What’s in your handbag?

After seeing this blog post and @NathanaelB on Twitter’s collage of his manbag,  I took a photo of the contents of my handbag. Did you know there’s a whole Flickr group devoted to handbag contents? I reckon Nathanael would survive a natural disaster. And I reckon the guy in the Wanderer blog could travel for three months with his bag, provided he can do the washing every third day. After a few months, he might find his clothes no longer suit the climate (assuming he’s in a place where there are definite temperature changes with the seasons).

So this is what’s in my handbag on any given day of the week:

The lipstick case has a bright red and lip balm. The sewing kit is actually not a sewing kit at all: it contains cough lollies and rosary beads. The three tubes below that are PureWipes, antibacterial cleanser, and eye drops. There’s usually car and house keys too.

Based on this, the situations I equip myself to deal with are:

• Access to things
• Minor physical discomfort
• Paying for things
• Communications (the iPad doubles as my phone)

I’m not sure what category the rosary beads belong to. Possibly all of the above.

I’ve been busy.

Good thing hardly anybody reads this blog, because I’ve been too busy to update it.
My writing energies have gone into a report for my day job, published last week with a good response in the media.
Although I did publish this little piece on Lip Mag online: a look at where to find strong female characters in contemporary non-mainstream fiction.

Women and G+

I hear that 75% of Google+ users are male. Which, of course, is quite different to the gender balance on other social media like Facebook, Twitter, forums, blogs etc.

So why are there not so many women on G+? I must admit to having gone back there, after an initial leaving in a huff. I left because I didn’t have time to deal with yet another social media outlet. But I came back because some of the people I like talking to are more available on G+ than on other media. And because G+ gives me more control over my privacy online than some other social media. But that doesn’t explain why other women are not there in greater numbers.

Perhaps one factor is that women get the point of social media: it’s for socialising. Until a critical mass of their friends are there, they won’t have reason to leave other networks and spend time in a new network. But because we like socialising, once that critical mass is reached, women will flood into the network as we invite our female friends over to play.

It could also be about the user interface. There is nothing much to the Twitter interface, and Facebook is something everyone is used to. G+’s lack of time-wasting games may work against it, because so many less tech oriented users learn to navigate an environment through games where it doesn’t annoy anyone if they click the wrong button.

Maybe it is also a statement about why women so dominate other forms of social media, not about why women are not among the mostly tech worker early adopters of a new social media network. There are a lot of women in our society who are isolated at home while the toddler is napping, or kids are at school, or the baby is awake at 3am and will only settle with an hour-long feed. Social media is a sanity break for so many women with short bursts of time to pass, but no energy left for deeply thought out interactions. And unlike phone calls, you can put something out there on social media with no requirement for your friends to reply immediately if they’re busy.

Maybe.