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

Welcome, new members/readers! Don’t forget that you can learn more about how to use the site by browsing the administrivia category of posts — and that if you have any questions or suggestions, you can get in touch with me at clara@stemming.org.

• There are four women in space right now, which is the most women that have ever been in space at one time. (See also: howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com)

• Teen Skepchick posts a satirical ten step guide to intellectual discussion in high school

• Gail Carmichael recaps her successful Carleton Celebration of Women in Science and Engineering

• Under the Microscope summarizes some recent studies on Women’s participation in STEM (most of the studies cite stereotypes and preconceptions as the main factors keeping women from entering these fields in greater numbers)

• Sophie Scott of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience critiques a Guardian profile of pharmacologist Susan Greenfield

• The AAUW posts about efforts to recruit women to teach physics

• Under the Microscope’s JoAnne Growney shares some of her mathematically-inspired poetry

• Girls Gather for Computer Science is a new summer program aimed at middle school students

• Kansas State’s Women in Engineering and Science program has been honored as the nation’s outstanding women in engineering program

• Greg Babe, CEO of Bayer, writes about why it’s important to encourage women and minorities in STEM

• The Anita Borg Institute profiles Jodi Forlizzi as part of their series on Women in Human-Computer Interaction

• Women at Ohio University are more likely to want to teach math than study it

• Don’t forget to be awesome: Geek Feminism shares a reserve of self-confidence tricks

Found (or created!) something cool you’d like to link to? Post your links in the comments here, or create a new post of your own!

• 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!

Happy Ada Lovelace Day — an international day of blogging about women in science and technology! Some of my technical & scientific heroines are the women of Stemming — below, a few women who agreed to be profiled today.

Emma (Emma Staatz) is studying to be a doctor specializing in public health — after getting degrees in English and theater in college, she took the initiative to take science courses and EMT training on her own in preparation for a medical career (even though, as she says, “there is a sad lack of costumes in science”). She loves learning how things work — “from toasters, to physics, to people’s bodies” — and prepared for a scientific career from an early age by having a lab in her basement as a child. Currently, Emma works in an office, and she enjoys movies, obsessing about Lost, and hanging out with friends.

Jenmyers (Jen Myers) always enjoyed working with computers, and once she discovered the internet, she worked on creating her own websites, which inspired her to change her major to computer science (moving away from her background as an artsy literature geek). She found the transition challenging, but says "I’m a firm believer in erasing all the lines that exist as barriers to tech/science, whether it’s for people who are told they’re only good at “creative” endeavors or whether it’s because they’re of a certain gender or ethnicity." Now Jen works as a web designer and front-end developer. She finds the fast pace of new technology that she has to keep up with both exciting and frustrating, and while she finds some aspects of the typical tech culture frustrating, she’s hopeful that that is changing. Jen is a single mom to a four-year-old daughter, writes for Skepchick.org, and runs a local skeptic group in central Ohio. She also blogs at deliberatepixel.com and tweets as @antiheroine.

Lola (Lola Thompson) is a mathematics PhD student specializing in number theory. She’s loved math and logic since an early age; as a kid, she loved going to math camp, and learning about ideas like fractals and the Fibonacci sequence. Her mathematical career hit a bump when she was turned off by the formulaic qualities of calculus in high school and early college, but once she discovered the possibility of a career in theoretical math, as she says, “once I got a taste of this so-called ‘pure math’, I knew that I had to be a mathematician”. She loves the creativity and flexibility of her job, but wishes there were more women in her field, especially other women who love skirts and heels! When she’s not doing math, Lola dances, cooks, and tries to travel each year to the most interesting place that she can for under $500 (last year: Iceland, this year: Peru). You can also find her online at math.dartmouth.edu/~thompson.

Mamealoney (Mame Maloney) is using her math degree as a programmer and data analyst at an economic consulting firm. She has always excelled at math and science, and enjoyed the satisfaction of pursuing subjects she was good at. She enjoys the day-to-day rhythm of her quantitative job, and likes her colleagues, but regrets that her challenging technical job takes up a great deal of time and pressures her to focus on technical development at the expense of her more sensory and artistic interests, like drawing, painting, and piano. But when she does have free time, Mame reads, rides her bike, drinks beer, shops, and is active in the animal welfare movement. You can find her online at hydrobromic.com.

