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

• At Geek Feminism — commenters offer advice for a young woman considering moving into a computer science career
• Newsarama has an article about Sony’s Game Design scholarship for women
• This year, Ada Lovelace Day will be October 7.
• Limor Fried of Adafruit Industries has just become the first female engineer on the cover of Wired!
• The Guardian posts slides of “100 years of scientific breakthroughs by women”
• MaximumPC lists the 15 most important women in tech history

LOTS of good stuff this week:

• In Malaysia, women make up 50 to 60 percent of the computer industry — Stanford researchers suggest that this is because masculinity and technology are not connected in Malaysian culture. This certainly suggests (as we really already knew) that the explanation for the low numbers of women in technical fields in many countries is cultural rather than biological.

• A young woman in tech support suggests that many expectations about the gender of computer experts are generational, and writes,

  I was born into the generation that struggled with inkjet printers as soon as they had to write their first papers in high school. Our generation is practically a cyborg generation: how do you possibly go through pre-teenage hood and your teen years without accumulating vast amounts of useful tricks to do with printer troubleshooting, router resetting, sending and receiving email, installing programs, surfing the internet?

  What do you think? I’m also from the generation that had computers and the internet as tools in our homes at a young age, and I agree that there’s a certain basic level of computer literacy that’s almost as fundamental to Millenials as literal literacy. But at the same time, I can definitely see different levels of interest and aptitude in learning how computers work and how to fix them themselves, even among people who all grew up using them as tools every day.

• For Women’s History Month, Under the Microscope is inviting women to share stories of a “message to a younger me”

• If you’re near London, check out the Ada Lovelace Day potluck and unconference!

• For International Women’s Day earlier this month, CERN put focus on the many women who work in its large labs

• In the New York Times, an article about academic women in science at Harvard

• The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is offering scholarships for students interested in attending the conference

• If you’re going to SXSW, the Anita Borg Institute will have a booth featuring several organizations supporting women in tech

• Wired posts a cool retrospective on where the internet and the dot-com bubble were 10 years ago. I was a teenager learning HTML in my spare time and marveling at the fact that Amazon could stay in business despite operating at a loss — how about you?

• An article about women in open source. (But you might want to skip the comments!)

• Geek Feminism posts about tokenism in technical contexts and offers some suggestions of how to react if you feel tokenized

• Dotfiveone blogs about Radia Perlman, “mother of the internet”, recipient of the Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Award, and now an Intel Fellow!

• For Women’s History Month, Veronica Arreola aka SCIENCE GRRL is having a science-related giveaway on the Girl with Pen blog

• For Women’s History Month, the Smithsonian features some classic photos of women scientists, along with pictures

• The Sexist interviews some young men about their knowledge of how birth control works and finds it… lacking. Here’s one area where women are expected to have the superior scientific and technical knowledge!

• Wired reviews Secret Ada, an iPhone/iPod app that teaches kids basic cryptography and unlocks profiles of women scientists at each level
• Under the Microscope profiles several notable black women scientists and inventors
• Taralyn Tan writes about What Women (in Science) Want
• The Women in Science Symposium 2010: Building an Identity is coming up in Chicago this April
• Also in April, the New York City Girls Computer Science and Engineering Colloquium is coming up, for girls in grades 9 and 10
• Here are some ways to get involved in Ada Lovelace Day next month (aside, of course, from adding your profile to the collection here at Stemming)

(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!