Congratulations to the three winners of the Women of the Year In Technology awards, given in Atlanta this weekend:

Marie Mouchet, chief information officer for Southern Co. Generation, Southern Co. Nuclear and Southern Power., won in the “Enterprise Organizations” category. For the “Medium/Mid-Market Organizations” category, the winner was Terry Trout, vice president of customer experience for Cbeyond Inc. And in the “Small/Emerging Organization” category Nexidia Senior Vice President of marketing and product management Anna Convery was the winner.

Since I set up a Google alert for stories about women in technology, I’ve gotten lots of emails about local awards like these. It seems as though a lot of local communities are noticing and honoring the women who are making contributions in science and tech.

People always try to claim that the pay gap between men and women stems from voluntary factors. Women choose not to work as hard as men. Women don’t want to prioritize careers over family. And so on. But it turns out that even if you control for those factors, men still end up earning more:

Analyzing U.S. Department of Education data on 19,000 men and women, Hill’s team found that one year out of college, women in 1994 earned 80% of what their male counterparts made. By 2003, a decade after graduation, they had fallen further behind, to 69% of men’s incomes.

Controlling for the number of hours worked, parenthood and other factors, college-educated women still earned 12% less than their male peers, according to the report.

The trick is for more women to get into science and technology. For that to happen, role models need to convey the “joy and creativity” in dry-appearing fields, says one expert. Also, women need to get more hard-nosed about bargaining, and ask for raises more often:

No employer has an obligation to whisper in the woman’s ear, “Hey, you know, you just lost out on more money because you didn’t speak up.” If she accepts the salary offered, so be it. But the consequences of failing to negotiate a first salary can lead women to lose more than $500,000 by age 60.

NOW also argues that the government should pass legislation requiring equivalent jobs to pay the same amount, which I’m pretty sure isn’t going to happen in our lifetimes.

I was super excited that one of my recent blogposts got included in a catchall post about women, science and fiction over at the awesome Women & Science blog. It also included some other posts that are well worth checking out:

Skepchick starts a list of books written by female scientists (Sandra Hrdy, Marlene Zuk, and May Berenbaum) and science fiction writers (Connie Willis, Tanya Huff) and asks for additional recommendations. Be sure to read the comments for additional suggestions!

See also the IMDB’s category of “babe scientist” movies, both good and bad.  And a link to Joan Slonczewski, a feminist science fiction writer who also teaches biology.

The New York Times has an interesting article about colleges trying to reverse a steep decline in the number of women taking computer science:

For decades, undergraduate women have been moving in ever greater numbers into science and engineering departments at American universities. Yet even as they approach or exceed enrollment parity in mathematics, biology and other fields, there is one area in which their presence relative to men is static or even shrinking: computer science.

Women received about 38 percent of the computer science bachelor’s degrees awarded in the United States in 1985, the peak year, but in 2003, the figure was only about 28 percent, according to the National Science Foundation.

The article goes on to talk about how women are the “canaries in the coal mine” and the factors driving us out of computer science will eventually drive away men too. And it talks about some of the things colleges are doing to try and attract more women back to the field. The Times also hosted a discussion. The comments range from the inane (computer programming = addictive behavior, and women are less prone to addiction) to the hopeful (if women saw how amazing and useful CS was, you’d have more women in the field).

One of the interesting (and controversial) statements in the article and discussion: more women would be attracted to computer if there was less of an emphasis on programming. Some commenters at Slashdot compare this to taking the math problems out of a mathematics course, provoking this comment:

For fucks sake, I think a lot of people here in slashdot should go and study Computer Science to realize that CS is NOT all about programming, there are countless branches of Computer Science where programming has *nothing* to do. … It is completely possible to study in a subfield of Computer Science (in fact in many of them) without knowing how to program (in fact, many of my fellow PhD students do exactly that, oh, and my own supervisor [a Prof. in Comp. Science] does not “code”).

In some ways, the changes to the computer science program at Carnegie Mellon sound as if the department has learned something from programs like Mills College’s interdisciplinary studies program. There’s more of an emphasis on looking for well-rounded students instead of students with tons of programming experience. They’re looking for “high overall achievement and broad interests, diverse perspectives and whether applicants seem to have potential to be future leaders.”

Date: April 16, 2007 @ 7:00 PM
What: Reading for She’s Such A Geek: Women Write About Science, Technology & Other Nerdy Stuff, edited by Annalee Newitz and Charlie Anders (Seal Press 2007)
Location: Ravenna Third Place Books, 6504 20th. Ave., Seattle, WA
Admission: Free
URL: http://www.shessuchageek.com

Co-editors Annalee Newitz and Charlie Anders will read from their new anthology, She’s Such A Geek, and discuss the growing role of women in the sciences, fandom, gaming and other areas. They’ll have a question and answer session about the book. Also reading will be contributor Elisabeth Severson.

