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

• Congrats to the winners of the Spring 2010 Systers Pass It On Awards, who win small amounts of funding to help them pursue their technical projects/careers!
• New blog My Fault, I’m Female collects stories of everyday sexism — with results both depressing and comforting.
• Eric Ries writes about diversity in startups, and how his perspective changed when he started doing “blind hiring” (having identifying information on resumes blocked out before he reviewed them)
• Attendees of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing are sharing their favorite memories of the event — did you go? Share your thoughts here on Stemming!
• The Free Software Foundation’s Women’s Caucus has published their recommendations on encouraging girls and women to develop interest in free software

• 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!)

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!

Welcome to stemming.org!

Stemming is designed to be an online space where girls and women interested in the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) can connect to support each other, network, mentor, share information, and make friends.

You’re encouraged to join the site; you’ll be able to put as much or as little as you want in your profile. The site will suggest other users near you and/or who have similar interests who you might want to connect with; you can also search for other users on a variety of criteria. Once you’ve found people you want to connect with, you can add them as friends on the site and/or send them networking requests (which will share your email with them, so you can get in touch offsite) through the buttons on their profile.

The site also features a collaborative blog; once you’ve joined the site, you can post a new blog entry. All your blog entries will show up on your profile, in the master list of posts, and when posts are searched; an administrator will pick selected posts from the stemming community to promote to the front page. We hope to get some good discussions going in the blogs — share your experiences, give advice to a younger version of yourself, ask a question or take an informal poll, or really just post anything you find interesting. Anyone on the site can add a new blog post!

We also have an informal mentoring/networking system; we’re hoping to expand this in the future, but for now, when you view another user’s profile, if they’ve indicated that they’re interested in networking, being a mentor, or having a mentor, you’ll see links on their profile to “send a request” for one of these types of connections. This will send them an email with your contact information encouraging them to get in touch so that you can meet and connect offsite. You can browse users by tag, search users, or view the list of all users to find people you may want to talk to.

The about page has some more information about the site; you can also always get in touch with any questions, comments, or suggestions (I’d love to hear from you!).

And just to get everyone excited, here’s a great video from the Grace Hopper celebration of Women in Computing: