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

• The New York Times writes this week about the challenges in getting ANY students to remain in scientific fields through high levels of education — with a lot more demand than supply for technically skilled workers, we can’t afford to alienate anyone.

• A post in the New Statesman outlines some of the many kinds of verbal abuse and threats women writing online often face; this hostile environment keeps many women from expressing themselves online in personal, professional, and political settings.

• The Anita Borg Institute writes on their blog about the business case for diversity in technical fields.

• Geek Feminism has a list of clean-up tasks they need help with on their very useful wiki.

• Under the Microscope highlights two deadlines coming up this month for seminar and fellowship opportunities for women in science.

• Also coming up is the deadline to apply for PITCH, a startup incubator directed at projects with at least one woman co-founder; thanks to a sponsorship, they’re offering 100 application spots for free, so there’s nothing to lose!

• In the New York Times, four top women scientists — a physicist, a neuroscientist, a geneticist, and a cryptographer — are interviewed about the challenges they face (both the general challenges of advanced research and the specific challenges they face as women and mothers) and the strategies they’ve used in rising to the top of their respective fields.
• The DevChix blog has started a series of Q&As on its members, beginning with programmers Nola Stowe and aimee daniels.
• BetaBeat profiles 25 women with prominent roles in the New York City tech scene — and it doesn’t just include “women near tech”, as in so many similar sets of profiles, but features several coders and engineers along with businesswomen and entrepreneurs.
• A neat article at the Atlantic about Project Euler’s approach to teaching programming
• Women in business blog The Glass Hammer posts about stereotype threat; a consensus is fast emerging that this phenomenon — as the article says, “the fear of proving a negative stereotype true actually causes someone to underperform” — is one of the biggest factors keeping women underrepresented in STEM (along with the vicious cycle it forms with the shortage of role models in these fields)
• Under the Microscope has a piece about “STEMebrities” — female scientists, teachers, or fictional characters who provide geeky inspiration and serve as role models for young women and girls
• Two awards from the Anita Borg Institute accepting applications:
  • Applications for the Anita Borg Pass-it-On Awards — small grants for individual technical women to pursue projects or studies — are open until July
  • The Anita Borg Top Company for Technical Women Award is accepting applications through October for a U.S. company
• Location-specific events in Los Angeles and Columbus:
  • In Los Angeles, there are several upcoming Python Ladies events
  • GirlDevelopIt in Columbus is looking for mentors in programming and web development

• At Flickr, you can now browse or add your image to the group This is What a Computer Scientist Looks Like, featuring images of contemporary computer scientists, mostly women.
• The Anita Borg Institute has posted videos of the winners of their 2011 Women of Vision award: Chieko Asakawa, Mary Lou Jepsen, and Karen Panetta
• Futurity discusses subtle (and probably unintentional) gendering in job ads through the use of words like “competitive”/“dominant” (coded male) or “compassionate”/“nurturing” (coded female).
• Under The Microscope posts about a high school Women in Technology club that increased retention of girls in the computer science program by providing a social support network.
• Gail at The Female Perspective of Computer Science discusses the ways computer science is relevant to other academic realms.

• 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.

In addition to blogs and other public online resources, one of the great ways the internet can support women in technology is through mailing lists. Lists have the advantage that your message asking for advice or suggesting a meetup goes directly into people’s inboxes — but even more importantly, lists and the messages on them can be private, so you can complain about a co-worker or ask about a delicate situation on a private mailing list and feel safe saying things you wouldn’t want to share on a public blog. Women-only or women-primarily lists are also great places to ask technical questions with less fear of embarrassment for asking something that might be obvious to someone with more experience (most of these lists have policies explicitly supporting “newbie” questions and requiring a polite, friendly attitude from anyone who responds).

Here are some of the lists I’m on:

• Systers — this list has been around since it was founded by Anita Borg in 1987(!). It’s a big list with a lot of members. People on the list share job offers, ask for advice, or just rant about their experiences. Systers is part of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, and in addition to running the mailing list, sponsors the Pass-It-On Awards (which are funded by donations from members).

• Linuxchix — this organization for women interested in Linux/free/open-source software (motto: “Be polite. Be helpful.”) has several lists with different purposes. Grrls-only is a private, non-archived list only for women (which makes it particularly suitable for discussing sensitive issues); to join the list you have to confirm that you are a woman and interested in Linux. Part of the point of this list is to provide a resource for women trying to learn more about Linux to ask questions without encountering the condescension or sexism that Linux-using men in other fora are sometimes prone to. Men are welcome in the other LinuxChix lists, like Programming or Techtalk, but the lists will still be more women-dominated than your average technical mailing list.

• Devchix — this list is specifically for women who are programmers (while the other lists above are broader in scope, encompassing fields like system administration or simply using Linux). There are a lot of vocal members who are Ruby programmers, but the list isn’t Ruby-exclusive and you can probably find “chix” on there who use whatever your language of choice is. Devchix also has a group blog on technical issues.

I don’t know if there are similar lists available for women in other areas of STEM — if you’re in a non-computing field, please share your experiences with mailing lists in the comments!

