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

• I just discovered Riot Nrrd — an awesome webcomic about geeky teens where most of the main characters are female (and the cast also features characters who are trans, queer, people of color, etc…). Plus their links page includes the sections “Feminist/Womanist Nerd Stuff”, “Nerds of Color Stuff”, “Disabled Nerd Stuff”, and “Queer Nerd Stuff”.

• Another comic, this time a one-off by Lucy Knisely, about the experience of women in nerd culture.

• Joe Clark posts a misguided response to Stubornella’s post (linked earlier this week) about women in technology — Elaine Nelson posts a sensible reply.

• At Tiger Beatdown, Garland Grey posts about his experience of queer nerd identity.

• Mashable posts a list of developer/hacker women to follow on Twitter. The list itself is great; some of these women I’m familiar with, and some are new to me. But something about the way the list is framed (it opens with “Everyone should know at least one woman who can code her way out of a wet paper bag”) rubs me the wrong way. Thoughts?

I’m not a STEM woman. I’m a creative writer. When I see numbers with a bunch of symbols as in any mathematical field from statistics to calculus, I freeze up. In high school chemistry I had far more interest in my amazingly good looking Hindi lab partner than in balancing equations. You get the idea.

Fortunately, I have brought into the world a well-balanced, 14 year old with equally stellar achievement in science, math and creative writing — a true hybrid of my husband and me.

She seeks a future in astrophysics or aeronautics, and to that end she is attending Physics and Engineering Camp for Girls at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. The St. Olaf Rube Goldberg Machine team has been national champions, going up against major universities like Syracuse and Michigan. St. Olaf has a world class math and engineering department — very unusual for a small, Lutheran, liberal arts college.

There are many camps and programs for middle school girls interested in STEM fields, but not as many for high school girls.

Another source of great fortune is that St. Olaf is just 140 miles up the road from our home.

The camp runs this year from July 11-16. It would be a great opportunity for a high school girl interested in physics or engineering for next year.

We seek: the last bit of funding for Caitlyn to go. My writing practice has fallen off dramatically in the six months since we signed Caitlyn up for the camp. She has earned two small scholarships — one from our local Society of Women in Engineering and one from our local Kiwanis. She has some money directly from the college.

We need: just $300 more. Normally, I would consider the cost of tuition for this camp more than reasonable for a sleep away camp.

Between my husband’s illness this winter and spring and my own business falling off with many projects on indefinite hold, we literally do not have $300.

If there is another Society of Women in Engineering or really any group or individual out there who, in the next few days, would give a need based scholarship directly to the college for a very high achieving rising high school freshman to make it possible for her to attend this camp, I believe your investment would be most worthwhile.

Providing scholarships to this camp for similar girls interested in STEM fields at this world class college would also be a solid investment in nurturing future women in STEM.

Thank you!

email me here for more information:

lakewriter51340@gmail.com

For more about the camp:

http://www.stolaf.edu/camps/science/index.html

Hi! I just found this site from DevChix (thanks, Jeanne!).

So just wanted to say hello and what an awesome site this is! I’m a software developer – I have The Hacker Chick Blog and I just landed a totally snazzy new job as a Developer Evangelist for Startups at Microsoft.

One of the amazing things is all of the great programs that Microsoft sponsors for students. I actually got to spend my first day volunteering at a DigiGirlz Day where we brought very cool next generation technology (Surface/multi-touch, electronic art, fabric-based computers – totally neat!) to around 300 high school girls. That was _totally _my coolest 1st day on a job ever. :-)

DigiGirlz Website: http://www.microsoft.com/about/diversity/programs/digigirlz/default.aspx

We also do Imagine Cup, which is a worldwide student competition, where students compete to build technology that addresses some of our greatest challenges like hunger and environmental issues. The US Finals are being held April 26th in Washington DC and they’re open to everyone (am a little jealous I won’t be able to get down to DC for this!): https://www.microsoftusevents.com/IC10communityshowcase/Content/Home.aspx

Anyway, just thought some of you might be interested, I’ll try to post more things like this as I find them and am looking forward to meeting more of you on the site! :)

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!

Workshop: Paintable Electronics Workshop

http://events.mit.edu/event.html?id=11609572&date=2010/04/02

Saturday, May 01, 2010

Time: 10:00a–5:00p

Location: N51

Open a book to make it glow, draw a sketch to create music, touch a pop-up book to make it move. This workshop (presented by researchers from MIT Media Lab’s High-Low Tech group) will teach you how to create interactive paintings and paper sculptures that sparkle, change shape, and sing. We’ll spend the day exploring the intersection of paper crafts, and electronics using paper, conductive paints, traditional paints, ribbons, beads, lights, speakers, and glue. No previous experience required. Lunch included with registration fee.

For teens (ages 15+) and adults only. Limited enrollment. PRE-REGISTRATION REQUIRED.

Part of the Cambridge Science Festival.

I have a sister who is 12. She loves her math and science classes, but her school doesn’t seem to be interested in teaching computer skills (not even typing – I bought her some typing programs to get her started when I found that out).

