5 years ago, a few graduate students began collecting discarded equipment from our university to send to scientists working in developing countries. We had all worked in labs abroad – from El Salvador to the Ivory Coast to China, and we knew that talented researchers were working in these places despite incredible obstacles – and that the surplus resources in our university were exactly what they lacked to pursue their research.

Now, five years later we have grown into a full-fledged nonprofit called Seeding Labs. Ultimately, the goal of Seeding Labs is to transform the global map of scientific innovation hubs. We began this project in Boston, where a few great universities have given rise to a strong and diverse scientific community. We believe that by supporting scientists at academic institutions in developing countries we can help seed similar scientific communities that foster first-class education, research and even private sector R&D. By the end of this month we will have helped 17 labs and clinics in 12 countries in Latin America and Africa: including a medical school in the Congo, tuberculosis and dengue fever research labs in Argentina and Paraguay, and a primary care clinic in Madagascar. We are now building the support to grow our operations in Boston, and helping groups of students in New York, Houston and Berkeley replicate our efforts. By equipping labs we are also building connections between scientists across international borders – a community that keeps in touch despite the distances.

So it seems very fitting that the internet is giving us a great opportunity in our expansion. We are in the running for a $10,000 prize at www.ideablob.com. And I thought perhaps you could help me get the word out about Seeding Labs and let people know about the easiest $10,000 donation they could ever hope to make. All it takes is going to the Ideablob website and voting for Seeding Labs. Signing up to vote doesn’t sign you up to receive spam. And everyone’s support would help us make an enormous impact on the lives of scientists around the world – and on the lives of everyone in the communities in which they work. Thank you so much.

Yesterday, I got to be part of Google’s observation of Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day, part of Engineers Week. There was some nice video coverage by:

• MarketWatch
• CNET

I particularly like near the end of the MarketWatch video when one enthusiastic girl says: “I think it’s going to be a sudden change when we all start working in the workforces,” and her friend adds: “Year, we’re going to change the way people think.”

Why don’t more women win the Nobel Prize in Physics? Wait twenty years, suggests one juror. Committee member Borje Johansson delivered a lecture on “How to Get a Nobel Prize.” And the topic of women came up:

Why there are few women in the list of Nobel physics laureates? Johansson said that there was usually a time lag of about 20 years between a discovery or invention and the recognition with a Nobel. “So, the awards now reflect the field of physics 20 years ago. With the number of women physicists increasing, this fact (of a handful women Nobel laureates) may change two decades from now,” he stated.

He also said a surefire way to win is to be related to a Nobel Prize winner (as in the case of Marie Curie, who won with her husband, and whose daughter also won a Nobel with her own husband.) And he pointed out that Indian physicist S.N. Bose never got a Nobel for his work on quantum mechanics in the 1920s, but Nobel prizes have gone to people who based their work on Bose’s.

In other words, the Nobel committee is just a tad slow sometimes…

Kaliya Hamilton is helping to organize She’s Geeky, an event she calls an “unconference” next month in Mountain View, CA. When I met Kaliya at BlogHer this year, she told me how the conference was partly inspired by She’s Such a Geek, and would be a place for women to come talk about tech stuff, geek out, and bond. The structure of an unconference is lack of structure — the agenda will be set by the people who come, so be sure to get there early and toss out some ideas. Kaliya writes:

Our goal is to support skill exchange and learning between women working in diverse fields and to create a space for networking and to talk about issues faced by women in technology.

Should be lots of fun, and very thought-provoking. Find out more about She’s Geeky.

A female gamer in Texas read She’s Such A Geek and then picked up the latest issue of Game Informer magazine. Maybe because she’d just been reading SSAG, she says, she noticed the staff of Game Informer was all men. She posted about this in the Girl Gamers group on Livejournal:

In fact, there are only 3 (at least obviously) female names on the entire staff page: the publisher, which I guess counts for something, and two advertising saleswomen.

I must admit, I found it difficult to read the magazine after finding this out. I just wasn’t as enthusiastic to be reading GI as I have been in the past. My GI subscription is fairly new since I just got my GameStop Edge card about a month ago and only have 3 issues so far, so I don’t know if there used to be female editors or not.

I wouldn’t say that I’m angry, and I certainly wouldn’t want them to hire a woman just for the sake of having a woman on staff. I would want her to be hired on her journalistic merit, of course. But at the same time, not having a single woman on the editorial staff makes me a bit uneasy and makes GI look somewhat backwards and old-fashioned, at least to me.

