Puzzle Trouble: Women & Crosswords in the Age of Autofill Anna Shectman on the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament and how the rise of crossword-construction software has changed the field. At this point in his speech, [David] Steinberg suggested that the ever-widening gender gap in crosswords might be explained (or boysplained, as one puzzle blogger snarked) by the field’s shift to software-facilitated constructions. Like photography, film, and any number of once-analog trades, the process of puzzle-making has been digitized in the past twenty years. With few exceptions, and I count myself among them, constructors use programs like Crossword Compiler or Crossfire to assemble their grids. Steinberg’s statistical analysis offered cogent data to support his hypothesis that the rise in crossword software is correlated to the widening gender gap among constructors. As puzzle-making became increasingly informed by programming, it began to replicate the gender imbalance of tech culture... Keep reading here: theamericanreader/puzzle-trouble-women-and-crosswords-in-the-age-of-autofill/
Posted on: Wed, 13 Aug 2014 15:34:01 +0000
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