Everybody, both right-wing nutbars and left-wing zealots, seems to have decided that Harvard named its first woman president to mollify people who were offended by Larry Summers’ sexist remarks two years ago. Says the National Organization of Women:

NOW is so pleased that Harvard will finally have a female president — and it has only taken them 371 years. Larry Summers, we couldn’t have done it without you.

And now here’s one of her critics, who actually wrote a whole book about the “struggle for the soul of” Harvard and convinced a major publisher to publish it, quoted in the New York Times:

“The real import of this choice is that it is a cautious pick, which seems targeted at healing the wounds of the Summers years and restoring Harvard’s momentum as quickly as possible,” said Richard Bradley, who wrote “Harvard Rules: The Struggle for the Soul of the World’s Most Powerful University” (HarperCollins, 2005).

I know absolutely nothing about Professor Drew Gilpin Faust, except that she has a cool name and she’s a respected Civil War historian. Some of her comments about celebrating people from that era, but not uncritically, have already been taken out of context by nutbars. Does Dr. Faust have the ability to run a major university? No clue.

But let’s just say everybody’s right and Harvard is making this Faustian bargain to get past the Summers controversy. If that’s the case, then aren’t they sort of barking up the wrong branch? Shouldn’t they be, I dunno, hiring more women science professors and giving them tenure? Giving women more fellowships and opportunities to present their work? Encouraging both men and women to mentor talented female grad students? Has Harvard made any substantive progress in those areas since Summers?

Well, one of the male-dominated areas not covered in SSAG is that of committing felonies, though I suppose there is an element of crime of passion here. According to the Associated Press, today a female astronaut was arrested and charged with attempted kidnapping and other counts. Lisa Nowak, who flew on the space shuttle last July, drove 900 miles from Houston to Orlando to confront another woman who she considered a rival for the affections of a space shuttle pilot.

Not something to celebrate—it looks like the woman let her imagination get ahead of her on a work crush, perhaps—but I have to admit finding an element of dark humor in this little geeky detail:

When she found out that Shipman was flying to Orlando from Houston, Nowak decided to confront her, according to the arrest affidavit. Nowak raced from Houston to Orlando wearing diapers so she wouldn’t have to stop to urinate, authorities said.

Astronauts wear diapers during launch and re-entry.

Hey, better thugging through science! Committing a crime is just so much geekier when you do it using space-age materials!

So I’m all excited that SSAG’s Zuska is going to be leading a virtual course on her blog titled “The Joy of Science,” which will teaching about science from a feminist perspective. I’ve picked up some of the books on her reading list from the library and requested the ones not available here through interlibrary loan. (Hey, books aren’t cheap, and I’m very picky about where I put my cash. I like to try them out first before committing to a purchase, the way my husband downloads MP3s and then buys the CDs of the ones that he likes, directly from the band or the small label if at all possible.)

As it happens, I’d already been reading a book titled A People’s History of Science by Clifford D. Conner. Since I’ve been reading Zuska’s blog I’ve become much more aware of how little I knew about the culture of science when I was in it, and that my notion of it being this pure world where the Truth was the main object was horribly misguided. (I’ll admit, at the same it wasn’t like I was totally pure in what I wanted from science: a good career, a place where I would be validated for what I felt at the time to be my chief talents, an intellectual playground.)

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My essay in She’s Such A Geek is about being a policy wonk, which is a huge part of my professional identity. I feel really strongly that wonks are a subset of geeks, and that it’s worth advancing the cause of wonk pride as well as female wonkdom. But it occurred to me the other day that I could also have written about being a speculative fiction author.

I’ve been writing speculative fiction for about 10 years, ever since I bought a copy of the Science Fiction Market Guide which claimed it’s possible to make a great living writing SF, fantasy or horrror. Especially short fiction!

I joined a writing group, the Revisionaries of Raleigh, which struggled with having a transgender person in its midst. No, not me. I hadn’t even started thinking about modding my gender yet. But that small group (usually half a dozen people) had a transwoman, an ex-marine like so many of us. Everyone else in the group seemed fairly straight and a bit bewildered by her, and I can’t imagine how they would have dealt with it if I’d tried to go all transtastic on them too.

All of which is to say, I started writing (mostly very bad) science fiction as a man. But I found speculative fiction a natural forum for exploring gender issues, as you can imagine. What if you had a species with only one biological sex, and they linked their wombs together to make one funcitonal womb and gestate their infant? What if you had six biological sexes, and they established a hierarchy with different tasks for each sex? Etc. etc. etc.