As you’d expect with Livejournal, there’s a spirited comment thread. A typical response:

Like it or not, ’serious gaming’ (ie not solitaire, minesweeper, sudoku, those puzzle games on MSN) is a field dominated by men, and likewise, so is their production. I’m studying computer game art in university, and I do a lot of classes with people studying other parts of video games (programming, design, music). I’m one of.. oh.. eight to ten girls, out of about 300 students in those fields at this particular university. Even my tutors have said that women really are a rarity in that field.

Meanwhile, the author of the original post, My Mind Is Lost, has a set of self-portraits on DeviantArt that are pretty awesome. My favorites are “tough guy” and “gothy girl.”

I know I’m way too late in posting this, but I only just found this awesome video which UC Davis geology professor Dawn Sumner posted on Youtube. It makes me insanely proud and psyched to know that people are making their own responses to the book, and telling their own stories. Also, check out her homepage, which has some cool info about her work on the cameras for the next generation of Mars rover. Rock on!

My first time at Dragoncon, I was still a guy, but that didn’t stop me from dressing up. I wanted to look dressy and cool, so I wore a nice shirt, waistcoat and silk tie. After all, I was there as a Professional Science Fiction Writer, and I was going to be networking with other writers and meeting editors and stuff.

People didn’t quite know what to make of me. I wasn’t dressed up in a costume, or a recognzied uniform like HippiePaganLARPerGoth. I wasn’t wearing the designated non-costume costume, which was a pair of jeans and a T-shirt that would let everybody know exactly what species of fanboy I was.

I bopped around in my Eurofag outfit and people just sort of ignored me. I did meet one editor, of a magazine that crashed and burned after its first issue. He spent an hour telling me that Rudy Rucker’s novels were all about cheese attacking people sexually and I shouldn’t bother reading them. At one point he and I spent a really boring hour with Larry Niven, who seemed pretty narcoleptic. But mostly I was both too weird, and not weird enough, to connect with anyone.

Some years later, I went back to Dragoncon, and this time I was dressed as Wonder Woman. I spent countless hours sculpting my gold lame eagle and belt, and finding just the right red cowboy boots. That time around, people noticed me, and everything felt just that much more festive. Cosplay transcends language, social expectations — and gender norms.

Mostly, people dug it. Okay, so there was one fighter/mage-looking guy at Dragoncon who yelled at me that I needed to get me some damn boobies. At this point, I hadn’t yet hormoned up any breasts of my own. And I hardly bothered to pad my Amazon bustier. My friend, mentor and surrogate mom, the late and amazing dgk goldberg, almost took the padding out of her own bra to show him.

In between those two visits to Dragoncon, I actually quit writing science fiction. As I transitioned from a nice boy to a rude girl, I also became a serious literary writer. When I returned to writing science fiction as a girl, there were two things going on. One was that I discovered, in my literary career, that there were things I could only explore using speculative elements. Things I needed to geek out about. And the other was that I finally found my place in the nerd community, whose culture defines so much of what science fiction is about.

But it was still daunting to go back into the world of science fiction fans. I realized at some point that science fiction and fantasy defines a particular type of person. Just the way that some queer literary authors have a devout following of people who all have matching punky haircuts, tattoos and found fashion, fans of science fiction have their own ethos. I’d never quite felt culturally science fictional. I couldn’t bring myself to read Robert Heinlein or get used to some guys’ lecture-as-conversation thing.

But I found there was an intersection between science fiction nerds and a tangle of alternative communities. At least some of the people who were fascinated by thirtieth century post-humans were also open to other genders, DIY sexualities, and non-traditional families. You’d find yourself at a party with a guy named Ewok, and that would be his hacker name, and then he’d turn out to be sort of a genderqueer furry. Sometimes you would run into someone at cafe scientifique and then meet them again at some queer burlesque thing.

And I started meeting more people in the science fiction writer community too. Sometimes, I’d run into writers at conventions or readings a number of times, and they would know me enough to wave to: the tranny in the slinky dress. Sometimes they’d get my pronoun wrong and I’d have to correct them. Sometimes they’d just treat me like one of the more exotic weirdos of fandom. And sometimes they’d actually take me seriously, as a writer and as a woman.

