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

Has anyone ever felt like the teacher doesn’t call on you because you’re a girl? I don’t act as aggressive as the other chemistry majors, who are guys. I don’t like competing with them, but I feel like that makes the teacher like them more.

It wouldn’t be like this at an all girls school.

• New on our blogroll:

Inkling (tagline: “life in the girl nerd world”), an online science mag that also features great ladygeek content like a gallery of geeky women and the geek perspective on birth control

Skepchick, where a group of mostly female bloggers write about science and skepticism (and recently, what most people won’t tell you about pregnancy (kind of terrifying!))

• ReadWriteWeb posts about why we need tech events for women
• Girl-wonder.org has a page up about the Con Anti-Harassment Project
• Bao Phi blogs at Racialicious about being a nerd of color
• Restructure! blogs about male IT geeks thinking they are low-status and venture capitalists consciously rewarding candidates for being white and male
• There’s been a lot of buzz about Google Buzz, and [trigger warning] its potentially serious privacy concerns. Are you using it? Do the privacy issues affect whether you’re using it?
• Notes from a mini-conference on how to make women welcome in tech at Agile Open Northwest
• As was mentioned here before, “computer engineer” was in the running for Barbie’s next career — and it turns out computer engineering Barbie will be produced!
• PhDork at The Pursuit of Harpyness writes about feminism in the classroom and her experiences teaching a class where male students volunteer to talk more often
• Nadya Fouad, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, studies the reasons girls don’t stick with math and science
• At Salon, Kate Harding writes about Christine Alvarado and Linda Geddes, women who’ve developed or expressed their scientific leanings through “girly” means (My Little Pony and weddings)!
• And for your Friday dose of science+cuteness=win, a neuroscience study guide… with cats!

Anecdotally, a lot of the men I know in science/tech/math have been interested in these fields since grade school; by the time they got to college, they’d already taken some advanced classes and were ready to major in these subjects. And while there are certainly plenty of women I know who were on math team in high school (or something similar), I also know a lot of women who realized they were interested in these fields later in life, after they’d already studied a non-technical field in college, and took a less traditional path to learning about it; some of them are self-taught in technical fields, and some of them are going back to school to learn more about their newfound interests.

My story is sort of in between. I’d always been somewhat interested in computers, but never really learned any programming. In my third year of college, when I was already well on my way to a linguistics degree, I decided that since I was interested in computational linguistics and natural language processing in particular (at the time I thought I’d go to grad school for linguistics), I’d benefit from taking an intro to computer science course. I decided I was up for the challenge of the honors level of the course; even though technically no programming experience was required, I assumed I was starting from behind. And indeed, the guys in the class (out of the 20-some-student class, I was one of two girls) projected an air of confidence and experience, and I felt like I was struggling to keep up with the assignments.

I was surprised, then, when at the end of the quarter, I had one of the highest grades in the class! (This made me wonder if some of the more experienced students had been overconfident and hadn’t worked as hard — I also think it helped that we were learning Scheme, which isn’t something many high school hobbyists pick up on their own :P) I’d also discovered that I loved programming, and started taking classes toward a computer science minor — which quickly turned into squishing a full computer science major into my last two years of college, and deciding I’d rather become a programmer than go to grad school. Since then, my web development skills have been mostly self-taught, though the programming I learned in college certainly gave me a head-start on that.

How did you first get interested in STEM? When and how did you start training in your field (if you’ve done that yet — or how do you plan to)? Share your story in the comments!