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!

This just in. Of course, plenty of discrimination for petty and superficial reasons still goes on in the world (see I hear this place is restricted, Wang, so don’t tell ‘em you’re a geek, okay?). And society still feels like it’s OK to comment on women’s appearances to a greater degree than they comment on men’s looks. But the self-immolation of this sorry sorority chapter gives some hope that we are yet moving in the right direction as a culture.

Former Rutgers University Professor Beverly Whipple, best known for popularizing the G-spot, is still out there researching women’s health and sexuality, according to the London Free Press. More than just a pioneer in sexuality research, she also broke ground in challenging the male-centered bias of researchers:

In the mid-1980s, Rutgers asked her to join the faculty. She told them she wouldn’t come aboard unless she could conduct research on women, who had been neglected in medical research. The university’s nursing school then offered her a laboratory to seal the deal.

Among her more recent areas of research: proving that women who’ve suffered spinal-cord injuries can still have orgasms, and that “non-genital orgasms” are real. In some cases, women’s own doctors had told them it was “impossible” for them to experience genital pleasure after a spinal-cord injury, but the vagus nerve still connected their genitals and their brains. Using MRIs and fMRIs, Whipple told Wired she discovered that:

some of the same brain areas are activated during orgasm in women with and without complete spinal cord injury, and also during orgasm from imagery alone, with no one touching their body, including the women themselves.

Whipple’s new book is The Science of Orgasm, cowritten with Barry Komisaruk and Carlos Beyer-Flores.

I mentioned this book back in my entry about more gifts for girls with geeky inclinations back in December. (Hey, and I’d also like to add that there’s even more cool science-themed jewelry out there!) Do the Math, to be published in July 2007, is a young adult novel about a girl who solves a mystery by applying algebraic reasoning, so I hear. My writing teacher, Janis Cooke Newman, read drafts of Do the Math because it was written by her original writing teacher, Wendy Lichtman. Janis told me last summer that even though she is not particularly into math per se, she got really drawn into the story.

Considering that Janis’s novel Mary is one of the five finalists for the award for first fiction in the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes competition to happen in late April, that means Janis can recognize some good storytelling when she sees it. I’m certainly looking forward to seeing what this young adult novel Do the Math is all about, since it sounds like a character I might have been able to relate to back in junior high. And the cover makes it look like there’s probably gender issues involved, too. Very cool. And there’s math. Need I say more?

Well, I’d like to judge the book for myself once I get a review copy. And it seems like I will! Because today I heard from Wendy Lichtman herself (not as huge a surprise as it might have been, considering the single degree of separation). She wanted to know if I might suggest organizations to market the book to. Starting out with She’s Such a Geek was very smart of her, of course! And she already knew about the Expanding Your Horizons network mentioned in Ellen Spertus’s post just before this one. I told Wendy that I’d be happy to review the book for Inkling (perhaps, if the editors agree), and WEPAN and Techbridge also came to mind immediately. WEPAN seems to have a link to BrainCake, another group that encourages girls in STEM.

But I was wondering whether any of you know of any organizations that might also potentially be interested in hearing about what promises to be a darn good mystery starring a girl who likes math? (The open source model of asking here has worked in the past!) If you know of any such groups, please share here! And of course, we shouldn’t just limit ourselves to budding geeks only—we also need to appeal to the girls who have yet to embrace their own geeky parts.

The first Expanding Your Horizons (EYH) conference took place at Mills College in Oakland, California, in 1976 with the goal of exciting girls about math and science, and it was a huge success. EYH conferences have since served more than 625,000 girls in over 89 locales internationally.

I am looking for volunteers to help with the hands-on digital electronics workshop I will lead at this year’s Mills College EYH, this Saturday, March 17. If you know how to connect logic gates in a breadboard and would like to help, please email me: spertus@mills.edu.

If you can’t help at this Saturday’s Mills conference but would like to help EYH, see the national list of conferences with contact information.
The above photo, taken by Barton Friedland, is from last year’s Mills EYH, which was written up in the Google Blog.

I’m a little late on this one, because it went up the middle of last week, but there is now a website Scientiae which will maintain a blog carnival of stories relating to women in science, engineering, technology, and math. In a way, it’s sort of a meta-She’s Such a Geek!, with lots of stories from all over. Check out the first post of the Scientiae blog carnival at Rants of a Feminist Engineer—a couple of our posts are listed, even if I never got my act together to submit to the carnival the first time. Don’t worry, there’s scads more I’ll be writing here. (more…)

So in case you were wondering what I look like, what I like to read, and what my favorite flavor of ice cream at San Francisco’s Bi-Rite Creamery is, here ya go. (I’m up to nine punches on my Bi-Rite Creamery card now! One more and I get a free scoop. Maybe I’ll make that one ginger.)

I’ll tell you more about why I’m re-reading The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace in future postings. But I want to note here that I had a lovely chat with People Reading blogger Sonya, who has written her first novel and is a fan of SSAG co-editor Charlie Anders’s writing. Sonya started her blog six months ago in order to reassure herself that people really do still care about books, and sure enough, in this town they really do.

I know that I do my share to buy the sorts of books that unfortunately will never be sold by the palletful at Costco, because the world is not just. (I was just at Book Passage at the Ferry Building yesterday and I saw some hardcover copies of a previous novel by 2006 National Book Award for fiction winner Richard Powers remaindered at $5.98 apiece—ouch! But in Germany he sells hundreds of thousands of copies of his books. Of course, they elected an intelligent female scientist to run their country, which I don’t think could ever happen here. *sigh* Well, like I said, the world is not a just place.)