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.  

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.”

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.

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).

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.

She started work the day the before the restaurant opened. “I was completely overwhelmed,” she said. “I just did whatever I was told.” But she wasn’t intimidated by the machinery, and today she’s a believer, perfectly comfortable turning out white beer sorbets, Earl Grey tea panna cottas and apricot flake salt.

“The machines just give you more options,” she said. “They’re not traditional cooking utensils, but they’re cooking utensils, and they’re going to become the norm.”

And here’s another woman who refuses to succumb to gendered notions of who wants to cook what:

What’s more, women working in the new mode say they don’t feel they are missing out on the elemental satisfactions of traditional cooking. Elena Arzak, the much-praised Spanish chef at her family’s century-old Restaurante Arzak in San Sebastian, was profoundly influenced by El Bulli and is developing her own take on Mr. Adrià’s innovations. But she insisted that a chemistry-based cuisine can be as warm and personal as any other. “The science just helps me cook,” she said.

And the article does acknowledge that men didn’t start the idea of the laboratory in the kitchen:

But many women dreaming of a restaurant career still may not see the appeal of a laboratory kitchen. Ms. Yung and Ms. Sanchez have been struck by how few women are in high-end restaurant kitchens of any sort. “We’re always wondering where the girls are,” Ms. Yung said.

Maybe settling on an official name for the movement would help. The chief contenders — “space age,” “hypermodern” or “extreme” cuisine — come straight from boys’ comic books. But in America, at least, the movement has a history its partisans never talk about — a history that happens to be packed with women.

It was the home economists of the late 19th century who first had the idea of transforming the old-fashioned kitchen into a sleek, modern chemistry lab, so that cooking would no longer be seen as traditional women’s drudgery but would rise to the status of a science worthy of the finest male mind. Why not acknowledge these roots and call it “Celebrity Home Ec”?

Yes, let’s give credit where credit is due! Though I have to admit, aspects of the molecular gastronomy phenomenon, such as designing specialized tableware for evanescent purposes, seem a bit recherche to me.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

And it is those kids who grow up to define the unofficial rules of the workplace, too. The book The Highly Sensitive Person points out that though having highly attuned senses is actually a good thing, it’s not a trait that our culture by and large recognizes or rewards. And it can be a pretty cruel and insensitive world out there, especially when you’ve been told that you are free to be you and can grow up to do anything you want, but when you are grown up you discover that actually it’s not as simple as all that.

As Jenny F. Scientist writes:

My mentor is a woman in her forties who has left academia; I am in love with her, she is wonderful, and I wish I’d met her years ago. Be advised, o women scientists: go ye forth and find women mentors, for verily, thy quality of life shall improve.

It was such a pleasure to connect with someone who has experience!! and useful advice!!! So we were talking about the need to be tough and on guard all the time, and I said, ‘It’s just been really hard…’ and burst dramatically into tears.

Of course she was wonderful about it.

But here’s the thing: I could not under any circumstances cry in front of my advisor, or any of the male professors; they would never take me seriously again. This is true of some of the female professors, but on the whole, I would expect it to be less career-destroying.

Nobody wants to cry in the workplace; we all know the rules. But regardless of popular notions of science being this entirely rational and emotionless endeavor, that simply isn’t true. In graduate school you have young high-achievers thrown into a situation where success is far from guaranteed—major research discoveries are so celebrated because they are so rare. The rules for success that worked for problem sets don’t necessarily work in graduate school, where not every problem has a guaranteed solution. There are personalities to deal with, because many scientists avoided the normal types of socialization. In short, it can be very stressful. And at some point you’re sure to run into a situation that will make you want to cry.

I definitely tried not to cry in front of my advisor, but it did happen. And I think it was only fair that my advisor should see the impact that the debacle of my first project had on me (though now I think I see that failure as a blessing in disguise, precisely because it did ultimately lead to my leaving physics).

And then there was the time when I cried in front of my advisor’s postdoctoral advisor, who was female, when I visited her lab. This was right after my project imploded, and I’d also just won a fellowship, and the cognitive dissonance of being congratulated just as I felt like this huge failure was too much. But I didn’t expect any sympathy from her, because she was of course close to my advisor, and how could I complain to her about her star postdoc? Cry and you cry alone, indeed.