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!

• Geek Feminism has started a new series, Wednesday Geek Woman, highlighting technical and scientific women both historical and current (it’s like Ada Lovelace Day every week!); today’s featured woman is biologist Rosalind Franklin.
• The Anita Borg Institute also has a series of profiles, Senior Technical Women; this month’s is Nora Denzel, a vice president at Intuit.
• There’s been a Twitter discussion about Silicon Alley Insider’s “New York’s Coolest People in Tech”. The conversation pretty much goes as per usual whenever a list comes out — someone points out that there’s an unrepresentatively small number of women on the list, and then a man involved in making the list complains that it’s because he couldn’t find any women or that they didn’t come to him asking to be included in the list. Sigh.
• Meanwhile, this Field Guide to Female Entrepreneurs managed to find plenty of women involved in the New York tech scene!
• Via the Systers mailing list, a cartoon drawn in honor of Ada Lovelace Day.
• Under the Microscope shares six things to inspire women in science.
• There’s still plenty of time to apply for Google’s Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship — which awards $10,000 each to qualified women who are full-time students in Computer Science or Engineering.

“Evil HR Lady” writes that she doesn’t think illegal discrimination is keeping women out of the technical world. (She quotes Michael Arrington’s ludicrous assertion that “Success in Silicon Valley, most would agree, is more merit driven than almost any other place in the world. It doesn’t matter how old you are, what sex you are, what politics you support or what color you are. If your idea rocks and you can execute, you can change the world and/or get really, stinking rich…” … has he considered that age, gender, politics, color, socioeconomic status, or other factors irrelevant to the quality of someone’s idea might affect their access to the connections, money, and time that are very relevant to their ability to execute the idea?)

Fortunately, Rikki Kite at Linux Pro Magazine has a great response to this.

And on the front of actually doing something about supporting women in the start-up world, the PITCH: Women 2.0 Start-up Competition is looking for early-stage startups with at least one woman on their founding team to compete for the opportunity to pitch their ideas to well-known venture capitalists; plus all applicants will get valuable feedback from the team of experienced judges.

Meanwhile, Jolie O’Dell writes about the importance of encouraging young girls to develop technical interests to grow the next generation of women in technology now, and Felicia Day responds with an account of how her home schooling experience exempted her from some of the pressures teenage girls typically face. (Oh, and if you’re interested in a hilarious online mini-sitcom that lovingly mocks the World-of-Warcraft-style gaming culture, check out Day’s fabulous The Guild.)

• Congrats to the winners of the Spring 2010 Systers Pass It On Awards, who win small amounts of funding to help them pursue their technical projects/careers!
• New blog My Fault, I’m Female collects stories of everyday sexism — with results both depressing and comforting.
• Eric Ries writes about diversity in startups, and how his perspective changed when he started doing “blind hiring” (having identifying information on resumes blocked out before he reviewed them)
• Attendees of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing are sharing their favorite memories of the event — did you go? Share your thoughts here on Stemming!
• The Free Software Foundation’s Women’s Caucus has published their recommendations on encouraging girls and women to develop interest in free software

• 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!

• 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”.

• 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!