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

• 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!

• Mathematician, philosopher, and skeptic Martin Gardner died last weekend; his Aha! series introduced me to a lot of the ideas of algorithms and discrete math when I was still a pre-teen.
• Skepchick debunks the science in a Daily Mail article by Richard Lynn claiming that evidence supports the idea that men are “just smarter”.
• A program has learned to recognize sarcasm; it was trained on Amazon reviews.
• Women 2.0 features mini-bios of some of the women and their projects who have gone through the Startup Weekend program.
• Betty Hayes, a professor at ASU, has co-authored a book exploring the role of games (especially moddable games) in developing computer skills, and the ways that the games girls tend to play fit into this.
• And just for fun, via Inkling, Fake Science: “for when the facts are too confusing”.

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!

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…)

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!

• 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!