MorgannaLeFey (Siobhan Perricone) has been interested in computers ever since her father first brought home a VIC-20, and now she works as a web applications and database developer. She loves using her technical skills to help make people’s lives easier, and says “there’s a real rush of pleasure when I finally manage to debug my software” — but she finds it frustrating when people dismiss science and technology as “too hard” for them. She enjoys a variety of games — computer games, online collaborative games, tabletop roleplaying games, board games, and card games — and spends a lot of time reading and watching movies. She also loves to travel; she attends at least one gaming convention a year and looks forward to a trip to the UK to officiate a wedding this summer.

Nora (Nora Friedman) is pursuing a PhD in public health — she studies infectious disease epidemiology. Her job involves a variety of scientific techniques — researching and compiling data, biology, immunology, bio-statistics, coding in SAS, and teaching both scientific theory and epidemiology methods — and she enjoys all these aspects of her work. Nora comes from an academic and scientific family that encouraged her pursuits in these fields; when she’s not working, she bikes around New Orleans, takes care of her house, and volunteers as a parasitologist at an animal shelter. She occasionally blogs at bigshouldersbigeasy.blogspot.com.

And Stemming user Amanda wants to give an Ada Lovelace Day shoutout to her twin sister Michelle — the only woman on the MooTools dev team!

Did you make an Ada Lovelace Day post today? Link it in the comments!

• A blogger at IT world suggests women may be “too smart” for tech careers. I’ve heard this argument before, and it generally strikes me as featuring a peculiar cognitive dissonance, and finding yet another direction to criticize women from (“if you are in tech, then you’re too stupid to realize it’s a bad job!” the perfect complement to the more common “if you’re not in tech, it’s because you’re too stupid to understand this intellectually challenging field”). Deirdra at Border House responds.
• A call for papers on women in science and engineering.
• Geek Feminism Wiki on male/gender-neutral names/pseudonyms in geek culture and elsewhere. Though they’re discussing the deliberate (or at least semi-deliberate) adoption of these monikers, I’ve also seen lists of women in open source where there seemed to be a disproportionate number of entrants with gender-neutral or masculine-seeming names, which made me wonder if they had an easier time participating in the open-source community because others presumed they were male.
• A recent study suggests that the gender gap in math is at least mostly cultural.
• The year in review at the Anita Borg institute — an impressive catalog of their accomplishments this year
• Getting a job with the skills nobody’s paid you for — useful information for people who, like many of the technical women I know, have a broad base of self-taught skills
• Rumor has it the Kindle’s DRM has been hacked — will Amazon do the right thing and start opening up their formats?

Share your links in the comments or in your own blog post!

• She’s Geeky unconference is coming up in the Bay Area!
• Also in the Bay Area, a competition for teams of high school girls programming Android and iPhone applications
• In Boston, the LibrePlanet Conference 2010 is coming up in March — RSVP now to reserve a spot!
• Check out Engineer Your Life — a website aimed at high school girls and promoting careers in engineering
• This story about research showing girls may be less interested in computer science if it’s associated with a “geeky” environment has been being passed around a lot this week. What do you think? Is this a legitimate explanation? Personally, I’ve always found geeky environments to be a plus — but then, I’m already a programmer, so my personal experience says more about how women do go into technology than why they don’t.
• Under the Microscope profiles several women who are playing important roles in the United Nations’ Climate Change Conference
• This diagram of the many species of geeks is kind of cool, but it’s also depressing how sexism in geek culture shows up even in such a playful context — one of the types of geek is “IT guy” (of course, there’s no “IT gal”), and all of the “geek heroes” are men, while several of the “geek obsessions” are women (taking their place among “stuff” like aliens, robots, and movies).
• Mark Shuttleworth is stepping down as CEO of Canonical — current COO Jane Silber will take his place
• Gawker posts a guide to the new Facebook privacy settings and an update on the old privacy settings you can no longer use
• Is Alice in Wonderland really a complex allegory about then-new types of mathematics?
• The Free Press Action Fund posts a map of where your representatives stand on Net Neutrality, and how to contact them about it
• And, it’s almost the weekend. Periodic Table of Beer!

Thanks to my twitter feed for sharing several of these links!

As always, please share your links of interest in the comments or in a blog post of your own!