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!

• The Male Programmer Privilege Checklist has been around for a while, but now there’s an editable version on the Geek Feminism Wiki. A worthwhile read, especially for male programmers who’d like to be more aware of how their experience differs from women’s.
• Femmeonomics is seeking submissions for a list of 50 women to watch in tech — submit yourself or another woman for the list (deadline September 16)!
• AT&T is trying to track down the women engineers featured in a recruitment film made in 1975. Watch the film for a look at the women working in technology in the 70s!
• Chemist Piper Klemm writes in Ms. Magazine’s blog about hosting a WikiWomen party — in response to the statistic that only 13% of Wikipedia contributors are women, Klemm invited four friends, also chemists, to spend time together and share some of their expertise with the wiki-reading world.
• The Fog Creek blog has an interesting story looking at historical trends of women in computing (when computers first appeared on the scene, the field was female-dominated; as the field of computing grew in size and prestige, the percentage of women dropped a lot; and according to the blog, the numbers have been going up in the past few years!) and interviewing the only woman currently on Fog Creek’s technical staff.
• In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Nancy Linde talks about how groups looking to attract young women to science and technology need to learn to use marketing techniques to refine their approach.

Share your own links for women in STEM in the comments!

• At Under the Microscope, a post about STEM internships for the upcoming summer!
• TechCrunch complains about “the saddest pink infographic about women in tech you’ll ever see” (I think that unfortunately, I’ll probably see sadder, but this is pretty bad)
• At Context and Variation, a post about what it’s like to be a female science blogger
• Geek Feminism talks about competence and tricking yourself

• Geek Feminism is rounding up books about women in science, by women.
• Advice, via the book Unlocking the Clubhouse, on encouraging more women to edit Wikipedia.
• Elizabeth Stark writes about the importance of mentors for women in technology.
• Fast Company is seeking nominations for the most influential women in tech.
• Here’s a roundup of some of the financial support options available for female grad students in STEM

Got any more links? Share them in comments!

And Happy Thanksgiving to those in the US!

• 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.

• Stubbornella writes about discrimination and affirmative action based on gender in the world of computing. Money quote: in response to an affirmative action critic’s comment, “as long as there are no barriers for [women], and I can’t think of one, I don’t see a problem”, she says: “Um, dude, if your site was loading in 18 seconds but you couldn’t think of any reason for it, would you decide you didn’t have a performance problem?”
• Restructure! at Geek Feminism starts a controversial discussion by asserting that if you were hacking by age 8, you were privileged (touching on some of the same issues I raise in my post about when students should start learning computer science). Of course, as always happens when someone suggests that computing may not be a 100% perfect meritocracy with success based on innate ability, people (mostly men) come out of the woodwork in the comments to complain about how they couldn’t possibly be privileged and of course their success is 100% a function of their ability and not any other circumstances.
• The Free Software Foundation’s Women’s Caucus has put together a list of mentoring/menteeing resources.

• 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!)

Posting links from the air conditioned library, as we’re having a heat wave this week…

• I just discovered ScienceWoman at ScienceBlogs; she shares a great blogroll of blogs by/for women in science, and I also found some interesting posts in her archive (Who is your favorite woman scientist? [answer in comments here!], and a discussion of what name to publish under for a woman starting her academic career but also about to change her name upon marriage).

• A post about the expectations of chemistry grad students at CalTech. A bit outdated, but sparks an interesting discussion about unrealistic expectations in academia. Women, of course, are disproportionately affected by these expectations because we’re more likely to have household or childrearing responsibilities that are incompatible with being in a lab 24/7.

• Geek Feminism commenters respond to a question about how to respond to women who think there’s no more oppression in the western world.

• Feministe points out that women haven’t been honored very frequently by the “Google Doodle”, and asks commenters to suggest accomplished women who deserve recognition there.

• There have been a few different posts on Geek Feminism recently about fashion and clothing issues for female geeks — a subject we’ve also discussed here.

• 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!

• At Geek Feminism, they’re putting together a thread collecting pointers to (legit, scientific) research on women in CS/STEM.

• Tracy at Skepchick explains that even though she’s female, Sex and the City isn’t her Star Wars, Star Wars is her Star Wars. Bonus: comment thread addresses the issue of women bragging about/being respected for liking “guy things” and/or disliking “girl things”.

• Palo Alto Online profiles several female entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley startup world.

• Geek feminists speak out against a campaign from Electronic Frontiers Australia which promotes an open internet and anti-mandatory-filtering stance (good!) via the sexist moms-are-the-least-technical-demographic-we-can-think-of trope (bad!).

• Misty at Shakesville highlights a promotion from an agile technology vendor whose name assumes programmers are men — and their response to complaints, well, leaves something to be desired.

• Female Science Professor responds to an email from a man who feels left out because his department-wide email list received an invitation to a women-only networking event.

• Check out Diaspora — this fall, they’re planning to launch an AGPL’d, GPG-secured, distributed, decentralized, host-your-own-profile social network, helping users regain control over their data. Awesome! I also love how they funded this project using Kickstarter — the four programmers (all dudes, alas) pledged to work full-time on the project this summer if they could raise enough money to pay their bills (which they did, and more!).

As always, submit your own links in the comments or in a separate post! Happy weekend!