5 years ago, a few graduate students began collecting discarded equipment from our university to send to scientists working in developing countries. We had all worked in labs abroad – from El Salvador to the Ivory Coast to China, and we knew that talented researchers were working in these places despite incredible obstacles – and that the surplus resources in our university were exactly what they lacked to pursue their research.

Now, five years later we have grown into a full-fledged nonprofit called Seeding Labs. Ultimately, the goal of Seeding Labs is to transform the global map of scientific innovation hubs. We began this project in Boston, where a few great universities have given rise to a strong and diverse scientific community. We believe that by supporting scientists at academic institutions in developing countries we can help seed similar scientific communities that foster first-class education, research and even private sector R&D. By the end of this month we will have helped 17 labs and clinics in 12 countries in Latin America and Africa: including a medical school in the Congo, tuberculosis and dengue fever research labs in Argentina and Paraguay, and a primary care clinic in Madagascar. We are now building the support to grow our operations in Boston, and helping groups of students in New York, Houston and Berkeley replicate our efforts. By equipping labs we are also building connections between scientists across international borders – a community that keeps in touch despite the distances.

So it seems very fitting that the internet is giving us a great opportunity in our expansion. We are in the running for a $10,000 prize at www.ideablob.com. And I thought perhaps you could help me get the word out about Seeding Labs and let people know about the easiest $10,000 donation they could ever hope to make. All it takes is going to the Ideablob website and voting for Seeding Labs. Signing up to vote doesn’t sign you up to receive spam. And everyone’s support would help us make an enormous impact on the lives of scientists around the world – and on the lives of everyone in the communities in which they work. Thank you so much.

Yesterday, I got to be part of Google’s observation of Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day, part of Engineers Week. There was some nice video coverage by:

• MarketWatch
• CNET

I particularly like near the end of the MarketWatch video when one enthusiastic girl says: “I think it’s going to be a sudden change when we all start working in the workforces,” and her friend adds: “Year, we’re going to change the way people think.”

From a ZDNet.co.uk article by Tom Espiner (via our friend Rohit):

The inventor of the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has called for an end to the “stupid” male geek culture that disregards the work of capable female engineers, and puts others off entering the profession.

Berners-Lee said that a culture that avoided alienating women would attract more female programmers, which could lead to greater harmony of systems design. “If there were more women involved we could move towards interoperability. We have to change at every level,” he said.

According to Berners-Lee, a culture exists where women can be put off a career in technology both by “stupid” behaviour by some male “geeks”, and by the reactions of other women.

“It’s a complex problem — we find bias against women by women. There are bits of male geek culture and engineer culture that are stupid. They should realise that they could be alienating people who are smarter and better engineers,” said Berners-Lee.

Engineering research facilities that interview candidates based only on how many papers they have had published also risk adding to the problem, according to Berners-Lee, because of an apparent in-built bias against women.

One academic went through a sex change, submitted the same papers under both identities, and found that papers were accepted from a man but were rejected when they came from a woman, said the web inventor. This bias is unaccountable, but adds to institutional bias, he said.

Why don’t more women win the Nobel Prize in Physics? Wait twenty years, suggests one juror. Committee member Borje Johansson delivered a lecture on “How to Get a Nobel Prize.” And the topic of women came up:

Why there are few women in the list of Nobel physics laureates? Johansson said that there was usually a time lag of about 20 years between a discovery or invention and the recognition with a Nobel. “So, the awards now reflect the field of physics 20 years ago. With the number of women physicists increasing, this fact (of a handful women Nobel laureates) may change two decades from now,” he stated.

He also said a surefire way to win is to be related to a Nobel Prize winner (as in the case of Marie Curie, who won with her husband, and whose daughter also won a Nobel with her own husband.) And he pointed out that Indian physicist S.N. Bose never got a Nobel for his work on quantum mechanics in the 1920s, but Nobel prizes have gone to people who based their work on Bose’s.

