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

“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.)

• 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!

• danah boyd responds to Clay Shirky’s rant
• Geek Feminism commenters talk about what they’ve learned from feminism and how they’ve used the tools of feminism in their geek lives
• mamealoney posted here on Stemming recently about Computer Engineering Barbie; while we still think that’s a step in the right direction, Sociological Images points out that Barbie’s many careers have an “a woman can do anything, as long as she’s hot!” attitude
• A psychology study shows that worldwide, gender differences in math ability essentially disappear when other factors (like gender equity overall in a particular country) are controlled for
• Another study suggests that gender stereotypes keep women out of scientific disciplines, but that having more female role models in their departments might help
• A graphic from the National Center for Women and Information Technology explains the “brain drain” of qualified women out of IT and why this hurts everyone
• Radengineer posts about why women leave engineering (and I love her tagline — “Pushing the radical notion that engineers are women”!)
• LinuxPlanet talks about the advantages Dreamwidth had from encouraging diversity in their development team (they’re one of the few open-source projects with a majority-female dev team)
• Sarah Blow at Girly Geekdom analyzes a decade of news about women in technology
• Be Counted is a web app that aims to track the gender balance at technical conferences based on user-reported data
• Women 2.0 posts their female founder successes of 2009 — and maybe I’m a little biased because Stemming got a mention! :)