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.  

Star Simpson, an MIT sophomore, was arrested after walking into Boston’s Logan Airport today after wearing a sweatshirt containing a circuit board with wiring and flashing lights. The press agrees on the facts, but they differ in how they refer to her. In their headlines, the Associated Press and ABC News her an “MIT Coed”, while InformationWeek calls her an “MIT Computer Whiz”. I didn’t know anyone still seriously used the word “coed”. (In any event, MIT graduated its first female student, Ellen Swallow Richards, 134 years ago.)

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”.

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.”

Reinhold Aman, editor of Maledicta: The International Journal of Verbal Aggression has written an interesting article on how Don Imus’s infamous epithet has been translated into different languages by news organizations. One common error made by users of British English (or dictionaries) was interpreting “nappy” as “diaper”. (Another interpreter inexplicably translated “nappy-haired” as “lawn”.) As Aman explains, even without such blatant errors, translating pejorative slang can be challenging, if not impossible, causing foreign readers to misunderstand the incident.

Physicists can be some of the most interesting characters you’ll ever meet, with restless curiosity about the world even beyond the confines of their subject. I admire that willingness to take the blinders off and examine the facts, rather than being hamstrung by preconceived notions. A physics education can help teach a person to question assumptions, and the analytical mindset that I gained from the years I spent in physics has helped me to see the world in a far different way from how I might have seen it if I hadn’t had that education. I do treasure having this extra way of seeing the world, even if I left physics behind.

But the problem is, the qualities of open-mindedness and questioning of assumptions in the laboratory can coexist with a huge blind spot: the belief that physics is a meritocracy. (You may substitute any science, or really just about any endeavor really, for “physics” here.) Astronomer Rob Knop posted about this myth on his blog Galactic Interactions after getting copies of these marked-up pages which are from the letters section of the December 2006 issue of the physics trade magazine Physics Today. (more…)

Apologies to Caddyshack here, but it seems an appropriate cultural touchstone. Gotta love this article from the Feb. 25 New York Times about how a bunch of women at DePauw University in Indiana feel they were kicked out of their chapter of the Delta Zeta sorority because they didn’t conform to the proper image for the sorority:

When a psychology professor at DePauw University here surveyed students, they described one sorority as a group of “daddy’s little princesses” and another as “offbeat hippies.” The sisters of Delta Zeta were seen as “socially awkward.”

Worried that a negative stereotype of the sorority was contributing to a decline in membership that had left its Greek-columned house here half empty, Delta Zeta’s national officers interviewed 35 DePauw members in November, quizzing them about their dedication to recruitment. They judged 23 of the women insufficiently committed and later told them to vacate the sorority house.

The 23 members included every woman who was overweight. They also included the only black, Korean and Vietnamese members. The dozen students allowed to stay were slender and popular with fraternity men — conventionally pretty women the sorority hoped could attract new recruits. Six of the 12 were so infuriated they quit.

Apparently the women asked to leave had been interviewed by national officers who determined that they weren’t dedicated enough to recruitment, since membership had fallen. So what was the pre-diaspora Delta Zeta like?

…[T]he chapter appears to have been home to a diverse community over the years, partly because it has attracted brainy women, including many science and math majors, as well as talented disabled women, without focusing as exclusively as some sororities on potential recruits’ sex appeal, former sorority members said.

(more…)

Last month, I was approached by a woman considering going back to school in computer science, which I teach at Mills College. We met, and I encouraged her, lending her some Java training materials. I received this email from her today:

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 I used to think of Bacon’s death-by-frozen-chicken incident in 1626 as a prime example of noble suffering in the pursuit of scientific knowledge. But now I think I have to root for the chicken.

This is also from Clifford C. Conner’s A People’s History of Science, as I wrote about in my previous entry. Sir Francis Bacon is lauded in history as an early advocate of the scientific revolution of the 17th century who cast a long shadow on how science would be practiced in English society, but his misogyny cast a long shadow on the culture as well:

The patriarchal imagery in Bacon’s writings reflected the social position of women at the beginning of the seventeenth century in England. Bacon invariably portrayed Nature as a female who was hiding her secrets. He wrote of the secrets “locked in nature’s bosom” or “laid up in the womb of nature,” and said she would have to be forcibly penetrated in order to make her give them up. (more…)

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.)

SSAG contributor Suzanne Franks just cranks out one thought-provoking post after another over at her blog Thus Spake Zuska. Just about everything she writes about there is relevant to what our book and blog are about, too, so I’ve created the new category Zuska, Zuska, Zuska! to include the many links in which I anticipate I will be namechecking or quoting from her or responding to something that she wrote. We need to get a blogroll going here, too, but I think that might have to go on another page, since the menu on the right-hand side of the screen has quite a bit of information already.

Anyway, go read Zuska’s analysis of how people should have handled the incredibly rude situation when a male professor from the Stone Age snubbed a female academic. In a nutshell: if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.