phrase coined by Ken MacLeod in The Star Fraction: "femininism". Anyway, possibly worth a look.

"it was coined in Germany only in the second half of the 19th century and was first used in English several decades later with the classical sense of “hetero” (“other, different”), making it initially a term of opprobrium. Only in the first decades of the 20th century did it settle into its present niche, cushioned with overtones of romance, pleasure, health and normalcy."

"Focusing on boys saved the toymaker in 2005. Now the company is launching Lego Friends for “the other 50 percent of the world’s children.” Will girls buy in?" This seems to be causing a minor kerfuffle on Twitter, but I can see what Lego are trying to do, and why. The 1980s style of relatively gender-neutral Town stuff has gone, and nowadays the line is, well, stereotypically male. Also: "The Lego Friends team is aware of the paradox at the heart of its work: To break down old stereotypes about how girls play, it risks reinforcing others. “If it takes color-coding or ponies and hairdressers to get girls playing with Lego, I’ll put up with it, at least for now, because it’s just so good for little girls’ brains,” says Lise Eliot", a neuroscientist and author.

"Asked to picture a computer programmer, most of us describe the archetypal computer geek, a brilliant but socially-awkward male." "It may be surprising, then, to learn that the earliest computer programmers were women and that the programming field was once stereotyped as female." 

Cordelia Fine has produced a witty and meticulously researched exposé of the sloppy studies that pass for scientific evidence in so many of today's bestselling books on sex differences

a chess champion calculates twenty moves forward in her game.

"Despite gaming being seen as a male activity, female players now make up about 40% of the gaming population.