In other words, the Nobel committee is just a tad slow sometimes…

The computer science department at Washington State University has encouraged the Linux Users Group there to increase its female membership in hopes of recruiting more female CS majors. At the same time, the group also wants to improve its image and visibility, so its members are planning a “nerd auction.” Willing user group members will be given a makeover by some obliging (but as yet unrecruited) sorority girls and then will make themselves available to “fix your computer, help you with stats homework, or if you’re really adventurous, take you to dinner!”

The makeover/auction proposal was posted on the user’s group page and wasn’t intended for the primetime news and Internet attention it’s received. In defense of the user group, it sounds like these guys are looking for some ways to reach a very mixed bag of goals – and maybe bust some of their own self-stereotyping in the process. The geeks want to team with the Greeks and then appeal to a wider audience for the actual auction (I didn’t think this was as clear in some of the articles as it was on the user group site itself).

Will it raise awareness of the user group? Obviously it already has – way more than they ever dreamed. Will it attract more women to the user group and thus a CS major? THAT sounds like way more of a stretch. I find myself wondering if any of these guys – or perhaps more importantly, their professors – have read She’s Such a Geek. I find myself hoping that this is one of many more serious initiatives that the professors and the WSU-area community are taking to understand their demographics and how to attract more female CS majors. To the users group, I say: know your audience. The women you want to recruit to the users group might like to talk computers or stats homework with you, they might like to collaborate on a project with you, and they even might like to go to dinner with you, but they probably won’t be interested in being the high bidder for your help.  

Star Simpson, an MIT sophomore, was arrested after walking into Boston’s Logan Airport today after wearing a sweatshirt containing a circuit board with wiring and flashing lights. The press agrees on the facts, but they differ in how they refer to her. In their headlines, the Associated Press and ABC News her an “MIT Coed”, while InformationWeek calls her an “MIT Computer Whiz”. I didn’t know anyone still seriously used the word “coed”. (In any event, MIT graduated its first female student, Ellen Swallow Richards, 134 years ago.)

Other media outlets refer to Simpson as an “MIT Student”, “MIT Sophomore”, “Woman”, “Teen”, “Student”, and “Art Student”. On her web page, Simpson describes herself as “an inventor, artist, engineer, and student”.

Kaliya Hamilton is helping to organize She’s Geeky, an event she calls an “unconference” next month in Mountain View, CA. When I met Kaliya at BlogHer this year, she told me how the conference was partly inspired by She’s Such a Geek, and would be a place for women to come talk about tech stuff, geek out, and bond. The structure of an unconference is lack of structure — the agenda will be set by the people who come, so be sure to get there early and toss out some ideas. Kaliya writes:

Our goal is to support skill exchange and learning between women working in diverse fields and to create a space for networking and to talk about issues faced by women in technology.

Should be lots of fun, and very thought-provoking. Find out more about She’s Geeky.

A female gamer in Texas read She’s Such A Geek and then picked up the latest issue of Game Informer magazine. Maybe because she’d just been reading SSAG, she says, she noticed the staff of Game Informer was all men. She posted about this in the Girl Gamers group on Livejournal:

In fact, there are only 3 (at least obviously) female names on the entire staff page: the publisher, which I guess counts for something, and two advertising saleswomen.

I must admit, I found it difficult to read the magazine after finding this out. I just wasn’t as enthusiastic to be reading GI as I have been in the past. My GI subscription is fairly new since I just got my GameStop Edge card about a month ago and only have 3 issues so far, so I don’t know if there used to be female editors or not.

I wouldn’t say that I’m angry, and I certainly wouldn’t want them to hire a woman just for the sake of having a woman on staff. I would want her to be hired on her journalistic merit, of course. But at the same time, not having a single woman on the editorial staff makes me a bit uneasy and makes GI look somewhat backwards and old-fashioned, at least to me.