• On Twitter, check out the Anita Borg Institute’s list of programs supporting technical women
• BlogHer posts a list of 10 great technical blogs by women; Geek Feminism readers share more in the comments. Know another great blog not mentioned? (Maybe your own blog?) Share it in the comments here!
• UK blog Women in Technology posts about the growing number of female science teachers
• Microsoft’s Imagine Cup featured several all-female teams, and one of those teams, Mirror Vita from Thailand, took first place in the Digital Media category. Congratulations Mirror Vita!
• Facebook is offering a scholarship to the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing for university students majoring in CS! If I were still in school I’d be all over this.
• The fantastic Amanda Hess of the Sexist enlists feminist geek Courtney Stoker to help answer a man’s question about how to make his corner of geekdom more accessible to women.
• Mashable posts a list of 5 organizations helping women get ahead in tech — including the Ruby on Rails workshops for women, which I know are awesome because I TA’d for them when they came to Boston. (Also, it looks like Mashable changed the title of this article from when I saw it a few days ago, which is nice; the original “Why Women Programmers Aren’t a Fad” was a little off-putting in its implications. I’m a person, not a fad!)

• Women 2.0 is running Women 2.0 Labs this summer — a 5-week program in San Francisco to share support, resources, and feedback with startup developers.

• The Anita Borg Institute is now accepting nominations for an award for the top company for technical women — recognizing companies that have excelled at recruiting, retaining, and providing a good working environment for technical women.

• Allyson Kapin at FastCompany blogs about the many structural problems that lead to male-run startups receiving much more prominence and success with venture capitalists than female-run startups.

• Gail Carmichael at the Female Perspective of Computer Science posts about applying general pedagogical techniques to computer science education.

• Sociological Images discusses a cartoon examining the early stereotyping and nudging in the marketing of children’s toys.

• The Age has an article about scientific evidence for sex biases; they also include some interesting anecdotes from two transgender scientists (a man and a woman) who talk about their differing experiences in the scientific community between being perceived as male and female.

• Geek Feminism posts about girls’ experiences with tinkering, and several women share their experiences about whether/how they were allowed to tinker with technology as a kid (and how their experiences differed from their brothers, where applicable).

• ReclaimPrivacy.org offers a GPL’d bookmarklet that will check your Facebook settings for privacy holes you might not have been aware of and help you plug them if you want.

• ThinkGeek has started a new line of Heroine t-shirts with cool designs of scientific and technical women on them — the first to be released are Ada Lovelace and Marie Curie. Awesome!

• Sigh. Yet again, we need instructions from a third party on how to prevent Facebook from sharing personal information without our permission

• Gail Carmichael at the Female Perspective of Computer Science responds to the contention that women in computing groups might not be useful – Gail’s post reflects on the enjoyable and useful experiences she’s had with the women in engineering group she helped start at her school

• Under the Microscope celebrates Earth Day by profiling oceanographer Sylvia Earle, conservation biologist Dee Boersma, and geographer/glaciologist Julienne Stroeve

• The Anita Borg Institute is seeking nominations for the Change Agent Awards, which recognize women working in technology in developing countries

• Next weekend, the Museum of Science in Boston will be featuring several women in science and engineering as speakers

• An inspiring Flickr group features images of techy women at conferences or doing other techy things

Welcome, new members/readers! Don’t forget that you can learn more about how to use the site by browsing the administrivia category of posts — and that if you have any questions or suggestions, you can get in touch with me at clara@stemming.org.

• There are four women in space right now, which is the most women that have ever been in space at one time. (See also: howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com)

• Teen Skepchick posts a satirical ten step guide to intellectual discussion in high school

• Gail Carmichael recaps her successful Carleton Celebration of Women in Science and Engineering

• Under the Microscope summarizes some recent studies on Women’s participation in STEM (most of the studies cite stereotypes and preconceptions as the main factors keeping women from entering these fields in greater numbers)

• Sophie Scott of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience critiques a Guardian profile of pharmacologist Susan Greenfield

• The AAUW posts about efforts to recruit women to teach physics

• Under the Microscope’s JoAnne Growney shares some of her mathematically-inspired poetry

• Girls Gather for Computer Science is a new summer program aimed at middle school students

• Kansas State’s Women in Engineering and Science program has been honored as the nation’s outstanding women in engineering program

• Greg Babe, CEO of Bayer, writes about why it’s important to encourage women and minorities in STEM

• The Anita Borg Institute profiles Jodi Forlizzi as part of their series on Women in Human-Computer Interaction

• Women at Ohio University are more likely to want to teach math than study it

• Don’t forget to be awesome: Geek Feminism shares a reserve of self-confidence tricks

Found (or created!) something cool you’d like to link to? Post your links in the comments here, or create a new post of your own!

• A blogger at IT world suggests women may be “too smart” for tech careers. I’ve heard this argument before, and it generally strikes me as featuring a peculiar cognitive dissonance, and finding yet another direction to criticize women from (“if you are in tech, then you’re too stupid to realize it’s a bad job!” the perfect complement to the more common “if you’re not in tech, it’s because you’re too stupid to understand this intellectually challenging field”). Deirdra at Border House responds.
• A call for papers on women in science and engineering.
• Geek Feminism Wiki on male/gender-neutral names/pseudonyms in geek culture and elsewhere. Though they’re discussing the deliberate (or at least semi-deliberate) adoption of these monikers, I’ve also seen lists of women in open source where there seemed to be a disproportionate number of entrants with gender-neutral or masculine-seeming names, which made me wonder if they had an easier time participating in the open-source community because others presumed they were male.
• A recent study suggests that the gender gap in math is at least mostly cultural.
• The year in review at the Anita Borg institute — an impressive catalog of their accomplishments this year
• Getting a job with the skills nobody’s paid you for — useful information for people who, like many of the technical women I know, have a broad base of self-taught skills
• Rumor has it the Kindle’s DRM has been hacked — will Amazon do the right thing and start opening up their formats?

Share your links in the comments or in your own blog post!