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!

• Forbes analyzes the reasons women leave careers in science and engineering, and finds that most women cite dissatisfaction with pay or promotion opportunities as their reason for leaving

• PZ Myers at ScienceBlogs criticizes the division of women and men into “feeling” and “thinking” and analyzes the problems that arise when this division portrays science and rational thinking as “anti-feminist”

• At Geek Feminism, a discussion of whether it’s helpful or harmful to warn young women about the sexism they’ll probably experience in technical careers

• At Dreamwidth, cme posts about the many hurdles and discouragements to women in open source — and why she’s moving her journal to Dreamwidth to support an open-source project that doesn’t have many of these problems

• Caroline McCarthy divides the women in tech “problem” into two separate issues — encouraging more women to enter technical fields, and getting more women in leadership positions at technical companies

• Johanna Rothman writes a post suggesting that while trying to encourage more women to join technical teams will bring a useful diversity to those teams, the focus should be on diversity of all kinds rather than just increasing the number of women

• The Daily Beast’s 13 Women Who Rule The Web profiles women playing important roles in startups and online media

Read anything interesting lately? Post your links in the comments, or in your own post!