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

I recently attended the Catalyst Awards hosted by Science Club for Girls. This organization provides free science education and activities for girls in Massachusetts — and then as the girls in the program get older, they start teaching courses themselves! This is an awesome local organization that’s doing a lot of great work.

Plus, I got to see some of the students (now student teachers) teach science to the award ceremony’s audience — most of us couldn’t figure out how to stick a skewer through a balloon without popping it, and the girls walked us through how to do it and why it works.

The Sunlight Foundation is hiring a Python/Django coder in Boston! Maybe this will be a good fit for an alumna of the Boston Python Workshop?

View the full job posting at Sunlight’s website.

Stemming is going to be demo-ing at the Boston Beta startup event next Tuesday!

Until this Friday, Stemming users can use the discount code demoguest to register for the event for free! Bring your friends, come say hi, and vote for Stemming in the “People’s Choice” startup competition!

Here in Boston, it’s one of the first spring-like days: hooray! Here are some links for your weekend enjoyment:

• Brown University’s Artemis Program for 9th grade girls interested in science and tech is seeking funding.

• The Free Software Foundation is also seeking donations to their Women’s Travel Fund to help get more women to this year’s LibrePlanet conference in Cambridge

• The National Center for Women & Information Technology is offering an award for high school girls interested in computing.

• 15 Female Scientists Who Changed the World — who else would you include?

• Rebecca Skloot talks about her new book on Henrietta Lacks, a poor black tobacco farmer whose cancer cells were harvested without her consent — descendants of those cells have contributed to a lot of advances in cancer research and are still in use in labs.

• And just for LOLz: Scientific Americat!

• She’s Geeky unconference is coming up in the Bay Area!
• Also in the Bay Area, a competition for teams of high school girls programming Android and iPhone applications
• In Boston, the LibrePlanet Conference 2010 is coming up in March — RSVP now to reserve a spot!
• Check out Engineer Your Life — a website aimed at high school girls and promoting careers in engineering
• This story about research showing girls may be less interested in computer science if it’s associated with a “geeky” environment has been being passed around a lot this week. What do you think? Is this a legitimate explanation? Personally, I’ve always found geeky environments to be a plus — but then, I’m already a programmer, so my personal experience says more about how women do go into technology than why they don’t.
• Under the Microscope profiles several women who are playing important roles in the United Nations’ Climate Change Conference
• This diagram of the many species of geeks is kind of cool, but it’s also depressing how sexism in geek culture shows up even in such a playful context — one of the types of geek is “IT guy” (of course, there’s no “IT gal”), and all of the “geek heroes” are men, while several of the “geek obsessions” are women (taking their place among “stuff” like aliens, robots, and movies).
• Mark Shuttleworth is stepping down as CEO of Canonical — current COO Jane Silber will take his place
• Gawker posts a guide to the new Facebook privacy settings and an update on the old privacy settings you can no longer use
• Is Alice in Wonderland really a complex allegory about then-new types of mathematics?
• The Free Press Action Fund posts a map of where your representatives stand on Net Neutrality, and how to contact them about it
• And, it’s almost the weekend. Periodic Table of Beer!

Thanks to my twitter feed for sharing several of these links!

As always, please share your links of interest in the comments or in a blog post of your own!