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.”

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.

The letters were in response to an article published earlier in the year about that topic that always is guaranteed a heated debate, why are there so few women in physics. I don’t know what the article said—I haven’t been a member of the American Physical Society in a decade—but reading the letters is free, and the images of the marked-up pages are even better (though the handwriting is a little hard to read). I transcribe below some excerpts interleaved with the corresponding handwritten comments by graduate student Rebecca Stanek:

After observing that the number of female full professorships in physics had doubled from 3% to 5% in four years (“5%! Slow down!” went the handwritten comment), the letter writers Jerry Smith and Wei Smith went on to say:

The second question we have is this: Must technical communities be cross-sectional representations of their greater societies? Gates suggests that they should be. Unfortunately, the question immediately leaves the realm of facts and statistics and lands squarely in a domain where physicists have little experience or qualification—the emotional and political arena of social engineering. Will the social engineering of physics stop once that “parity” is achieved? Probably not. Will the next step be to lower physics graduation requirements simply to attract students from other career fields in the hope of meeting some artificial parity requirement? [emphasis added] That outcome is not as far-fetched as some may think.

Handwritten comment: “Women who drop out tend to have above-average grades and/or qualifications”

How are women faring in other career fields? It is well observed that female engineering students tend to favor such specialties as biomedical or materials engineering over the traditional mechanical, civil, and electrical domains. This phenomenon is dominated by sociological and psychological factors. The nerdy reputation that attaches to traditional engineering does not help cultivate the social connections and relationships that our society stresses for young women. [emphasis added] Alternatively, the newer engineering fields, particularly biomedical, can be viewed as exciting, and as more people-oriented and compassionate—qualities that our society emphasizes in young women.

Handwritten comments: “1) Removing the “macho nerd” reputation helps men AND women. 2) Maybe society shouldn’t stress that women be little social butterflies. 3) Maybe someone should tell Drs. Smith that physics is no longer about one dude working alone in a lab.”

Is the lack of male nurses viewed as a crisis in medicine? Considering that females currently dominate the nursing and medical aid communities, and the doctor community approaches parity, is society concerned at the prospect of a female-dominated medical community? Of course not. [emphasis added] So why should we be concerned that males may be more socially inclined to physics?

Handwritten comment: “No, because it helps them justify low pay to teachers and nurses.”

To achieve social similitude, the physics community must either change society or abandon the meritocracy that yielded the great founders of our field. Let’s allow students to choose their own careers in line with their interests and dreams. We risk losing professional integrity if we cast aside the meritocracy of physics for cross-sectional similitude with society merely for the sake of political correctness. And rather than acting as sociologists, we should remain focused on our expertise and true to our goal: good physics that is good for society. Once society has fixed its problems, the optimal solution will percolate throughout the physics community so long as we maintain our unbiased meritocracy. [emphasis added]

Handwritten comment: “Ha ha ha!”

And then there’s this letter from a Robert Adair, who writes the following:

Certainly men and women are different. Our forebears who dealt with cows and bulls, roosters and hens, and rams and ewes never questioned such differences. Although gender differences in the intrinsic intellectual abilities important in physics are surely small, if not nonexistent, men and women differ in certain personality traits such as aggression (murderous or otherwise), which unfortunately has some effect on status, even in physics. More important is that in judging their best roles in society, women tend to make different choices from men. The influx of women into medicine and biology rather than physics and engineering likely follows from such differences in interests rather than gender biases. [emphasis added]

Handwritten comment: “SOCIALIZATION”

It is important to reduce illegitimate gender biases in all elements of society. I suggest, though, that the most important bias is found in the structures of the paths to leadership roles. These paths mesh poorly with women’s biological rhythms. When I review the wedding announcements in the New York Times, I find that attractive and accomplished brides are marrying at an average age of about 30—halfway between menarche and menopause. Thus, among advanced societies, women are properly playing a larger role in leadership, but the birth rate lags behind replacement levels. We are becoming extinct. [emphasis added]

Handwritten comment: “‘Don’t read, just breed!’”

There’s more good stuff if you’re interested, just click on this link and scroll down to find the photographic images of the printed letters—er, “Men defending the status quo”—pages.

I don’t know how representative these attitudes are of the field as a whole. I believe my graduate school advisor was a good guy and supportive of women in physics, but at the same time there was a gulf between the way he’d been socialized and the way I’d been socialized that led to explicit misunderstandings on several occasions.* But I heard about how another professor (about the same age as my advisor) would comment to his female chemistry grad student that she should become a medical doctor instead—not exactly encouragement.** And I would hear the occasional comment, fortunately not from anyone I worked with or chose to hang out with, but enough to make you aware that sexist attitudes still very much exist. And it makes you wonder about how much you’re not picking up on, too.

The thing is, you just don’t know what other people are really thinking, until some of them write letters like the above. You think everyone’s cool, everyone’s enlightened, because of how freethinking scientists can be in other respects, but then you run the experiment and get data showing that no, there still are people who really don’t think women are up to snuff in physics. That moves to make the field more hospitable for women—or really, hospitable for people—will dilute the quality of research being done. (And it’s easy to start asking yourself why you should care about impressing these people or why you would want to be in a field where you see that you’re not going to be given the benefit of the doubt if you’re not already head and shoulders above the competition.***)

The pity is that these people, who are so astute in other ways, can’t even see their blind spot about this. Everything else in the universe is up for questioning and being probed, but perish the thought of criticizing the culture of the field, which is clearly already perfect as it is.