Annalee Newitz and I were lucky enough to have the chance to go down to the Google.com headquarters and read from She’s Such A Geek recently. Also joining us were Ellen Spertus and Jenn Shreve, two contributors to the book who work at Google. Instead of reading my piece about being a health care policy wonk, I decided to read from a new piece about being a science fiction writer. Anyway, Youtube has finally posted the video of the event, and it’s online here.

When a guy tries to negotiate for better pay and benefits, male bosses just accept it as normal behavior. But when a woman does the same thing, the men considering her for a job are likely to decide she’s “not nice” and decide they don’t want to work with her. So women who actually stand up for themselves and ask for decent pay and benefits are less likely to get the job. Or if they do get the job they’re applying for, they’ll start out at a disadvantage, among coworkers who think they’re “not nice.”

That’s the gist of a new study reported in the Washington Post (via the Washington Monthly.)

“What we found across all the studies is men were always less willing to work with a woman who had attempted to negotiate than with a woman who did not,” [researcher Hannah Riley] Bowles said. “They always preferred to work with a woman who stayed mum. But it made no difference to the men whether a guy had chosen to negotiate or not.”

As I mentioned back in February, I’ve had two speculative fiction writing careers: a fairly awful one as a boy, and a somewhat better one as a girl.

Around the time I started flexing my girl-muscles, I stopped writing so much science fiction and switched to literary fiction.* This was a good move, because my speculative fiction mostly really sucked.

I spent a few years in a writing group, where the guys mostly wrote science fiction (Space battles!) and the women mostly wrote fantasy (Bards! Anti-abortion vampires!). As a guy, I wrote science fiction too, but my efforts were never quite nerdy enough.

“The science should be the main character in your story,” one guy in the group told me a few times. “Your actual human characters should have, like, conflicts and stuff. But the science is the star.”

I tried really hard to make the science the star of my stories. My first dozen or so science fiction stories were pretty “plot oriented” in any case.

I was very proud of myself when I first learned how to write endings. I’d gotten pretty good at beginnings, and okay at middles, but I had an ending issue. My early stories had a pretty pat formula: the protagonist faces a problem involving science (usually in the first sentence) and struggles with it for about 2,000 words. And then the protagonist resolves the conflict (usually in the final sentence.) Eat your heart out, Raymond Carver!

So it was super helpful to start writing literary fiction instead. Not just because science couldn’t be the star of a story about roccoco design. I also needed to make sense of my bizarre new habitat. Moving to San Francisco and changing from a polite boy to a foul-mouthed girl, I found identities latching onto me like barnacles. I needed to model the world I’d come from and the world I’d found myself in, and figure out how humans operated in both places. I needed a field guide for the alien creature I’d become.

In many of my “literary” stories, weird things still happened. People still had conflicts, albeit without any pat resolution. The universe remained a ludicrous enemy to people. I tried to map not just the sharp edges of our alleged reality — but also the contortions people take on to avoid those edges.

One major benefit of literary writing: people assumed everything I wrote was autobiographical. And yet they also felt free to psychoanalyze the “me” in my stories, in a bracing way. One literary-magazine editor called me up and talked for an hour about a story he was publishing. He felt my trans protagonist suffered from “phallic access” problems. He had some great ideas for how to make the story more emotionally real and intense, but he also wanted to get to the root of my character’s penis envy. It sort of reminded me of the way my old writing group would nitpick my science and assorted plot devices. Plus, it was like free therapy!

As my stories got stranger and more tangled, I started reaching for metaphors that would let me probe into the heart of their emotional chaos. If only there was some way I could work in some story elements that were both surreal and yet concrete! I groped for a way to reify the strangeness of “real” life and take my characters beyond normal experience. And little by little, I found myself writing speculative fiction again.

Soon enough, I was thinking about going to conventions and rejoining the ranks of the science fiction nerds. The only question in my mind was, would they accept me as a girl? Especially a strange girl whose stories were a bit betwixt and between?

* Yes, I know genre dividers are really imaginary and meaningless. And the genre lines are never as tidy as people like to pretend. Lots of literary writers dabble in speculative fiction, and people like Kelly Link and Jonathan Lethem have won mainstream literary cache. At the same time, the death of genre boudnaries is greatly exaggerated. The New Yorker and Analog haven’t merged yet. For the most part, speculative fiction and literature target different groups. Most speculative fiction remains noticeably nerdier, and dorkier, than most literary fiction. And both literary fiction and speculative fiction each still has its own set of unexamined assumptions and tropes.