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

Business Week has a great article on Maria Klawe, Harvey Mudd college president, who has more than tripled the number of women in CS at the school since taking the job in 2006. She revamped the computer science curriculum, splitting what had previously been one introductory course into three (which I think is a great idea — I’ve written before about my experience in introductory CS), one for beginners, one for programmers with some experience, and one designed for (non-computer) scientists. Maybe this is the beginning of a new trend, and we’ll see other CS departments revamping their curricula over the next few years. I hope so — making CS more accessible as a major to a variety of students is a benefit, of course, but it’s also great to teach non-CS students some of the basics of computing, since it’s nearly impossible to avoid using computers in your work in some capacity.

ThinkProgress reports a heartening statistic: the increase in the number of women getting doctoral degrees over the past 30 years. The article suggests that this could mean more female professors for girls entering college in the near future, but unfortunately, as a commenter points out, women drop out of the STEM pipeline at every level, and an increase in women getting doctorates translates into a much smaller increase in women taking roles as professors. Still, it’s a promising trend!

• 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 Geek Feminism — commenters offer advice for a young woman considering moving into a computer science career
• Newsarama has an article about Sony’s Game Design scholarship for women
• This year, Ada Lovelace Day will be October 7.
• Limor Fried of Adafruit Industries has just become the first female engineer on the cover of Wired!
• The Guardian posts slides of “100 years of scientific breakthroughs by women”
• MaximumPC lists the 15 most important women in tech history

• 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

• A She’s Geeky unconference is coming up at the end of October in New York City!

• Geek Feminism commenters suggest technical blogs to follow and women-friendly open-source projects to contribute to

• Via Leslie Hawthorn on Twitter, two guides for IRC for beginners! (If you don’t already know, IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat — it’s a simple chatroom technology that’s been around for a while. IRC channels are common communication methods for contributors of open-source projects and also often serve as forums where experienced users of programs or tools hang out ready to give technical help to new users. A lot of people new to IRC find it intimidating at first, but it ends up being pretty straightforward once you get used to it!)

• Jezebel rounds up the 10 most patronizing technology ads for women. Ew. Advertisers often justify stuff like this by saying that most women don’t really understand or care about the detailed technical specs of their devices, but guess what? Neither do most men! But tech ads for men still focus on devices’ power or speed, rather than their ability to store recipes.

• Tom Forrister writes about how after his gender transition to male, he finds that it’s a lot more common that he’ll be asked for technical help. I find stories like this fascinating — the differences people who gender transition experience in how they are treated before and after their transition, while still being essentially the same person with the same skills and interests, say a lot about how our society still makes so many assumptions based on gender or perceived gender (and not based on other qualities of the person). (Another telling example of stuff like this is the experience of Ben Barres — a scientist who, after his transition to male, started hearing comments like “Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but then his work is much better than his sister’s.”)

“Evil HR Lady” writes that she doesn’t think illegal discrimination is keeping women out of the technical world. (She quotes Michael Arrington’s ludicrous assertion that “Success in Silicon Valley, most would agree, is more merit driven than almost any other place in the world. It doesn’t matter how old you are, what sex you are, what politics you support or what color you are. If your idea rocks and you can execute, you can change the world and/or get really, stinking rich…” … has he considered that age, gender, politics, color, socioeconomic status, or other factors irrelevant to the quality of someone’s idea might affect their access to the connections, money, and time that are very relevant to their ability to execute the idea?)

Fortunately, Rikki Kite at Linux Pro Magazine has a great response to this.

And on the front of actually doing something about supporting women in the start-up world, the PITCH: Women 2.0 Start-up Competition is looking for early-stage startups with at least one woman on their founding team to compete for the opportunity to pitch their ideas to well-known venture capitalists; plus all applicants will get valuable feedback from the team of experienced judges.

Meanwhile, Jolie O’Dell writes about the importance of encouraging young girls to develop technical interests to grow the next generation of women in technology now, and Felicia Day responds with an account of how her home schooling experience exempted her from some of the pressures teenage girls typically face. (Oh, and if you’re interested in a hilarious online mini-sitcom that lovingly mocks the World-of-Warcraft-style gaming culture, check out Day’s fabulous The Guild.)

• 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.

• 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

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.

• Women 2.0 is running Women 2.0 Labs this summer — a 5-week program in San Francisco to share support, resources, and feedback with startup developers.

• The Anita Borg Institute is now accepting nominations for an award for the top company for technical women — recognizing companies that have excelled at recruiting, retaining, and providing a good working environment for technical women.

• Allyson Kapin at FastCompany blogs about the many structural problems that lead to male-run startups receiving much more prominence and success with venture capitalists than female-run startups.

• Gail Carmichael at the Female Perspective of Computer Science posts about applying general pedagogical techniques to computer science education.

• Sociological Images discusses a cartoon examining the early stereotyping and nudging in the marketing of children’s toys.

• The Age has an article about scientific evidence for sex biases; they also include some interesting anecdotes from two transgender scientists (a man and a woman) who talk about their differing experiences in the scientific community between being perceived as male and female.

• Geek Feminism posts about girls’ experiences with tinkering, and several women share their experiences about whether/how they were allowed to tinker with technology as a kid (and how their experiences differed from their brothers, where applicable).

• ReclaimPrivacy.org offers a GPL’d bookmarklet that will check your Facebook settings for privacy holes you might not have been aware of and help you plug them if you want.

• ThinkGeek has started a new line of Heroine t-shirts with cool designs of scientific and technical women on them — the first to be released are Ada Lovelace and Marie Curie. Awesome!