women – Page 3 – Things Are Good

Games for Women

Some entrepreneurs in Vancouver have discovered that there are not enough games designed specifically for women and they are looking to change that.

As a game designer myself, I think that this is a great thing to see!

Few mainstream video games are made â€” or marketed â€” with women in mind, even though nearly 40 per cent of video game players in the United States and Canada are female. The likely reason? Few women are actually designing the games.

Brenda Bailey Gershkovitch and Kirsten Forbes hope to ride to the rescue. Last July, the two Vancouverites launched Silicon Sisters, the first game development studio in the country owned and run by women. It is unique in its mission to design games for young girls from a female perspective.

Their first game, School 26, launches in early spring on computer and portable Mac devices. Itâ€™s a role-playing game in which players act as a high school student who helps peers with personal and school-related problems.

Read the rest of the article.

Thanks Stewy!

World Toilet Day is today! For those of you who care about sanitation it’s time to celebrate this campaign to increase awareness of the plight of loos around the world. Access to toilets is a huge issue in poor areas that has cascading effects on all levels of society, particularly women.

It’s great to see this campaign get so much attention and there’s stuff you can do to help out!

WTO which has over 200 partners worldwide, 42 of which are in India is one of the few organisations that focusses only on sanitation and toilets instead of water. “Everyone clubs water and sanitation, and 95% of the funds go towards water projects. But good sanitation is the first step towards clean water,” he says.

Toilets weren’t really top of the pot for Sim, who ran a number of businesses from the age of 25. “When I turned 40, I realised that I had 13,000 more days to live the average Singaporean lives to 80 and wanted to do something useful,” he says. Sim started reading and “realised that the toilet is really neglected”. So he started “the other WTO” in 2001 to disseminate serious facts with a sense of humour. The logo is a toilet seat shaped like a heart. “I thought the best way to break the toilet taboo was to use lots of puns.” But the name, which everyone thinks is “really bad at first” sticks in people’s minds. “That’s because every mother has told her child not to talk about the toilet. It’s not polite’. And here we are talking about the loo quite freely,” says Sim, who is often called Toilet Man.

And it’s not just about getting toilets installed. “You have to keep them clean too. So Sim has started the World Toilet College in Singapore that provides training in toilet maintenance and design. “I’m hoping we can open one in India too to train toilet cleaners like technicians.”

Vaginal Gel Cuts HIV Infections by Half

The International Aids Conference is currently underway in Vienna right now and some exciting news has been announced there. A new vaginal gel containing an AIDs drug is excellent at curtailing HIV infections.

The gel was found to be both safe and acceptable when used once in the 12 hours before sex and once in the 12 hours after sex by women aged 18 to 40 years.

Salim Abdool Karim, one of the two leading co-researchers, told reporters in Vienna that the 889 women involved in the trial, conducted in the coastal city of Durban and a remote rural village, had largely used the gel as directed.

They were also given condoms and advice about sexually transmitted diseases, and tested for HIV once a month.

After 30 months, 98 women became infected with HIV – 38 in the group that got tenofovir in the gel and 60 in the group that got placebos.

G(irls)20

Teh G(irls)20 has started in Toronto, the first of many G20 related events for people by the people. The best news of all? These summits don’t $1 billion in security preparations. We’ve looked at the G(irls)20 before, but here’s more info on it:

The event, organized by the Belinda Stronach Foundation, has brought together young women from the 20 countries represented at the G20, plus one representative from the African Union. Travel and accommodation for the delegates is being covered by sponsors.

Held in downtown Toronto as the city girds itself for the large international G20 summit, the event aims to brainstorm solutions, from a young female perspective, to the world’s problems. Their ideas will then be made public, with hopes of influencing the world leaders before they begin official talks at both the G8 and G20.

Germany’s Most Popular Women’s Magazine to Ban Models

Brigitte, Germany’s most popular women’s magazine will stop using professional models because the models do not reflect the vast majority of women. Previously, the magazine has been adding weight to the super-thin models using photoshop.

The Guardian has more.

“From 2010 we will not work with professional models any more,” said Andreas Lebert, editor-in-chief, adding that he was “fed up” with having to retouch pictures of underweight models who bore no resemblance to ordinary women.

“For years we’ve had to use Photoshop to fatten the girls up,” he said. “Especially their thighs, and decolletage. But this is disturbing and perverse and what has it got to do with our real reader?”

He said the move was a response to complaints by readers who said they had no connection with the women depicted in fashion features and “no longer wanted to see protruding bones”.