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.

It’s really encouraging to see the number of bloggers out there writing about their experiences as women in these male-dominated fields (there’s way more blogs that I can add to our sidebar here; I’ve just been casual about it so far). I seriously wonder if there aren’t the seeds of a movement here, now that women who haven’t had anyone to talk to honestly can open up anonymously and tell it like it really is for them among people who don’t understand what it’s like to be marked by your gender. (Of course, I can’t say what it’s like to be marked by race, really, though I have lived in Japan. Being a white American in Japan is surely a different experience from being black or Asian or Hispanic in America, though.)

All’s I can say is that it’s great that women are starting to compare notes and share stories, and maybe we can use solidarity to help change the dominant culture of STEM fields. When I was in a top-ranked graduate school in physics, I believed I was as qualified to be there as everyone else in my class, even though there was always this vague sense of maybe I had gotten that extra break because I was female (my mother had suggested this to me more than once during my college and graduate school career). This crescendoed in a raging sense of inadequacy, that maybe I really didn’t belong there, when my first project went south, even though a large part of that debacle wasn’t my fault. If there had been an active AWIS chapter on campus, maybe I would have been able to find a mentor who could have told me how to avoid death march projects and other advisorial shortcomings—but there wasn’t, and I didn’t have that mentoring, and I took the failure really, really hard.

I know, nobody likes to think of the possibility of bad things happening to them. Neither did I, and it didn’t keep misfortune at bay anyway. (I’ve written about this before.) But I’ve harped on it before, and I’m going to harp on it again: women in science need to find mentors—which is not necessarily synonymous with your grad school advisors!—in order to learn the way to play the science game that nobody teaches girls in school but which you need to know to succeed in the male-dominated science world! And we have to keep sharing our stories, which is why I love this Scientiae blog carnival. If we don’t know that we’re not alone, we can’t begin to change the status quo (and there’s a heck of a lot of status quo to change).

This entry was posted by Kristin A. on Monday, March 5th, 2007 at 2:11 pm and is filed under Sex & gender, Career advice, Progress and politics, Tech talk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.