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.  

Other media outlets refer to Simpson as an “MIT Student”, “MIT Sophomore”, “Woman”, “Teen”, “Student”, and “Art Student”. On her web page, Simpson describes herself as “an inventor, artist, engineer, and student”.

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.”

Of course, there’s the obligatory feeling of who knows if I’d still have gotten into Princeton if I applied today. But I sure as heck wouldn’t have gotten into Caltech:

But with more and more students filling out ever more applications, schools like the California Institute of Technology received a record number of applications this year — 3,595, or 8 percent more than last year — and admitted 576 students. Among so many talented applicants, a prospective student with perfect SAT scores was not unusual, said Jill Perry, a Caltech spokeswoman.

“The successful students have to have shown some passion for science and technology in high school or their personal life,” Ms. Perry said. “That means creating a computer system for your high school, or taking a tractor apart and putting it back together.”

Well, that would have ruled me out, as my selling points back in 1985 were my experience on the speech and debate team, very strong grades and test scores, and APs in eight subjects (plus three IBs, from the international school senior year). Never mind that the only computer my family had at the time was a Sinclair ZX81, or that I lived in the suburbs and didn’t have access to a tractor to tinker with.

There was a whole welter of socialization about what girls are expected to be interested in and what I would have been permitted to do in the house (my mother was very particular about the house; we weren’t even allowed to sit on the furniture without changing clothes if we’d been playing outside in the summer). My all-female Catholic school (which was separate and unequal to the boys’ school up the road in terms of the offerings) didn’t expect us to be interested in math, and so our participation in math meets was relatively ad hoc compared to the organized team that my brother reluctantly participated in. (How I envied his having an actual team with practices—which, of course, he didn’t appreciate—while at my school I was pretty much on my own. I never tried to drum up more interest in math team myself, having been a misfit in junior high who didn’t want to face the pain of almost certain rejection for this hopelessly nerdy pursuit.) And we didn’t do science fairs.

Maybe with girls’ tech programs like Expanding Your Horizons, the level of technical knowledge is higher now than it was some twenty years ago. (Embarrassing revelation: I didn’t even know what a diode was when I took my first electrical engineering course! Not that it’s conceptually difficult to learn, but a lot of the guys had been playing around with circuits in a way that I hadn’t.) But I’m also wondering that, with the stakes so high so early, are we starting to discourage well-roundedness? Do you really have to focus that much that soon in order to get into one of the “name” colleges these days? What about the bright girls who hadn’t been in a situation that supported them becoming extremely technical early on? Is there a chance for them to discover a technical talent without feeling like they’re behind at the starting gate? I don’t know what the gender stats on the Caltech admissions were, but I can’t help but think that it must be even more intimidating than it seemed for me at a competitive liberal arts university nearly 20 years ago.

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).

I have enjoyed our electronic correspondence

Whenever my terminal notifies me that I have mail,
I eagerly check whether it is from you.
If it is, my heart races as I read and reread it.
It annoys me officemates that
I laugh aloud at your witticisms
and audibly groan at your criticisms,
But I care about you more than them.
I fondly remember the times we used “talk”.
I confess that I saved away phrases of yours
that I was unwilling to let go.
I think we should meet each other in person some time.

I also slipped in some feminism:

You don’t belong at MIT (to most students)

I don’t know anything about your intelligence,
your grades, or your experience,
but that won’t stop me from telling you
that you don’t belong at MIT.
You were only admitted because you are
a legacy/woman/underrepresented minority/Iowan.
I realize that by saying this without knowing
anything about your abilities,
I imply that no member of your group is qualified,
but I say it anyway.

One way, of course, is to collect a couple dozen essays from women about their experiences being women in male-dominated fields that address topics from life in the lab or cubicle to talking about fashion and sex. And if you’ve been reading this blog for the last month or so, you’ll know that I won’t miss any opportunity to plug our book.

