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

• The New York Times writes this week about the challenges in getting ANY students to remain in scientific fields through high levels of education — with a lot more demand than supply for technically skilled workers, we can’t afford to alienate anyone.

• A post in the New Statesman outlines some of the many kinds of verbal abuse and threats women writing online often face; this hostile environment keeps many women from expressing themselves online in personal, professional, and political settings.

• The Anita Borg Institute writes on their blog about the business case for diversity in technical fields.

• Geek Feminism has a list of clean-up tasks they need help with on their very useful wiki.

• Under the Microscope highlights two deadlines coming up this month for seminar and fellowship opportunities for women in science.

• Also coming up is the deadline to apply for PITCH, a startup incubator directed at projects with at least one woman co-founder; thanks to a sponsorship, they’re offering 100 application spots for free, so there’s nothing to lose!

There’s been a bit of an online kerfuffle this week over a recent John Tierney column in the New York Times.

Tierney looks at studies of gifted students who take the SAT at a young age (in this case, seventh grade); these statistics show that boys in this group substantially outnumber girls in getting the very highest math scores (and girls outnumber boys in getting the very highest verbal scores). From this, he concludes that women may be outnumbered by men in the sciences because of… innate lesser ability! How “daring”! No one has ever suggested this before!

Of course, his conclusions aren’t very scientific. Here are a few of the unfounded assumptions he has to make to draw the conclusions he draws:

• Most obviously, the assumption that test scores at age 13 precisely reflect innate ability, rather than also reflecting the effects of thirteen years of possibly-biased education and socialization
• The assumption that the SAT (a test known to feature many cultural biases) accurately tracks mathematical intelligence
• The assumption that mathematical intelligence is “what it takes” to get tenure at a top university (and not, say, luck, personal factors, institutional support…)
• The assumption that science is so hard that it’s really only suited for people with extremely high scores (in the top fraction of a percent among a group of students who are already in the top fraction of a percent among their peers)
• The assumption that this finding would explain the low numbers of women in science, ignoring the fact that the size of the imbalance among high-scoring seventh graders is still smaller than the size of the imbalances in many professional STEM fields

Why are people still trying to bend over backwards to “show” an innate difference in ability, that, if it exists at all, is by any evidence available still much smaller than the difference in representation? Why are they trying so hard to deny the existence of biases and unequal treatment, despite the heaps of evidence available that this occurs at every level and the common-sense conclusion that cultural factors play a much bigger role than biological factors in keeping women out of science?

(More responses to Tierney at Shakesville and Jezebel.)

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!