Rachel Maines, who has written two amazing and geeky books about the history of vibrators and asbestos, wrote a great piece for the Chroncle of Higher Education entitled “Why Women Become Veterinarians But Not Engineers.” She asks, “What do veterinary schools know that engineering and physical-science programs don’t about enrolling lots of women?”

Mara H. Wasburn and Susan G. Miller’s … chapter in Women, Gender, and Technology — edited by Mary Frank Fox, Deborah G. Johnson, and Sue V. Rosser (University of Illinois Press, 2006) — included a table of female undergraduate enrollment in Purdue’s various schools in 2001. Engineering and technology were at the bottom, with women making up 18 percent and 15 percent, respectively. At the top was veterinary medicine, where 99 percent of the undergraduates were female.

Unfortunately the article is behind a subscription wall, so I’ve only been able to read snippets of it. I’d love to know what, if any, explanations Maines comes up with.

UPDATE: Ellen Spertus sent me a temporary link to the full text of the article. It’s fascinating stuff. Maines talks about how grad students in veterinary medicine went from being 8 percent female to about 77 percent female in the past few decades. Veterinary medicine, she points out, is technical, demanding, precise, bloody and dangerous for pregnant women. Also, there are still few female role models at the top of the veterinary profession.

So why the sudden influx of women? Maines isn’t sure. There are fewer high-paying jobs servicing the farm industry and more low-paying jobs dealing with pets. And the veterinary medicine field did all the same things to reduce discrimination that engineering schools did. But in fact, “There were no organized efforts in veterinary medicine, as there now are in engineering and the sciences, to recruit women.”

Could the cause instead be that treating cats and dogs, now more common patients than in the past, is insufficiently macho?

Maines wishes someone would do more research on why veterinary medicine succeeded where other formerly male-dominated fields have failed. So do I.

Meanwhile, reviewing the new book Why Aren’t More Women In Science?, Dr. Dobbs contributing editor Gregory V. Wilson writes:

Several years ago, Michelle Levesque and I looked at the gender balance in open source (see Open Source, Cold Shoulder). While the male:female ratio in the software industry is between 7:1 and 12:1, depending on how you measure it, the ratio in open source is at least 200:1, and probably worse. For a community that talks so loudly about freedom and rights, I think that’s shameful; I think it’s even more shameful that so many people in that community choose not to notice, or say (rather defensively), “Well, it’s not my fault.”

A sexy calendar of women engineering students from University of Illinois sparked some controversy, according to the IEEE Spectrum. After a dozen female engineering students posed in varying states of undress, the story got picked up in newspapers. And then Playboy weighed in, saying the engineers weren’t “knockouts,” but were “the total package,” smart as well as cute. Whatevs. It sounds as though the calendar didn’t do that well, and one woman who posed for it says she’s disappointed that it didn’t reflect more of her geeky skillz as well as her sexiness.

The article concludes with a fascinating interview with Karen Hopkin, who created the calendar “Studmuffins of Science,” featuring male science PhDs in saucy poses. The 1990s calendar series did so well, she considered expanding it to include women, only to hit a snag:

“Whereas hundreds of guys had sent in pictures, I got maybe four women,” says Hopkin, herself a Ph.D., in biochemistry, and a science writer for the National Institutes of Health. “And they all accompanied their photos with several-page letters saying that they liked my idea but needed to know what I was doing. It had to be tasteful; they didn’t want to jeopardize their careers.”

The men hadn’t minded at all. One did tell her that he’d been a bit worried to see his calendar photo mixed in among his journal articles during his final interview for academic tenure, but then the department head slapped him on the back and told him it was okay. Another, a cover model, credited the calendar with introducing him to his future girlfriend. Hopkin concluded that men have less to fear from exposing themselves, both literally and figuratively.

She says she supports the Illinois calendar project completely, that it’s great to let people know that engineering and science “can be done by women, and by good-looking, sexy women.” The problem, though, is that just about any woman with a Ph.D., well along in her career, will shy away from what to an undergrad might seem merely a lark.

I don’t know why she needed PhDs instead of students, but this sort of reminds me of the comment thread on my post the other day. It’s hard enough for a woman with a PhD in the sciences to be taken seriously and get a secure job track. I’m sure very very few female science PhDs feel secure enough to portray themselves as sex objects on top of that. So don’t blame the sexual double-standard in this case — it’s much more to do with the leaky pipeline in general.

The gender gap among science PhDs in California has narrowed a fair bit, according to a new analysis by the Sacramento Bee:

In the UC system between 1994 and 1996, 527 women received doctorates in those disciplines, according to the California Postsecondary Education Commission. From 2003 to 2005, the most recent years available, that number rose to 681. That’s a roughly 30 percent increase.

A big, obvious gap still exists — but it’s shrinking. Across the UC system, the ratio of men-to-women doctorates in those four disciplines went from 4.8 to 1 a decade ago to 3.5 to 1 in the most recent figures.

The Bee found similar numbers for private colleges, and said the number of women getting PhDs in the sciences nationally went up about 20 percent in the past decade. The reason? A “snowball” effect: the more women role models you have in the sciences, the more women get into the sciences, and so on. Offhand, these statistics sound like a good start, but obviously a 1:1 ratio would be better. And the next hurdle for these women, once they have their PhDs, is getting a tenure-track job.

Reinhold Aman, editor of Maledicta: The International Journal of Verbal Aggression has written an interesting article on how Don Imus’s infamous epithet has been translated into different languages by news organizations. One common error made by users of British English (or dictionaries) was interpreting “nappy” as “diaper”. (Another interpreter inexplicably translated “nappy-haired” as “lawn”.) As Aman explains, even without such blatant errors, translating pejorative slang can be challenging, if not impossible, causing foreign readers to misunderstand the incident.

Congrats to the three winner’s of this year’s Women of Vision awards from the Anita Borg Institute.

UCLA computer science Professor Deborah Estrin is the founding director of the Center for Embedded Network Sensing. CENS, a National Science Foundation project, aims to develop wireless sensor systems. The uses of this new technology include military, ecological, seismological, and security-related:

ENS systems will form a critical infrastructure resource for society–they will monitor and collect information on such diverse subjects as plankton colonies, endangered species, soil & air contaminants, medical patients, and buildings, bridges and other man-made structures. Across this wide range of applications, Embedded Networked Sensing systems promise to reveal previously unobservable phenomena.

Also, Purdue University Dean of Engineering Leah Jamieson co-founded the Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) program. It helps students and their advisors to devise engineering projects to solve problems in their communities. And Duy-Loan Le is the first woman to be named a Senior Fellow at Texas Instruments, and only one of six people to hold that title.

The first issue of Cerise, a new online magazine for women gamers, is up now. It covers “video games, tabletop games, and live action role-playing,” from the under-represented point of view of women. Topics include how to make your own miniatures, and the future of gender in games. Plus tips for video game designers wanting to attract female gamers, and an article explaining how all gamers can rip the head off of the “boys’ club” stereotype in video games.

And they’re looking for submissions for their second issue. They want to know how you got dragged, kicking and punching, into video games (or tabletop games, or LARPing):

Do you have a story to tell about an experience or two that shaped your identity as gamer? Do you want reflect on the good and bad of being a young gamer, or talk about what games helped get you into gaming, or think about the first character in a game that you really got attached to and why?

Submissions are due May 15.