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Male Geeks Seek Female Greeks for Makeovers…and Possible Change of Major?

Friday, September 28th, 2007

The computer science department at Washington State University has encouraged the Linux Users Group there to increase its female membership in hopes of recruiting more female CS majors. At the same time, the group also wants to improve its image and visibility, so its members are planning a “nerd auction.” Willing user group members will be given a makeover by some obliging (but as yet unrecruited) sorority girls and then will make themselves available to “fix your computer, help you with stats homework, or if you’re really adventurous, take you to dinner!”

The makeover/auction proposal was posted on the user’s group page and wasn’t intended for the primetime news and Internet attention it’s received. In defense of the user group, it sounds like these guys are looking for some ways to reach a very mixed bag of goals – and maybe bust some of their own self-stereotyping in the process. The geeks want to team with the Greeks and then appeal to a wider audience for the actual auction (I didn’t think this was as clear in some of the articles as it was on the user group site itself).

Will it raise awareness of the user group? Obviously it already has – way more than they ever dreamed. Will it attract more women to the user group and thus a CS major? THAT sounds like way more of a stretch. I find myself wondering if any of these guys – or perhaps more importantly, their professors – have read She’s Such a Geek. I find myself hoping that this is one of many more serious initiatives that the professors and the WSU-area community are taking to understand their demographics and how to attract more female CS majors. To the users group, I say: know your audience. The women you want to recruit to the users group might like to talk computers or stats homework with you, they might like to collaborate on a project with you, and they even might like to go to dinner with you, but they probably won’t be interested in being the high bidder for your help.

Posted in Progress and politics, Sex & gender, They actually said that? | 1 Comment »

“Sadly, though, our profession is self-selected for people who don’t agree”

Monday, May 21st, 2007

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.”

Posted in Progress and politics, Sex & gender, They actually said that?, Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

Three women: observing plankton colonies, engineering in communities

Thursday, May 3rd, 2007

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.

Posted in Inspiring women, Progress and politics | No Comments »

Delta Zeta sorority at DePauw now moved to alumna status

Monday, March 12th, 2007

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.

Posted in Progress and politics | 7 Comments »

Scientiae blog carnival

Monday, March 5th, 2007

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…)

Posted in Career advice, Progress and politics, Sex & gender, Tech talk | 3 Comments »

She’s Such a Geeky Chef

Wednesday, February 28th, 2007

In today’s NY Times food section, there’s an article (”Kitchen Chemistry Is Chic, But Is It a Woman’s Place?”) that asks where the women are in the male-dominated world of molecular gastronomy, the application of science to culinary practice. (Never mind that the same thing was done by women in the late 19th century when it was called “home economics” and not at all the big rage in restaurants.)

Anyway, the article begins with the premise that using too much precise chemistry in the kitchen is not very soulful, and therefore women won’t take to it. But then they round up a few young women who are working in top molecular gastronomy restaurants, and they’re taking to it just fine, thank you very much:

Pamela Yung, for instance, didn’t have to steel herself to face a hostile French kitchen, nor did she train in California. She didn’t train anywhere. After majoring in computer science and design at the University of Michigan, she was working in a Detroit design firm when she saw a notice on eGullet, the food-maven Web site. Mr. Goldfarb was about to open Room 4 Dessert and needed a stagiaire, or trainee, who would work long hours for low pay. “On a whim, I e-mailed him,” said Ms. Yung, 24.

(more…)

Posted in Inspiring women, Progress and politics | 8 Comments »

“Leadership is important”

Thursday, February 22nd, 2007

As challenging as the situation is for women in the academic sciences overall, at least there’s progress in most areas. But the situation for minority women in the sciences is “dismal,” according to Brown University professor Anne Fausto-Sterling:

In 2002, there were no African-American, Hispanic, or Native American women in tenured or tenure-track positions in the top 50 computer science departments in the country. …

Although African-American women earn more science and engineering doctorate degrees than African-American men, African-American men hold a greater percentage of faculty positions than women. Overall, the proportion of minority women in tenured science positions is extremely low, and actually fell between 1989 and 1997, Fausto-Sterling said.

“While the overall trend for women is going up, the trend for minority group women is not,” Fausto-Sterling said.