More about the book:

She’s Such A Geek is collection of essays by nearly two dozen female geeks of all persuasions talking about their lives, careers and hobbies. They tell about how they fell in love with science, technology or role-playing games. They explain how those pursuits have shaped their lives. And they reveal the challenges — and triumphs — they’ve experienced in mostly male-dominated fields.

Raves for the book:

New York Times Technology reporter Katie Hafner called the book “exhilerating, hilarious, inspiring and infuriating.” Xeni Jardin from BoingBoing says she takes “great joy in the she-nerd spirit evident throughout this book.” Kim Stanley Robinson calls the book “sharp, interesting, and funny.” And Ladies Home Journal listed it in the “our favorites” list for December 2006.

About Ravenna Third Place Books

Ravenna Third Place Books is a bookstore with a jolly pub downstairs and the fabulous HoneyBear Bakery/Cafe right in the store. It’s in the Ravenna neighborhood: 6504 20th Ave. NE, Seattle, WA 98115
Phone: (206)525-2347
See http://www.ravennathirdplace.com/contact.html for directions and map.

This is freaking cool. British researchers, led by an Iranian researcher, say they’ve managed to turn bone-marrow cells into “early-stage sperm.” This could allow men with fertility problems to create sperm. But Karim Nayernia and his team also hope to be able to grow sperm from women’s bone marrow. Their technique works by isolating a “parent cell” from bone marrow, and then persuading “the sperm cells to develop.” The result is called “spermatogonial” stem cells. These should be able to morph into full-blown sperm in men, but this experiment didn’t go the full distance. But caution is indicated:

Prof Nayernia is concerned that the Government could outlaw treatments based on such work. A White Paper argued that the use of artificial gametes - eggs and sperm - would “raise profound new possibilities such as the possible creation of a child by combining the genetic material of two women”.

Prof Robin Lovell Badge, of the National Institute of Medical Research in Mill Hill, London, said there were fundamental reasons why female bone marrow could not be converted into sperm…

Josephine Quintavalle of Comment on Reproductive Ethics, CORE, said: “How ironic that one of the few reproductive novelties the Government wants to ban is the very one that CORE could make a case for. But infertile men shouldn’t get excited. There is far too much hype in this paper. As to growing sperm from women? As any A-level biology student would question, ‘Where are they going to get the Y chromosome from?’ ”

So the good news is that 168 libraries have stocked She’s Such A Geek. That totally rules, because it means a lot of people who couldn’t otherwise have read the book will have access to it. And each of those copies will go a long way. (By contrast, only 78 libraries have my first novel. Sob.)

But, and I know this is a tad geeky of me, some of those libraries are stocking the book under the wrong Dewey Decimal number.

For example, the Newton, MA public library has it under 508.2, which is the classification for “Seasons.” What does our book have to do with seasons, other than featuring the wisdom of seasoned techies and nerds? The Millbrae, CA public library has it under just plain 508, which is “natural history.” Slightly better, but still odd.

But hurray for the Mechanics Institute Library here in San Francisco, which has the good sense to list the book under 509.2, which is the Dewey Decimal code for “scientists.” A perfectly sensible classification, if you ask me.

I have to say I’m somewhat disappointed that so many people have chosen to blame anonymity for the verbal and visual harassment of Kathy Sierra. I’m a free-speech zealot, and I believe the ability to speak anonymously is an important cornerstone of that freedom. For one thing, anonymity (however imperfect it may be online) is what allows so many women bloggers to tell their deeply personal stories without fear that their friends and family will see what they write. I wouldn’t want to do anything to make it harder for vulnerable people to tell the truth online.

The important part of the Kathy Sierra scandal was not that people were saying hateful and violent things anonymously. Rather it was that some A-list bloggers like Chris Locke, who were not anonymous and were in fact exploiting their fame, set up several blogs (ie, Meankids) explicitly designed for people to say hateful things. That being the case, I would blame the A-listers for giving the hate speech a high-profile forum, not the no-name low-lifes who took advantage of it. If the anonymous person/people had chosen to set up blogs on typepad and started spewing there, it wouldn’t have gotten nearly as much attention. (And that might have defeated the purpose.)

Or am I missing something?

Liz Henry blogs about an amazing presentation that Angela Byron did about women in free and open-source software at the Flourish conference:

Angela’s talk addressed “How to Deal with the following situations”:

* Sexist jokes
* Posting sexual material (porn, etc.)
* Verbally attacking/dismissing women (time of the month)
* Death threats

The most jaw-dropping part is when she mentions that women account for 28 percent of proprietory software developers, but only 1.5 percent of people in open-source software. WTF?

Liz also mentions that blogging superhero Beth Kanter won an award for “most valuable person in the nonprofit tech community.” Go Beth!

Verónica Engler, who writes for one of Argentina’s leading newspapers, has just sent me a link to a long article she wrote (in Spanish) about She’s Such a Geek and the phenomenon of female geeks generally. She also used lots of great pictures from Inkling’s SSAG photo contest. If anybody would like to translate it, please send us a link to your translation!

El sutil encanto de la ciencia [via Pagina/12]