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.

The first Expanding Your Horizons (EYH) conference took place at Mills College in Oakland, California, in 1976 with the goal of exciting girls about math and science, and it was a huge success. EYH conferences have since served more than 625,000 girls in over 89 locales internationally.

I am looking for volunteers to help with the hands-on digital electronics workshop I will lead at this year’s Mills College EYH, this Saturday, March 17. If you know how to connect logic gates in a breadboard and would like to help, please email me: spertus@mills.edu.

If you can’t help at this Saturday’s Mills conference but would like to help EYH, see the national list of conferences with contact information.
The above photo, taken by Barton Friedland, is from last year’s Mills EYH, which was written up in the Google Blog.

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).

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.

And since I rebooted my laptop this morning because it froze, some flag somewhere has reset and won’t let me launch my Windows 2000 virtual machine any more because it thinks that one is already running. I’ve submitted a bug report, but it’s looking like I’ll just have to reinstall the darn thing (there’s a newer build out now anyway).

Grrrr. Wait, I forgot: computers make our lives easier. Computers make our lives easier. Computers make our lives easier…even when they don’t make our lives easier.

biologist OR physicist OR scientist “she says”

And Google responded:

Did you mean: biologist OR physicist OR scientist “he says”

So I tried a little experiment and searched for:

teacher OR nurse OR housekeeper “she says”

And Google didn’t ask me if I meant to search for anything different. Is that weird or what?