On Monday, Women In Technology honored five women who’ve made strides in scientific or technical fields, including Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, who co-discovered HIV. Also inducted into their “Hall of Fame” were Maria Azua, a vice president at IBM who holds 27 patents and has another 59 pending, and Been-Jon Woo, an engineer at Intel who holds 13 patents.

Another honoree has helped HP realize that helping women engineers return to work after they give birth isn’t rocket science, according to the inspiring lede in the Mercury News story:

The pattern was depressing. For years, Nor Rae Spohn watched as women engineers at Hewlett-Packard would take time off work to have children and then disappear. “The technology moved quickly, and you couldn’t entice them to come back,'’ she said.

But Spohn, vice president of business imaging and printing at HP in Boise, and her management team worked to get women engineers to come back to work part time — anywhere from two to four days a week. The result: Her organization is 22 percent women in a male-dominated industry. “As their kids get older, they gladly come back to the workplace and we haven’t lost them,'’ she said.

The fifth honoree, Kim Jones from Sun Microsystems, was quoted as saying: “I want to pass on the message that diversity is critical in all decisions a business makes.”

Welcome to the official blog for She’s Such a Geek: Women Write About Science, Technology and Other Nerdy Stuff. Published by Seal Press, the book is an essay collection by and about women who have have lived, worked and played in the male-dominated realms of technical and cultural geekdom. Edited by Annalee Newitz (that’s me!) and Charlie Anders, the book includes amazing essays by female scientists, engineers, bloggers, videogame designers, gamers, Harry Potter fans (of course), and policy wonks.

Katie Hafner of the New York Times calls She’s Such a Geek “exhilarating, hilarious, inspiring and infuriating.” BoingBoing’s Xeni Jardin says she “take[s] great joy in the she-nerd spirit evident throughout this book.” Kim Stanley Robinson, author of Red Mars, calls it “sharp, interesting and funny.” And Ellen Ullman, author of The Bug, dubbed it “a delight, a challenge, and a call to arms.” W00t!

You can buy the book here or here or here. Check back often for book tour dates, as well as the latest rants and commentary from the book’s contributors and editors.

We’ll be using this blog as a clearninghouse for ideas and issues related to female geekhood. Whether it’s science or science fiction, high tech or low-fi, if it’s got nerds and women this is the place to talk about it. Join us. We are many, our voices are loud, and we’ve got fast processors!