—-

*—For example, I don’t think he fully got it when the first project I was on ran into serious managerial and technical problems and I took it really hard. (In retrospect, it was the wrong project for me, or really for just about any beginning graduate student who wasn’t already a master tinkerer. I did make mistakes, no question. But it really hurt that all of my eggs had been in that one basket, while he had other projects that were getting results.)

**—I do wonder if this guy might have had some issues with women at the time, though, since his ex-wife had run off to marry a rival of his working in the same field, and he was engaged in litigation over custody of their daughter. I am sure there are two sides to this story, neither of which I know.

***—I was certainly not a standout—with the way graduate school had gone, I would have had to perform a miracle during my postdoc(s) to have had a crack at an academic position. And I didn’t have the fire in the belly for that any more.

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.

“I had a sister I could go to a bar with if I had boy problems,” said Erin Swisshelm, a junior biochemistry major who withdrew from the sorority in October. “I had a sister I could talk about religion with. I had a sister I could be nerdy about science with. That’s why I liked Delta Zeta, because I had all these amazing women around me.”

Wow! Sounds like I’d fit right in! Oh wait, maybe not:

But over the years DePauw students had attached a negative stereotype to the chapter, as evidenced by the survey that Pam Propsom, a psychology professor, conducts each year in her class. That image had hurt recruitment, and the national officers had repeatedly warned the chapter that unless its membership increased, the chapter could close.

At the start of the fall term the national office was especially determined to raise recruitment because 2009 is the 100th anniversary of the DePauw chapter’s founding. In September, Ms. Menges and Kathi Heatherly, a national vice president of the sorority, visited the chapter to announce a reorganization plan they said would include an interview with each woman about her commitment. The women were urged to look their best for the interviews.

The tone left four women so unsettled that they withdrew from the chapter almost immediately.

Robin Lamkin, a junior who is an editor at The DePauw and was one of the 23 women evicted, said many of her sisters bought new outfits and modeled them for each other before the interviews. Many women declared their willingness to recruit diligently, Ms. Lamkin said.

But willingness to commit to recruitment wasn’t enough, apparently, because even the president of the chapter was asked to leave:

The national representatives announced their decisions in the form letters, delivered on Dec. 2, which said that Delta Zeta intended to increase membership to 95 by the 2009 anniversary, and that it would recruit using a “core group of women.”

Elizabeth Haneline, a senior computer science major who was among those evicted, returned to the house that afternoon and found some women in tears. Even the chapter’s president had been kicked out, Ms. Haneline said, while “other women who had done almost nothing for the chapter were asked to stay.”

Six of the 12 women who were asked to stay left the sorority, including Joanna Kieschnick, a sophomore majoring in English literature. “They said, ‘You’re not good enough’ to so many people who have put their heart and soul into this chapter that I can’t stay,” she said.

Of course, I’m also wondering about the chicken-and-eggness of the social awkwardness/math-and-science major connection being drawn in the story. Annalee and Charlie could write circles around me about this, I’m sure. Sounds like a familiar narrative (and I’m wondering if it’s from the incident or imposed by journalistic formula): Were those women in those male-dominated science fields just not feminine enough in the right ways? You gotta wonder, since after those interviews with the national officers most of those women were hidden in the attic during the ensuing recruiting drive:

A few days after the interviews, national representatives took over the house to hold a recruiting event. They asked most members to stay upstairs in their rooms. To welcome freshmen downstairs, they assembled a team that included several of the women eventually asked to stay in the sorority, along with some slender women invited from the sorority’s chapter at Indiana University, Ms. Holloway said.

“They had these unassuming freshman girls downstairs with these plastic women from Indiana University, and 25 of my sisters hiding upstairs,” she said. “It was so fake, so completely dehumanized. I said, ‘This calls for a little joke.’ ”

Ms. Holloway put on a wig and some John Lennon rose-colored glasses, burst through the front door and skipped around singing, “Ooooh! Delta Zeta!” and other chants.

The face of one of the national representatives, she recalled, “was like I’d run over her puppy with my car.”

And I hope she was dancing to “Super Freak,” too.

Girls, there is a sorority for you: Sigma Sigma Alpha Gamma. We’ll welcome you with open arms.

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.

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.

“I am come in very truth,” Bacon declared, “leading to you nature with all her children to bind her to your service and make her your slave.” We cannot “expect nature to come to us,” he said. “Nature must be taken by the forelock” (grabbed by the hair). It is necessary to “lay hold of her and capture her,” to “conquer and subdue her, to shake her to her foundations.” He cited the way women suspected of witchcraft were tortured by mechanical devices to extract confessions as a metaphor to indicate the methods of inquisition by which he thought Nature’s secrets should be extracted from her:

howsoever the use and practice of such arts is to be condemned…for the further disclosing of the secrets of nature…a man [ought not] make scruple of entering and penetrating into these holes and corners, when the inquisition of truth is his whole object.

Nature, he said, “exhibits herself more clearly under the trials and vexations of [mechanical devices] than when left to herself.”

The sexual imagery of penetrating, torturing, and enslaving Mother Nature should not be dismissed as harmless figures of speech unrelated to the way seventeenth-century English gentleman scientists perceived the world. The subordination of women was an essential component of their worldview, which was entirely committed to maintaining male dominance in a patriarchal society. To believe that the early scientists’ pronouncements were “value-free” with regard to women or any other social matters would be extremely naive.

By the way, for what it’s worth, 99% of the comment spam that we get is for erectile dysfunction medication.

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.)

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.