As you’d expect with Livejournal, there’s a spirited comment thread. A typical response:

Like it or not, ’serious gaming’ (ie not solitaire, minesweeper, sudoku, those puzzle games on MSN) is a field dominated by men, and likewise, so is their production. I’m studying computer game art in university, and I do a lot of classes with people studying other parts of video games (programming, design, music). I’m one of.. oh.. eight to ten girls, out of about 300 students in those fields at this particular university. Even my tutors have said that women really are a rarity in that field.

Meanwhile, the author of the original post, My Mind Is Lost, has a set of self-portraits on DeviantArt that are pretty awesome. My favorites are “tough guy” and “gothy girl.”

I know I’m way too late in posting this, but I only just found this awesome video which UC Davis geology professor Dawn Sumner posted on Youtube. It makes me insanely proud and psyched to know that people are making their own responses to the book, and telling their own stories. Also, check out her homepage, which has some cool info about her work on the cameras for the next generation of Mars rover. Rock on!

My first time at Dragoncon, I was still a guy, but that didn’t stop me from dressing up. I wanted to look dressy and cool, so I wore a nice shirt, waistcoat and silk tie. After all, I was there as a Professional Science Fiction Writer, and I was going to be networking with other writers and meeting editors and stuff.

People didn’t quite know what to make of me. I wasn’t dressed up in a costume, or a recognzied uniform like HippiePaganLARPerGoth. I wasn’t wearing the designated non-costume costume, which was a pair of jeans and a T-shirt that would let everybody know exactly what species of fanboy I was.

I bopped around in my Eurofag outfit and people just sort of ignored me. I did meet one editor, of a magazine that crashed and burned after its first issue. He spent an hour telling me that Rudy Rucker’s novels were all about cheese attacking people sexually and I shouldn’t bother reading them. At one point he and I spent a really boring hour with Larry Niven, who seemed pretty narcoleptic. But mostly I was both too weird, and not weird enough, to connect with anyone.

Some years later, I went back to Dragoncon, and this time I was dressed as Wonder Woman. I spent countless hours sculpting my gold lame eagle and belt, and finding just the right red cowboy boots. That time around, people noticed me, and everything felt just that much more festive. Cosplay transcends language, social expectations — and gender norms.

Mostly, people dug it. Okay, so there was one fighter/mage-looking guy at Dragoncon who yelled at me that I needed to get me some damn boobies. At this point, I hadn’t yet hormoned up any breasts of my own. And I hardly bothered to pad my Amazon bustier. My friend, mentor and surrogate mom, the late and amazing dgk goldberg, almost took the padding out of her own bra to show him.

In between those two visits to Dragoncon, I actually quit writing science fiction. As I transitioned from a nice boy to a rude girl, I also became a serious literary writer. When I returned to writing science fiction as a girl, there were two things going on. One was that I discovered, in my literary career, that there were things I could only explore using speculative elements. Things I needed to geek out about. And the other was that I finally found my place in the nerd community, whose culture defines so much of what science fiction is about.

But it was still daunting to go back into the world of science fiction fans. I realized at some point that science fiction and fantasy defines a particular type of person. Just the way that some queer literary authors have a devout following of people who all have matching punky haircuts, tattoos and found fashion, fans of science fiction have their own ethos. I’d never quite felt culturally science fictional. I couldn’t bring myself to read Robert Heinlein or get used to some guys’ lecture-as-conversation thing.

But I found there was an intersection between science fiction nerds and a tangle of alternative communities. At least some of the people who were fascinated by thirtieth century post-humans were also open to other genders, DIY sexualities, and non-traditional families. You’d find yourself at a party with a guy named Ewok, and that would be his hacker name, and then he’d turn out to be sort of a genderqueer furry. Sometimes you would run into someone at cafe scientifique and then meet them again at some queer burlesque thing.

And I started meeting more people in the science fiction writer community too. Sometimes, I’d run into writers at conventions or readings a number of times, and they would know me enough to wave to: the tranny in the slinky dress. Sometimes they’d get my pronoun wrong and I’d have to correct them. Sometimes they’d just treat me like one of the more exotic weirdos of fandom. And sometimes they’d actually take me seriously, as a writer and as a woman.