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

• If I were to link you to all the awesome Ada Lovelace Day posts that came out this week, we’d be here all day. Fortunately there’s already a list for your browsing pleasure! Obviously more than enough to read, but hopefully you’ll find something about a technical woman you didn’t know about or whose contributions were/are bigger than you realized.

• Geek Feminism posts about how NOT to observe Ada Lovelace Day; the purpose of the day is to increase the visibility of women in science and technology, and they call out some posts that don’t help with this goal

• 18-year-old Erika DeBenedictis just won the Intel Science Talent Search top prize for her work on a software program to direct interplanetary travel. Congratulations, Erika!

• AAUW has released a report, Why So Few, that studies the factors keeping women out of STEM fields — some of the report’s findings, including evidence that women will respond to stereotype threat and score worse on exams if told that women tend to score worse on those exams, are summarized in the San Francisco Chronicle.

• Psychology Today posts on an experiment where children weren’t taught math until sixth grade — these children were able to catch up quickly to their peers in mathematical ability, while remaining way ahead of other children on other measures. The article’s author argues that it could be beneficial to adopt this approach to elementary education across the board. What do you think?

• Kathy Kleiman is raising money to produce a documentary on the six women who programmed the original ENIAC computer! These women have received little credit for their work developing a lot of the ideas we use in programming today.

• Geek Feminism has a thread seeking advice from commenters on how to mentor a geeky teen.

What awesome links have you dug up this week? Do you have a favorite Ada Lovelace Day post this year (or did you write a post)? Post them in the comments, or in your own post!