I was lucky enough to meet Camille Minichino last year at Writers With Drinks, a literary event I host in San Francisco. I remember thinking, what could be more geeky? She not only works at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, she also writes a series of mystery novels with a chemistry theme! They have titles like The Carbon Murder, The Oxygen Murder, The Helium Murder, The Boric Acid Murder, The Nitrogen Murder and The Beryllium Murder. I have the Carbon book and it’s awesome.

But now it turns out that Ann Parker, the woman Minichino shared an office with at Lawrence Livermore starting in 1978, is also a mystery novelist! Parker’s novels don’t actually have science themes, but they do a kick-ass female protagonist, Inez Stannert, and they take place during the silver rush in 1879.

Minichino’s own novels also have a female protagonist, a middle-aged physicist named Gloria Lamerino. Says Minichino:

I try to make it the norm… I pose the idea (that) here’s a woman and, by the way, she’s a physicist.

Minichino and Parker are reading at the San Leandro Main Library tomorrow.

We should all aspire to the geeky open-mindedness and unflappability of Nellie Chu. A man, who wasn’t a student, went into the UC Santa Cruz science library and wandered around videotaping women’s feet. Just their feet, not any other parts of them. The first time, three women confronted him and he fled. When he came back a few days later, they called the campus police, who inspected his camera and found that “the subject of his filming seemed to be ‘feet.’” He promised never to come back.

But the best part of the article is the quote from Chu, who presumably studies science of some sort:

Graduate student Nellie Chu said she wasn’t concerned.

“It’s odd, but I don’t think there’s any need to jump to conclusions,” Chu said. “Maybe he was doing research.”

Over the past couple of days, there’s been a flurry of discussion in female geek blogland over the web-stalking of techie expert Kathy Sierra. Apparently somebody or a group of somebodies has decided that it’s incredibly amusing to make mean, violent, and sexualized comments about her on her blog and elsewhere. Now the insults have escalated into Photoshopped pictures of Sierra with panties over her face. What’s sad is that Sierra — who has a reputation for being incredibly nice and non-controversial — has responded (understandably) with fear. After all, this griefer has posted about wanting to slit her throat and hang her. She’s called the FBI, and has cancelled public appearances because she’s afraid that her stalker may get violent in real life.

As Sierra explains on her blog, her first impulse was to ignore the griefer responsible. After all, there are lots of creeps running around online who will say whatever they can to get attention. But then it began to dawn on her that people she respected were maintaining the websites where this griefer was posting, and not taking the posts down (they have been taken down now). And she also talked about how she’s been singled out for attention in part because she’s female:

I do not want to be part of a culture–the Blogosphere–where this is considered acceptable. Where the price for being a blogger is kevlar-coated skin and daughters who are tough enough to not have their “widdy biddy sensibilities offended” when they see their own mother Photoshopped into nothing more than an objectified sexual orifice, possibly suffocated as part of some sexual fetish. (And of course all coming on the heels of more explicit threats)

I do not want to be part of a culture where this is done not by some random person, but by some of the most respected people in the tech blogging world. People linked to by A-listers like Doc Searls, a co-author of Chris Locke. I do not want to be part of a culture of such hypocrisy where Jeneane Sessum can be a prominent member of blogher, a speaker at industry conferences, an outspoken advocate for women’s rights, and at the same time celebrate and encourage a site like meankids — where objectification of women is taken to a level that makes plain old porn seem quaintly sweet.

She also points out that people are always talking about how they want more women to come to conferences and other tech events — and yet those very same people tolerate these kind of freaky sexual insults in their communities.

As somebody who has also been stalked by griefers — and who has had to deal with the Slashdot crowd debating the relative merits of my body — I can understand why Sierra is disturbed. If it were me, I would be angry rather than afraid. But fear and anger are two faces of the same thing. They’re what we feel when we’re helpless to change something huge, like intrenched sexism, in the communities and industries we call home.

Annalee and I just did an interview for the world-renowned Bat Segundo Show about She’s Such A Geek:

Subjects Discussed: The gender divide in science and technology, whether empirical accounts can raise public awareness, present historical perceptions of gender in relation to past perceptions, female stereotypes, positive cultural portrayals of women, Trinity from The Matrix, Scarlett Thomas, the relationship between underground and mainstream culture, prognosticating gender roles, macho sentiment in the workplace, geek answer syndrome, sexual roles, jiggly breasts and video games, Ghost Rider, gender presentation vs. work performance, dress code, the “lawyer situation,” unisex possibilities, responding to Olivia Boler’s review, and the nature of geek.

Check it out!