I sort of wandered away from writing speculative fiction in favor of “literary” fiction, but I’ve been coming back over the past few years. And I’ve decided to focus on speculative fiction more in the coming year or two. At the same time, I’ve been very self-consciously writing feminist science fiction. I’m interested in dealing with gender as a fungible “what if” sort of issue, but also as a locus of oppression and exploitation.

In theory, speculative fiction writers and readers should have the openest of minds. After all, they can conceive of dragon/unicorn hybrids, or planets where the “fifth force” (which affects dark matter) is stronger than gravity. So the idea that I’m a chick, that gender is customizeable, that things aren’t always simple or binary, should be no big whoop for the SF crowd, right?

Well, mostly. Most speculative fiction fans, like most geeks, have been accepting if occasionally clueless and obnoxious. What’s made me saddest is the lack of acceptance from some people in feminist SF forums, who dredged up old-school fears of “infiltrators” getting inside their tree fort. Bah! But for the most part, I’m just another life form.

Alternet reprints an interview with danah boyd about kids on MySpace, and the dreaded Alternet comment trolls come out to trash her. She writes on her blog:

Still, the comments on Alternet make me sad. I’m called “barely articulate” and a “typical talking head” (and my age is brought into the discussion as a way to dismiss me). It’s always peculiar to see my speaking style in written form; i feel far more coherent when i control the written form. That said, those labels sting.

I’m also accused of being too blase about the safety issues. As with all interviews, i gloss over a lot of details to get general ideas across but it is driving me nuts that everyone assumes that because i think we’ve gone too far in the direction of moral panics and culture of fear that i don’t care about safety or teenagers or rape. I find myself wanting to scream. I spent five years working on the issues of rape, domestic violence, and other violence against women; safety is a very real concern of mine, but reality is far more nuanced than the sky is falling perspective seems to convey.

She goes on to ask for advice on how to combat “extreme media positions” (like the MySpace panic) without sounding like an extremist in the opposite direction. Lots of good advice in her comments, such as “Just keep defending your side as politely as you can, and never stoop to their level.” (As well as one or two somewhat blowhardy guys who tell her to simplify her speaking style and be less “loosey-goosey,” whatever that means.)

So it’s taken me a week or so to decide how to respond to the less-than-positive review of She’s Such A Geek in the San Francisco Chronicle that I found via a Google News search a week or so back. It was clear to me then that the reviewer doesn’t get the book, but I wanted to understand exactly how.

The reviewer seems to be bothered that she can’t figure out the audience for the book:

Is it women—people—like me, users of technology who love their camera phones, Wi-Fi connections and “Battlestar Galactica,” but whose eyes glaze over at terms like Bose-Einstein condensate, sysadmin and RSS? Or is it women—people—unlike me, who are in an elite scientific stratum, be it biotech research or video game development, and are the choir to which these writers are preaching?

But this is setting up a false dichotomy. The first group of people is basically mainstream middle-class America, who get to enjoy the fruits of consumer technology that have been made so user-friendly that they require no particular technical expertise to operate. And science fiction shows on television are nothing new—I remember the first “Battlestar Galactica” from network TV over 25 years ago. In other words, this is not a very restrictive group. (more…)

Want to make a living helping girls become geeks? Now you can! Liz Henry at Composite posts a job listing for a program manager at Techbridge, an after-school program to get girls interested in technology:

Techbridge is an innovative program to inspire girls in technology, science and engineering. The program is hosted after school at elementary, middle, and high schools in Oakland, San Lorenzo, and at the California School for the Blind in Fremont. In these after-school programs, girls work on a variety of projects such as making solar LEGO cars, soldering, digital photography, and building robots. The girls also participate in field trips and meet with role models.

Under the supervision of the Program Director, the Techbridge Program Manager is responsible for supporting and supervising staff, coordinating and implementing our after-school programs, developing and piloting curricula, and leading professional development workshops for teachers, role models, and professional audiences. We are looking for an experienced and dynamic individual who has the ability to supervise a team of instructors, work with the Techbridge project director, and oversee the development of training and resources to teachers, professionals and partners.

According to the Techbridge Web site, girls had lots of ideas for things they’d like to do, including “addressing problems at school and in the neighborhood, working with tools, building robots, taking field trips, and meeting role models.”

Here are all the things I meant to blog about in the past couple of weeks but didn’t have time to mention:

The makers of Joe Millionare are unveiling a new reality series, “When Women Rule The World.” There’s this island, see, and on it women are in charge. Unfortunately, it’s not Paradise Island and the women won’t be Amazons. Instead, they’ll be typical reality contestants. The men have to obey the women, and/or they’ll get eliminated. Will this lead to a Utopian society, the Fox network press release wonders? Because of course we all look to reality television for our world-shattering thought experiments.

