by, for, and about women in science, technology, engineering, & math

• At Geek Feminism — commenters offer advice for a young woman considering moving into a computer science career
• Newsarama has an article about Sony’s Game Design scholarship for women
• This year, Ada Lovelace Day will be October 7.
• Limor Fried of Adafruit Industries has just become the first female engineer on the cover of Wired!
• The Guardian posts slides of “100 years of scientific breakthroughs by women”
• MaximumPC lists the 15 most important women in tech history

• Geek Feminism has started a new series, Wednesday Geek Woman, highlighting technical and scientific women both historical and current (it’s like Ada Lovelace Day every week!); today’s featured woman is biologist Rosalind Franklin.
• The Anita Borg Institute also has a series of profiles, Senior Technical Women; this month’s is Nora Denzel, a vice president at Intuit.
• There’s been a Twitter discussion about Silicon Alley Insider’s “New York’s Coolest People in Tech”. The conversation pretty much goes as per usual whenever a list comes out — someone points out that there’s an unrepresentatively small number of women on the list, and then a man involved in making the list complains that it’s because he couldn’t find any women or that they didn’t come to him asking to be included in the list. Sigh.
• Meanwhile, this Field Guide to Female Entrepreneurs managed to find plenty of women involved in the New York tech scene!
• Via the Systers mailing list, a cartoon drawn in honor of Ada Lovelace Day.
• Under the Microscope shares six things to inspire women in science.
• There’s still plenty of time to apply for Google’s Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship — which awards $10,000 each to qualified women who are full-time students in Computer Science or Engineering.

• If I were to link you to all the awesome Ada Lovelace Day posts that came out this week, we’d be here all day. Fortunately there’s already a list for your browsing pleasure! Obviously more than enough to read, but hopefully you’ll find something about a technical woman you didn’t know about or whose contributions were/are bigger than you realized.

• Geek Feminism posts about how NOT to observe Ada Lovelace Day; the purpose of the day is to increase the visibility of women in science and technology, and they call out some posts that don’t help with this goal

• 18-year-old Erika DeBenedictis just won the Intel Science Talent Search top prize for her work on a software program to direct interplanetary travel. Congratulations, Erika!

• AAUW has released a report, Why So Few, that studies the factors keeping women out of STEM fields — some of the report’s findings, including evidence that women will respond to stereotype threat and score worse on exams if told that women tend to score worse on those exams, are summarized in the San Francisco Chronicle.

• Psychology Today posts on an experiment where children weren’t taught math until sixth grade — these children were able to catch up quickly to their peers in mathematical ability, while remaining way ahead of other children on other measures. The article’s author argues that it could be beneficial to adopt this approach to elementary education across the board. What do you think?

• Kathy Kleiman is raising money to produce a documentary on the six women who programmed the original ENIAC computer! These women have received little credit for their work developing a lot of the ideas we use in programming today.

• Geek Feminism has a thread seeking advice from commenters on how to mentor a geeky teen.

What awesome links have you dug up this week? Do you have a favorite Ada Lovelace Day post this year (or did you write a post)? Post them in the comments, or in your own post!

Happy Ada Lovelace Day — an international day of blogging about women in science and technology! Some of my technical & scientific heroines are the women of Stemming — below, a few women who agreed to be profiled today.

Emma (Emma Staatz) is studying to be a doctor specializing in public health — after getting degrees in English and theater in college, she took the initiative to take science courses and EMT training on her own in preparation for a medical career (even though, as she says, “there is a sad lack of costumes in science”). She loves learning how things work — “from toasters, to physics, to people’s bodies” — and prepared for a scientific career from an early age by having a lab in her basement as a child. Currently, Emma works in an office, and she enjoys movies, obsessing about Lost, and hanging out with friends.

Jenmyers (Jen Myers) always enjoyed working with computers, and once she discovered the internet, she worked on creating her own websites, which inspired her to change her major to computer science (moving away from her background as an artsy literature geek). She found the transition challenging, but says "I’m a firm believer in erasing all the lines that exist as barriers to tech/science, whether it’s for people who are told they’re only good at “creative” endeavors or whether it’s because they’re of a certain gender or ethnicity." Now Jen works as a web designer and front-end developer. She finds the fast pace of new technology that she has to keep up with both exciting and frustrating, and while she finds some aspects of the typical tech culture frustrating, she’s hopeful that that is changing. Jen is a single mom to a four-year-old daughter, writes for Skepchick.org, and runs a local skeptic group in central Ohio. She also blogs at deliberatepixel.com and tweets as @antiheroine.

Lola (Lola Thompson) is a mathematics PhD student specializing in number theory. She’s loved math and logic since an early age; as a kid, she loved going to math camp, and learning about ideas like fractals and the Fibonacci sequence. Her mathematical career hit a bump when she was turned off by the formulaic qualities of calculus in high school and early college, but once she discovered the possibility of a career in theoretical math, as she says, “once I got a taste of this so-called ‘pure math’, I knew that I had to be a mathematician”. She loves the creativity and flexibility of her job, but wishes there were more women in her field, especially other women who love skirts and heels! When she’s not doing math, Lola dances, cooks, and tries to travel each year to the most interesting place that she can for under $500 (last year: Iceland, this year: Peru). You can also find her online at math.dartmouth.edu/~thompson.

