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

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!

• Latoya on Jezebel posts about girls, geekdom, and sexism in gaming, scifi and programming — as usual, the comments are worth a look from the variety of perspectives from geeky girls and the guys who like them
• The New York Times writes about reforming computer science education at the high school level; the Washington Post talks about declining enrollment in high school CS classes, and Fred Wilson responds to the NYT article, asking schools to bring computer science into middle schools as well!
• Sally Ride discusses the gender gap
• A Pew Survey shows people’s attitudes about technology compared with their attitudes about society in general in the ’00s
• Google’s Anita Borg scholarship for college women majoring in CS or related fields has an upcoming deadline — 2/1/10. (It’s also interesting to note that according to Dr. Borg’s bio, she didn’t start programming until her 20s, and yet still had a successful research career — yet more evidence that we should be reminding people who didn’t start their engineering education in their teens that it’s not too late!)
• Under the Microscope posts their top 8 summer internships for women in STEM!
• CareerWISE, another website supporting women in STEM (though focused more tightly on academia), is soon to launch
• And already in existence: Braincake, a website for girls aged 11-17 interested in STEM. They even have a Gender Equity Toolkit for parents and teachers!