But for those of you who might prefer a more homeopathic remedy, there’s also another opportunity for geek women to stand up and be counted in images—and yes, you can keep your clothes on. (Please!) The new online science magazine Inkling has launched a contest in search of the photo which best suits the caption “OMG she’s such a geek!” It runs until the end of the month—read the rules to get all the details about where to send and info on the Ada Lovelace poster prize.

Full disclosure: I’ve written a few pieces for Inkling, which aspires to tell science stories with a touch more whimsy than they are often reported. In the words of co-editors Anne Casselman and Anna Gosline: “Founded in late 2006, we cover the science that pervades our life, makes us laugh, and helps us choose our breakfast foods. We aim to capture a larger proportion of female readers, but, of course, everyone is always welcome.”

Check Inkling out—you’ll probably learn something and have a chuckle at the same time. And if you think you can make a winning photo of female geekitude, have at it. I’ve set the bar pretty low here just wearing my Hello Kitty t-shirt—I know you can do better. There’s gotta be someone out there mired in cable spaghetti or doing cartwheels in the cavern of an accelerator!

On the 15th I will drop off at your office the Java 2 Training Course. I will not be using it after all, but thank you very much, just the same.

After receiving the results of an aptitude test last week I realized CS would not be the best field for me to enter. A key aptitude among engineers is being able to visualize 3-D structures. I scored on the low end of average with this aptitude.

After getting over my surprise, I replied:

I can’t visualize 3-D structures either. Please do not make important career decisions based on a single aptitude test that is likely to be faulty. For example, there could be gender bias. Women are reportedly less able to visualize 3-D structures then men are, but some of us flatlanders are excellent computer scientists.

You shouldn’t abandon CS unless you are not interested in it or you fail in learning it. Please do not leave the field because of some possibly sexist superstitions about what abilities are needed.

I am reminded of Michael Bérubé’s satire on former Harvard president Larry Summer’s statements about women in science:

According to [Harvard geneticist Charles] Kinbote, the presidency of Harvard University requires a unique array of talents and dispositions which, statistically, only a small handful of women possess…..Men are … more adept than women at mentally rotating three-dimensional shapes on aptitude tests, Kinbote added. “You’d be surprised how often a university president needs to do this, and at Harvard the pressure is especially intense.” Kinbote estimated that the president of Harvard spends roughly one-quarter of the working day mentally rotating complex, hypothetical three-dimensional shapes.

Much is being made of Harvard’s recent decision to appoint a woman to its presidency. While some people are speculating that she was hired because of her sex, it is more likely that she is the first Harvard president not appointed on the basis of their sex.

On a similar theme, see Women, men, and IQ tests, posted at my Beyond Satire blog.

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.

Well, no duh. We know that women in engineering, and female geeks of all stripes, don’t just geek out all the time. People all have their needs for love, intimacy, and sex, regardless of what they choose to do for a career.

But I also don’t think that posing in lingerie in front of a camera is the best way to communicate the message that women can be multidimensional. Instead, it just replaces the stereotype of the geeky woman with the stereotype of the woman who is there for men’s sexual pleasure. I doubt that anyone who buys this calendar is going to be reading the information on the women’s majors. That’s probably written in much smaller print than those images of skin and lingerie splashed across the page.

Hey, I’m sure the modeling sessions were fun, and it’s people’s right to pose for a cheesecake calendar if they want to. But aren’t “tongue-in-cheek” pin-up calendars way overdone, anyway? And if people really want to see how female geekery and sex mix, the written word can put a far more nuanced point on the matter anyway—as SSAG contributors Violet Blue, Suzanne Franks, and Quinn Norton do in their essays!

UPDATE: Zuska just wrote about this calendar, too—and reminded me that there have been others like it just within the past year. People, how about a different calendar that tries to show how original and creative y’all can be, for a change? This pinup stuff really is sooooo boring on top of all the other things wrong with it!