Mamealoney (Mame Maloney) is using her math degree as a programmer and data analyst at an economic consulting firm. She has always excelled at math and science, and enjoyed the satisfaction of pursuing subjects she was good at. She enjoys the day-to-day rhythm of her quantitative job, and likes her colleagues, but regrets that her challenging technical job takes up a great deal of time and pressures her to focus on technical development at the expense of her more sensory and artistic interests, like drawing, painting, and piano. But when she does have free time, Mame reads, rides her bike, drinks beer, shops, and is active in the animal welfare movement. You can find her online at hydrobromic.com.

MorgannaLeFey (Siobhan Perricone) has been interested in computers ever since her father first brought home a VIC-20, and now she works as a web applications and database developer. She loves using her technical skills to help make people’s lives easier, and says “there’s a real rush of pleasure when I finally manage to debug my software” — but she finds it frustrating when people dismiss science and technology as “too hard” for them. She enjoys a variety of games — computer games, online collaborative games, tabletop roleplaying games, board games, and card games — and spends a lot of time reading and watching movies. She also loves to travel; she attends at least one gaming convention a year and looks forward to a trip to the UK to officiate a wedding this summer.

Nora (Nora Friedman) is pursuing a PhD in public health — she studies infectious disease epidemiology. Her job involves a variety of scientific techniques — researching and compiling data, biology, immunology, bio-statistics, coding in SAS, and teaching both scientific theory and epidemiology methods — and she enjoys all these aspects of her work. Nora comes from an academic and scientific family that encouraged her pursuits in these fields; when she’s not working, she bikes around New Orleans, takes care of her house, and volunteers as a parasitologist at an animal shelter. She occasionally blogs at bigshouldersbigeasy.blogspot.com.

And Stemming user Amanda wants to give an Ada Lovelace Day shoutout to her twin sister Michelle — the only woman on the MooTools dev team!

Did you make an Ada Lovelace Day post today? Link it in the comments!

This weekend I’m going to some of the LibrePlanet events — I met some great ladies at the women in free software dinner last night, and tomorrow we’ll talk more about ways to increase women’s participation in the free software community.

I also gave my first technical presentation yesterday! I gave an introduction to WordPress talk. I was definitely pretty nervous and didn’t know what to expect with this presentation — I can tell that I still have a lot to learn about giving effective presentations, but overall it went pretty well and I am definitely glad I took advantage of this opportunity!

Some links of interest this week:

• Under the Microscope’s “Message 2 a Younger Me” series has collected a bunch of interesting stories
• They also collected information on Women’s History Month events that are science-related
• Lisa Barone at Outspoken Media speaks out against women in tech cutting each other down
• Ada Lovelace Day t-shirts!
• Nola at DevChix blogs about her experiments with remote pair programming

LOTS of good stuff this week:

• In Malaysia, women make up 50 to 60 percent of the computer industry — Stanford researchers suggest that this is because masculinity and technology are not connected in Malaysian culture. This certainly suggests (as we really already knew) that the explanation for the low numbers of women in technical fields in many countries is cultural rather than biological.

• A young woman in tech support suggests that many expectations about the gender of computer experts are generational, and writes,

  I was born into the generation that struggled with inkjet printers as soon as they had to write their first papers in high school. Our generation is practically a cyborg generation: how do you possibly go through pre-teenage hood and your teen years without accumulating vast amounts of useful tricks to do with printer troubleshooting, router resetting, sending and receiving email, installing programs, surfing the internet?

  What do you think? I’m also from the generation that had computers and the internet as tools in our homes at a young age, and I agree that there’s a certain basic level of computer literacy that’s almost as fundamental to Millenials as literal literacy. But at the same time, I can definitely see different levels of interest and aptitude in learning how computers work and how to fix them themselves, even among people who all grew up using them as tools every day.

• For Women’s History Month, Under the Microscope is inviting women to share stories of a “message to a younger me”

• If you’re near London, check out the Ada Lovelace Day potluck and unconference!

• For International Women’s Day earlier this month, CERN put focus on the many women who work in its large labs

• In the New York Times, an article about academic women in science at Harvard

• The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is offering scholarships for students interested in attending the conference

• If you’re going to SXSW, the Anita Borg Institute will have a booth featuring several organizations supporting women in tech

• Wired posts a cool retrospective on where the internet and the dot-com bubble were 10 years ago. I was a teenager learning HTML in my spare time and marveling at the fact that Amazon could stay in business despite operating at a loss — how about you?

• An article about women in open source. (But you might want to skip the comments!)

• Geek Feminism posts about tokenism in technical contexts and offers some suggestions of how to react if you feel tokenized

• Dotfiveone blogs about Radia Perlman, “mother of the internet”, recipient of the Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Award, and now an Intel Fellow!

