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

• Sigh. Yet again, we need instructions from a third party on how to prevent Facebook from sharing personal information without our permission

• Gail Carmichael at the Female Perspective of Computer Science responds to the contention that women in computing groups might not be useful – Gail’s post reflects on the enjoyable and useful experiences she’s had with the women in engineering group she helped start at her school

• Under the Microscope celebrates Earth Day by profiling oceanographer Sylvia Earle, conservation biologist Dee Boersma, and geographer/glaciologist Julienne Stroeve

• The Anita Borg Institute is seeking nominations for the Change Agent Awards, which recognize women working in technology in developing countries

• Next weekend, the Museum of Science in Boston will be featuring several women in science and engineering as speakers

• An inspiring Flickr group features images of techy women at conferences or doing other techy things

I’m spending a few days at my parents’ microfarm this week, so just a few links before I go back outside to play with chickens in this beautiful weather:

• The NIH has released some free “Women are Scientists” videos profiling successful female scientists

• A Skepchick reader blogs about his experience seeing a young woman gain interest and skills in science thanks in part to strong female role models in the lab

• The ACM posts about intelligent tutoring systems that could change their strategies based on a student’s mood

• A discussion at Geek Feminism on whether hiring based on applicants’ previous open-source experience is inherently, if inadvertently, sexist

As always — if you’ve read something interesting lately, link it in the comments or create your own post! (If you’re read something cool offline, book reviews are welcome too…)

Here in Boston, it’s one of the first spring-like days: hooray! Here are some links for your weekend enjoyment:

• Brown University’s Artemis Program for 9th grade girls interested in science and tech is seeking funding.

• The Free Software Foundation is also seeking donations to their Women’s Travel Fund to help get more women to this year’s LibrePlanet conference in Cambridge

• The National Center for Women & Information Technology is offering an award for high school girls interested in computing.

• 15 Female Scientists Who Changed the World — who else would you include?

• Rebecca Skloot talks about her new book on Henrietta Lacks, a poor black tobacco farmer whose cancer cells were harvested without her consent — descendants of those cells have contributed to a lot of advances in cancer research and are still in use in labs.

• And just for LOLz: Scientific Americat!

• danah boyd responds to Clay Shirky’s rant
• Geek Feminism commenters talk about what they’ve learned from feminism and how they’ve used the tools of feminism in their geek lives
• mamealoney posted here on Stemming recently about Computer Engineering Barbie; while we still think that’s a step in the right direction, Sociological Images points out that Barbie’s many careers have an “a woman can do anything, as long as she’s hot!” attitude
• A psychology study shows that worldwide, gender differences in math ability essentially disappear when other factors (like gender equity overall in a particular country) are controlled for
• Another study suggests that gender stereotypes keep women out of scientific disciplines, but that having more female role models in their departments might help
• A graphic from the National Center for Women and Information Technology explains the “brain drain” of qualified women out of IT and why this hurts everyone
• Radengineer posts about why women leave engineering (and I love her tagline — “Pushing the radical notion that engineers are women”!)
• LinuxPlanet talks about the advantages Dreamwidth had from encouraging diversity in their development team (they’re one of the few open-source projects with a majority-female dev team)
• Sarah Blow at Girly Geekdom analyzes a decade of news about women in technology
• Be Counted is a web app that aims to track the gender balance at technical conferences based on user-reported data
• Women 2.0 posts their female founder successes of 2009 — and maybe I’m a little biased because Stemming got a mention! :)