In her talk at Harvard University, Fausto-Sterling pointed to many of the same problems that confront non-minority women. But both women and minorities face discrimination and obstacles:

Firsthand accounts told of economic pressures for those from lower-income backgrounds, the need to care for family members, discrimination from faculty, and the belief of other students – and in a few cases even of themselves – that they don’t belong in the field.

I couldn’t find a copy of Fausto-Sterling’s talk online, so I don’t know what substantive solutions she called for. The article about her talk simply quotes her as saying “leadership is important” at universities. It would be interesting to know if she actually got into any specifics of how to redress the gender and race gaps in science.

Posted in Progress and politics | No Comments »

Turing Award Finally Catches Up

Wednesday, February 21st, 2007

Rock on! Retired IBM programmer Frances E. Allen was the first woman to win the prestigious Turing Award, worth $100,000. When she joined IBM in 1957, the company was trying to recruit women on college campuses by circulating a brochure called “My Fair Ladies.” She joined right after John Backus’ team had just developed Fortran. Allen developed techniques to optimize the performance of compilers, which translate programming languages into binary code. Says Business Week:

The point of Fortran was to develop a system that could operate a computer just as efficiently as previous “hand-coded” approaches directly assembled by programmers. Allen recalled Wednesday that her task at IBM was to replicate the achievement on multiple kinds of computers.

“I had the good fortune to work on one big project on good machines after another,” she said.

Her work led her into varied assignments, including writing intelligence analysis software for the National Security Agency. More recently she helped design software for IBM’s Blue Gene supercomputer.

Backus got his own Turing Award in 1977, but it’s taken 40 years for a woman to receive the honor:

Allen called it “high time for a woman,” though she quickly added: “That’s not why I got it.”

Posted in Inspiring women, Progress and politics | No Comments »

Joy of Science begins over at Thus Spake Zuska

Monday, February 12th, 2007

She’s Such a Geek! contributor Suzanne Franks is starting her course “Feminist Theory and the Joy of Science over at her blog, Thus Spake Zuska. Today she posted her synopses of the first week’s readings as well as some other notes, all of which is open for discussion in the comments.

All of this is well worth reading, especially if you’ve ever thought that not fitting in with the dominant culture in a technical field reflected some flaw in you. (It took me a long time to forgive myself for my failing to fit in in physics, but now I know that I’d been brainwashed to be a science worshiper.) Remember, science is not perfect; it has a culture, too, and like all cultures, it has its flaws.

Here’s a taste of what Zuska writes here about women in engineering (WIE) programs, whose value is being debated since women still make up less than 20% of engineering majors, even after nearly thirty years of programs encouraging women to go into these careers:

So are WIE programs a waste of time and resources? I don’t think so, for the following reasons. If a college of engineering is going to do little or nothing to change business as usual, then a WIE program provides a safe haven for the women who do manage to slog it out in the Boy’s Club. They need a place to go once in awhile to get advice on moron management, you know. WIE programs can help reinforce the belief that it’s not abnormal for a woman to love technology. They can also help women see that one need not be completely obsessed with technology to be a “real” engineer. In this case, WIE programs are truly there just to help women deal with the status quo….

I’ve always said that women don’t need programs to help them deal with engineering; they are perfectly capable of doing engineering. Engineering needs programs to help it become more inclusive.

Posted in Progress and politics, Sex & gender, Zuska, Zuska, Zuska! | No Comments »

It’s not all right to cry

Saturday, February 10th, 2007

I found a great post and discussion on crying in the scientific workplace at A Natural Scientist via another fine blog, Am I a woman scientist? Jenny F. Scientist describes the double bind of being socialized as a girl that it’s all right to cry, but that in the science lab, don’t even think about it.

Not that crying is something that anyone plans on doing. And actually, with the exception of Rosie Grier singing “It’s All Right to Cry” on Free to Be… You and Me, I got the message growing up that crying is most definitely a huge no-no. And I knew that because I cried easily. I was the kid of whom teachers would say, “She’s very sensitive.” I didn’t really understand the phrase at the time, but I figured it wasn’t good, because I was the weirdo and the kids who called me “crybaby” were the norm.

(more…)

Posted in Career advice, Progress and politics, Sex & gender, True confessions | 2 Comments »