• For Women’s History Month, Veronica Arreola aka SCIENCE GRRL is having a science-related giveaway on the Girl with Pen blog

• For Women’s History Month, the Smithsonian features some classic photos of women scientists, along with pictures

• The Sexist interviews some young men about their knowledge of how birth control works and finds it… lacking. Here’s one area where women are expected to have the superior scientific and technical knowledge!

• Wired reviews Secret Ada, an iPhone/iPod app that teaches kids basic cryptography and unlocks profiles of women scientists at each level
• Under the Microscope profiles several notable black women scientists and inventors
• Taralyn Tan writes about What Women (in Science) Want
• The Women in Science Symposium 2010: Building an Identity is coming up in Chicago this April
• Also in April, the New York City Girls Computer Science and Engineering Colloquium is coming up, for girls in grades 9 and 10
• Here are some ways to get involved in Ada Lovelace Day next month (aside, of course, from adding your profile to the collection here at Stemming)

The ACM’s Dot Diva initiative is seeking technical women in their 20s to profile on their site in order to inspire high school girls. (And while we’re on the topic of profile of technical women, don’t forget that Stemming wants to post a profile of you too for next month’s Ada Lovelace Day.)

In San Francisco, Sarah Allen has an internship opportunity for a new Rubyist.

Also in San Francisco, featuring Sarah Allen (and Sarah Mei), and Ruby-related: the San Francisco Ruby on Rails Outreach Workshop for Women is back next weekend! There are only a few spots left, so sign up now if you’re interested. I was a TA at the Boston version of this last fall, and I cannot recommend the workshop highly enough — it’s free, completely newbie-friendly (whether you’re totally new to programming or just new to Ruby), childcare is available, everyone is nice and friendly, and it’s overall a super-fun way to get started with Ruby and meet some great people.

(Welcome, Skepchick readers and new members! You may want to browse some of the administrivia posts to learn more about the site.)

Mamealoney posted about Computer Engineering Barbie earlier, and now she’s real!

Of course, like any news item about women and technology, the launch of Computer Engineering Barbie has set off a flurry of hand-wringing about how there must be something wrong with this. In this case, it’s the idea that this Barbie is too femme to be a geek — if she’s wearing pink and has long hair, she can’t be a “real coder”.

Wired’s Geek Dad blog posts a tongue-in-cheek “5 Ideas to Make Computer Engineer Barbie Realistic” (because, of course, she doesn’t look realistic as is), and one of the first commenters reposts a tweet that “If new Barbie was a real coder, she would be wearing a Three Wolf Moon t-shirt.”¹ Another Wired blog, GadgetLab, elicits the wonderful comment “News flash, they put the hot chicks in front desk answering the phone, or they have them on the sales staff. The hot ones or even remotely attractive ones never work in IT/IS.” (Eww! Maybe consider comment moderation, Wired?) And a woman quoted in the BBC’s article about the doll describes Barbie’s hairstyle as “really impractical… you [would] spend half the time pulling it back from your face.”

There have been a lot of great discussions about this on some of the mailing lists I’m on (the LinuxChix, DevChix, and Systers mailing lists are great, if you’re not already on them!), and someone there made the key point: if a geeky woman presents as femme/takes care in her appearance/is attractive, she’s considered not much of a geek, but if she doesn’t care about her appearance, she’s considered not much of a woman. You can’t win.

In my opinion, Computer Engineering Barbie is great, and it’s ridiculous to say that her “girly” presentation makes her unrealistic as a geek. Real geeks come in all shapes, sizes, genders, colors, levels of attractiveness, and styles of dress — it’s what you do and how you think that makes you geeky, not what you wear. Asserting that “real coders” don’t care about their appearance is just one more in the barrage of cultural memes that pigeonhole programmers into one narrow stereotype — it’s bad for coders (who may or may not fit the stereotype), it’s bad for potential coders (who decide not to go into programming because they don’t fit the stereotype), and it’s bad for everyone who benefits from computer technology (which could be even better if so many people weren’t turned away from the field by this stupid idea).

This is part of why Ada Lovelace Day is so needed — as last year’s many posts showed, when you’re actually profiling real women in technology and not some imagined stereotype, you can see that “geek vs. femme” (or “geek vs. woman”, or “geek vs. [anything else]”) is a pretty pointless distinction. (And I hope you’ll join us this year and help us showcase the vast diversity of women in science/tech we have right here on Stemming!)

1. not that there’s anything wrong with a three wolf moon t-shirt!

Ada Lovelace Day is coming up next month — for those who don’t know, it’s a worldwide event where hundreds of bloggers each post about a woman in technology they admire.

I posted about a number of women last year on my personal blog; but this year, I’d like to feature some of the women of Stemming!

If you want to be one of them (and I know you do), just let me know; leave a comment here, or email me at clara@stemming.org answering a few of these questions:

1. What makes you a technical or scientific woman? (Don’t worry… there’s no wrong answer!)
2. How did you first get interested or involved in tech/science?
3. What do you like/dislike about it?
4. What do you do with your life when you’re not engaged in technical/scientific pursuits?
5. Do you have a website or blog we can link our users to?

On March 24, I’ll post them all here!

Of course, we hope you’ll also make your own Ada Lovelace Day posts about women you admire here on Stemming!