Yet another study finds a correlation between gender stereotypes and math ability in women. This time, instead of having the women read essays before doing math problems, the researchers just surveyed their attitudes:

Researchers discovered that women who possessed strong implicit gender stereotypes, (for example, automatically associating “male” more than “female” with math ability and math professions) and were likely to identify themselves as feminine performed worse relative to their female counterparts who did not possess such stereotypes and who were less likely to identify with traditionally female characteristics. The same underperforming females were also the least inclined to pursue a math-based career.

To be fair, though, they didn’t seem to establish which was cause and which was effect.

Two new books look at lives of women who made major contributions to physics:

During the past 40 years, study after study has addressed why more women do not become scientists. The question is most apt for physics… The flip side of the question is: Why and how did those few prominent female physicists succeed? Historian Judith P. Zinsser’s La Dame d’Esprit and the profiles of women physicists in Out of the Shadows unveil the scintillating lives of women who overcame discrimination and made major contributions that went largely unacknowledged.

Marquise du Chatelet was Voltaire’s lover and shielded him from critics, but she also helped to synthesize prevailing notions of the physical world in her time. And her book Institutions of Physics helped to propagate the scientfic method. Meanwhile, Mary L. Cartwright, a pure mathematician, helped to found chaos theory.

Although the salary gap between men and women remains weighted in men’s favor in most instances, women are actually making more money than men in some IT related jobs, PC Magazine reports. Female help desk professionals and tech writers make more than men in the same jobs. But also female CEOs and other execs in the IT industry make 1.4 percent more than male ones. Overall, women in IT make 9.7 percent less than men, an improvement over the 10.9 percent gap a year ago.

Possible indications that the times could be changing a bit? The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the American Economic Association voted to allow more explicit references to seeking women and minority applicants in job postings. (It’ll ask for a login/password, just click “cancel.”)

Since 1986, the association has banned advertisements in its newsletter, Job Openings for Economists, that discriminate “on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, national origin, sexual preference, or physical handicap.” And for at least a decade, it has interpreted that policy with an unusual strictness, so as to forbid phrases such as “We encourage applications from women and members of underrepresented minorities.” Broad language such as “We are an equal-opportunity, affirmative-action employer” has been accepted, but explicit encouragement to particular groups has not.

It seems mostly to be a semantic change, since everybody understands what “equal opportunity, affirmative-action” means. But if it makes just a few more qualified women and minorities feel comfortable putting themselves forward then, it’s more than worth it.

Turns out She’s Such A Geek isn’t the only new book delving into the topic of women in science and technology. A more academic work, Why Aren’t More Women in Science: Top Researchers Debate the Evidence, aims to examine the possible reasons for women’s under-representation in the sciences. It’s very much a response to the whole Larry Summers fiasco.

The book’s editors seem to have gone out of their way to give space to biological explanations of women’s under-representation in the sciences. In this interview, they worry that the anti-Larry backlash dampened the spirit of free inquiry: “Defenders of Summers’s remarks were vilified and dismissed. This does not serve the purpose of science — it led to muzzling of the scholarly debate, with one side effectively silenced by the other.”

But it sounds, from the interview, as though they had a balance of arguments for, as well as against, the idea that women are naturally less clever with numbers:

Our biggest surprise was not found in any one essay but in the class of essays about biological differences between men and women. We had anticipated greater agreement among these essayists, but what we found was quite divergent, with some arguing strongly in favor of sex differences in brain organization, hormones, etc., as causative factors in women’s underrepresentation among those who score the highest on standardized mathematics tests, and others arguing against such views.

So that’s something. And they also note the well-known fact that the “science gender gap” is really a white American thing, not a global thing.

They also discuss social factors behind the disparity, including the well-known “leaky pipeline,” where women give up at every stage of the academic process. They also talk about the challenge of balancing a career and family. This gives rise to the following comment from a guy reading the post:

Most of the references to “women” in the article (and perhaps the book it describes) are about women who desire male sexual partners, i.e. heterosexuals. From childhood to adulthood this orientation may well be a liability for women with interests and aptitudes in science…

Studies of lesbian women faculty in the sciences are sorely needed, as is research on adolescent lesbian attitudes towards the sciences. … The question that needs to be asked is this: How much is this problem is caused by female biology and how much is a result of the culture of heterosexuality?

Darn good point, actually… although the lesbian scientists I know are as stressed out by the whole balancing-careeer-and-family thing as everyone else.