I love computers and I love programming because of the limitless applications and ways to help people. My enthusiasm has yet to convince her that programming is something she’d be interested in, though. I’ve tested the programming waters with her on a few occasions using Python, but she is quickly bored by the need to understand basic data structures and flow control before being able to do anything interesting.

I’m not sure how to better motivation programming for her. Super-high-level kid-oriented languages exist, for example Scratch and many other projects from the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab, but as the group name suggests, these programming platforms are geared towards kids half her age.

One idea I’ve been toying with is setting up a Moo for her and her friends and seeing if exploring the world inspires her to want to learn how to add things to it (although Lambda is maybe a sadistic choice for first programming language).

Has anyone has success with introducing programming to someone this age? What worked for you?

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!

I just attended an EPA user’s conference for a solid waste management program called RCRA. The EPA has system called RCRAInfo, which is where states submit the pertinent data for consumption by a wide variety of individuals.

During one of the panel discussions I was struck by how many women there are working on the technical side of things for this application. There were fifteen individuals introduced as members of the team doing the actual work on the software. Ten of them were women (and, because women ARE good at math, I don’t need to tell you how many men that means there were, or what percentage each gender comprises of the whole). The lead programmer for the web application is a woman, though it does appear that many of the upper management roles are still older men.

It appeared to me that there was a more equal distribution among the actual program members who were attending the conference, but perhaps there were a few more women than men who constituted the users of this software.

Obviously I have no real hard statistics for this, it was more just a sense of things, and it pleased me to see so many women working on/with this software. It got me wondering, though, about why it might be there would be more women in proportion than the average across industries (or if it just happened to be this particular program, or solid waste management in particular).

I work in applications development. My boss has five people he supervises, and there is one intern that we sorta oversee (her pay comes from a specific department, but she’s doing web development work so she works with us). My boss is male. He has two colleagues at his management level, one male and one female. All three of them report to a make “Super IT Boss”. In my section (applications development) there are two females, three males, and a female intern. Our intern is an actual college student whose major is web applications development. My female coworker went to college in the 70s, and studied geology (that’s what her degree is). Two of my male coworkers have been to college and studied computers, one at the typical young age, one as a second career. I don’t know think the third has a degree in computers. I came into computers from being a super user, not through having any sort of degree in them.

In the section that is supervised by a female, there is one other female. She was inherited during a re-org that centralized IT for our agency. The female supervisor never hires females, she most assuredly works better with males. She sometimes appears to have the attitude that females (herself excepted) don’t make good IT professionals. Though really I think it comes down to her simply not working well with other females. Personally, I think this is a totally lame excuse and she shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this, but I’m not willing to rock the boat on this front at this time. I have no idea how many women have even applied for any of her vacancies, so I don’t know if she’s really being sexist about it. She supervises five employees in total.

In the section supervised by the other male (not my boss), there are only two other employees, both male. It’s a very specific field (GIS), and I don’t know how many women have experience in it who would apply for a state job doing it (the previous supervisor for that section was female, she moved on to a corporate job in the same field).

I can think of a lot of reasons why public service might attract more females in technical careers. We certainly have a fair number of female scientists in our agency (I don’t know specifically though).

Perhaps because the hours are better. Overtime is rare because there’s simply no funding for it. It’s more conducive to having family and being able to get away when you need to for your kids.

Perhaps because the benefits are good. Not great, and not cheap (at least here in Vermont) but certainly way better than a lot of my friends in private industry have.

Or because they work hard to get rid of sexism in the work place. If you’re a systems developer II, you make the same wage as every other systems developer II who has worked the same amount of time as you have. There are no salary adjustments or negotiations for salary. The only place for there to be discrimination, really, is in the hiring practices of individual supervisors (if they never hire a female systems developer, for instance, despite there being qualified applicants), or in whether or not promotions are granted when vacancies open up, but that’s often a case of seniority, and someone would have to argue pretty strongly against a female candidate with seniority to not be promoted to fill a particular vacancy if she’s capable and wants the position.

It used to be that job security was a strong reason for working in public service. However, the latest economic meltdown has shown that governors are not above panicking and firing people without any serious consideration to the harm this does to the services that the people of the state expect to be available. So while it’s still a pretty secure job, it’s not as secure as it was three years ago.

On the down side, the pay, in general, is not really comparable to what I’d be making if I were in private industry. Though sometimes I wonder if I’m adjusting enough for that. I mean, I’d have to maintain a very different wardrobe than I have now (probably). That’s money out of the bottom line. There’s also the question of overtime, and how overtime is, from what I’ve heard, usually expected. And without compensation for it. At least here, if I HAVE to do overtime, I get 1 for 1 comp time off in exchange for it. So I wonder if I’d actually be making more money in the end, taking into account that I’d be doing 60 or more hours a week, instead of the absolute 40 I can count on here.

I wonder if more women would be interested in tech careers if they were looking more closely at public service positions.

Anyway, these are just some rambling musings…

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!

• 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)