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

I recently saw an ad on the Red Line from a software company looking to hire skilled programmers, and was disappointed to see that it uses the sexist/ageist trope of letting a generic “mom” stand in for any non-technical person. Fortunately, someone fixed it!

• 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.”)

• Forbes analyzes the reasons women leave careers in science and engineering, and finds that most women cite dissatisfaction with pay or promotion opportunities as their reason for leaving

• PZ Myers at ScienceBlogs criticizes the division of women and men into “feeling” and “thinking” and analyzes the problems that arise when this division portrays science and rational thinking as “anti-feminist”

• At Geek Feminism, a discussion of whether it’s helpful or harmful to warn young women about the sexism they’ll probably experience in technical careers

• At Dreamwidth, cme posts about the many hurdles and discouragements to women in open source — and why she’s moving her journal to Dreamwidth to support an open-source project that doesn’t have many of these problems

• Caroline McCarthy divides the women in tech “problem” into two separate issues — encouraging more women to enter technical fields, and getting more women in leadership positions at technical companies

• Johanna Rothman writes a post suggesting that while trying to encourage more women to join technical teams will bring a useful diversity to those teams, the focus should be on diversity of all kinds rather than just increasing the number of women

• The Daily Beast’s 13 Women Who Rule The Web profiles women playing important roles in startups and online media

Read anything interesting lately? Post your links in the comments, or in your own post!

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.)

• At Geek Feminism, they’re putting together a thread collecting pointers to (legit, scientific) research on women in CS/STEM.

• Tracy at Skepchick explains that even though she’s female, Sex and the City isn’t her Star Wars, Star Wars is her Star Wars. Bonus: comment thread addresses the issue of women bragging about/being respected for liking “guy things” and/or disliking “girl things”.

• Palo Alto Online profiles several female entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley startup world.

• Geek feminists speak out against a campaign from Electronic Frontiers Australia which promotes an open internet and anti-mandatory-filtering stance (good!) via the sexist moms-are-the-least-technical-demographic-we-can-think-of trope (bad!).

• Misty at Shakesville highlights a promotion from an agile technology vendor whose name assumes programmers are men — and their response to complaints, well, leaves something to be desired.

• Female Science Professor responds to an email from a man who feels left out because his department-wide email list received an invitation to a women-only networking event.

• Check out Diaspora — this fall, they’re planning to launch an AGPL’d, GPG-secured, distributed, decentralized, host-your-own-profile social network, helping users regain control over their data. Awesome! I also love how they funded this project using Kickstarter — the four programmers (all dudes, alas) pledged to work full-time on the project this summer if they could raise enough money to pay their bills (which they did, and more!).

As always, submit your own links in the comments or in a separate post! Happy weekend!

• 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!

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…)

(Welcome, Skepchick readers and new members! You may want to browse some of the administrivia posts to learn more about the site.)

Mamealoney posted about Computer Engineering Barbie earlier, and now she’s real!

Of course, like any news item about women and technology, the launch of Computer Engineering Barbie has set off a flurry of hand-wringing about how there must be something wrong with this. In this case, it’s the idea that this Barbie is too femme to be a geek — if she’s wearing pink and has long hair, she can’t be a “real coder”.

Wired’s Geek Dad blog posts a tongue-in-cheek “5 Ideas to Make Computer Engineer Barbie Realistic” (because, of course, she doesn’t look realistic as is), and one of the first commenters reposts a tweet that “If new Barbie was a real coder, she would be wearing a Three Wolf Moon t-shirt.”¹ Another Wired blog, GadgetLab, elicits the wonderful comment “News flash, they put the hot chicks in front desk answering the phone, or they have them on the sales staff. The hot ones or even remotely attractive ones never work in IT/IS.” (Eww! Maybe consider comment moderation, Wired?) And a woman quoted in the BBC’s article about the doll describes Barbie’s hairstyle as “really impractical… you [would] spend half the time pulling it back from your face.”

There have been a lot of great discussions about this on some of the mailing lists I’m on (the LinuxChix, DevChix, and Systers mailing lists are great, if you’re not already on them!), and someone there made the key point: if a geeky woman presents as femme/takes care in her appearance/is attractive, she’s considered not much of a geek, but if she doesn’t care about her appearance, she’s considered not much of a woman. You can’t win.

In my opinion, Computer Engineering Barbie is great, and it’s ridiculous to say that her “girly” presentation makes her unrealistic as a geek. Real geeks come in all shapes, sizes, genders, colors, levels of attractiveness, and styles of dress — it’s what you do and how you think that makes you geeky, not what you wear. Asserting that “real coders” don’t care about their appearance is just one more in the barrage of cultural memes that pigeonhole programmers into one narrow stereotype — it’s bad for coders (who may or may not fit the stereotype), it’s bad for potential coders (who decide not to go into programming because they don’t fit the stereotype), and it’s bad for everyone who benefits from computer technology (which could be even better if so many people weren’t turned away from the field by this stupid idea).

This is part of why Ada Lovelace Day is so needed — as last year’s many posts showed, when you’re actually profiling real women in technology and not some imagined stereotype, you can see that “geek vs. femme” (or “geek vs. woman”, or “geek vs. [anything else]”) is a pretty pointless distinction. (And I hope you’ll join us this year and help us showcase the vast diversity of women in science/tech we have right here on Stemming!)

1. not that there’s anything wrong with a three wolf moon t-shirt!

Can anyone recommend a registrar? I’m with godaddy right now, and I’m sick of their advertising.

• Latoya on Jezebel posts about girls, geekdom, and sexism in gaming, scifi and programming — as usual, the comments are worth a look from the variety of perspectives from geeky girls and the guys who like them
• The New York Times writes about reforming computer science education at the high school level; the Washington Post talks about declining enrollment in high school CS classes, and Fred Wilson responds to the NYT article, asking schools to bring computer science into middle schools as well!
• Sally Ride discusses the gender gap
• A Pew Survey shows people’s attitudes about technology compared with their attitudes about society in general in the ’00s
• Google’s Anita Borg scholarship for college women majoring in CS or related fields has an upcoming deadline — 2/1/10. (It’s also interesting to note that according to Dr. Borg’s bio, she didn’t start programming until her 20s, and yet still had a successful research career — yet more evidence that we should be reminding people who didn’t start their engineering education in their teens that it’s not too late!)
• Under the Microscope posts their top 8 summer internships for women in STEM!
• CareerWISE, another website supporting women in STEM (though focused more tightly on academia), is soon to launch
• And already in existence: Braincake, a website for girls aged 11-17 interested in STEM. They even have a Gender Equity Toolkit for parents and teachers!