According to an article in the Calcutta Telegraph, 30 percent of local cyber criminals are women:

Women are not just victims of cyber crime. An increasing number of them are committing the crime themselves. “We have registered complaints against eight women in the past year who allegedly committed crimes using their personal computers or laptops,” said Gyanwant Singh, the deputy commissioner of police (headquarters).

Most of the women are young and from well-off families. “They are educated and also tech-savvy,” Singh said.

Crimes include identity theft, credit card fraud and sex work. Even a year ago, police say they only came across women who were victims of cyber crime, not perpetrators.

Today’s San Jose Mercury News has an incredibly depressing article about the scarcity of women directors in Hollywood. (By contrast, female directors are common in Europe.) But this part of the article, for me, was by far the most depressing and rage-causing:

Actress Julie Delpy has wanted to be a director since she was 17, when she wrote her first script. In 1992, having acted for great filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and Krzysztof Kieslowski, she went to the NYU film school. She did well and graduated eager to get behind the camera. Years later, all she had to show for it was a short film and a indie feature that never saw theatrical release in the United States. She also had a drawer full of scripts that reflected her love of science fiction and other nongirlie topics. She couldn’t get any of them produced. “I was kind of losing hope,” she said. …

“This is why my first film is a romantic comedy,” said Delpy, now 37, with evident exasperation. “It is only because it is the first time people will give me money to make a film. People will trust a woman to do something with a relationship more than they will to do something with a war story or science fiction.”

“I would sell out to direct a big action movie if I had the opportunity,” she said. “I love to take risks, and I think I would do a great job. My dream is to do a science fiction movie, like ‘Close Encounters of a Third Kind,’ like ‘Blade Runner.’ But you need money to make ‘Blade Runner.’

I sometimes love small movies about relationships, which the article says are the only kind of movie that female directors are “allowed” to make. But honestly, a lot of romantic comedies and family dramas feel really cookie-cutter to me. And, as you can probably guess, I love science fiction. I would way rather see Delpy try to make another Blade Runner that she feels passionate about, than a dumb Woody Allen/Nora Ephron knockoff that she’s just doing because people expect it of her.

Why does Steven Spielberg get to make dozens of increasingly braindead films, when Julie Delpy doesn’t get her shot?

Tooting my own horn slightly… I wrote a piece on feminist bloggers responding to sexism in superhero comics, which is in the new issue of Mother Jones. There’s been a great surge among feminist comics blogs and online communities. The comics industry has gone from blithely ignoring feminist concerns to responding to them openly. At the same time, though, weirdly dehumanizing imagery and storylines remain very prevalent in superhero comics. The article’s not online yet, but should be within a few weeks.

Contrary to essentialist stereotypes, women speak roughly the same number of words as men. The female “chatterbox” stereotype is the counterpart to the idea that men are more laconic, but also more logical and better at sciencey stuff. There’s never been any proof of those stereotypes, and now there’s proof that they’re wrong:

Researchers recorded the daily conversations of 400 university students in the United States and Mexico over a period of several days. They found that females spoke about 16,215 words each day, and males uttered an average of 15,669 words, which was considered a statistical dead heat.

It seems like a minor victory, but this actually knocks out one of the keystones of dumb stereotyping. And maybe now that we all know women’s words are no cheaper than men’s, everyone will be just a little more likely to stop and listen when women talk.

Science Quiets Myth Of ‘Chatterbox’ Females [via Washington Post.]

“Geeks may be the consummate outsiders in our cliquey culture,” writes Keely Savoie - and then she goes on to reveal that she’s one of us. The science and culture writer’s review of She’s Such a Geek for Bitch Magazine was the Powells.com July 1st Review-a-Day entry. She writes:

As a longtime geek myself, I know it takes no small amount of courage, fortitude, and blind passion to endure, let alone flourish, in such a vacuum. She’s Such a Geek fills that void with 23 tales from intrepid and undeterred women who gamely tell the tale of the issues they have had to confront.

Thanks to Bitch, Powell’s and Keely for spreading the word!

“Everything around us has an invisible reason for existing. That’s why I like science,” the twelve-year-old girl narrator says at the start of the trailer for Future Weather, a new movie in progress. “I like science because it helps you measure changes, changes so small they’re barely visible to the naked eye,” she adds later. It looks like a really interesting film, with a protagonist who feels like a real kid, not a Hollywood kid. It’s about a girl who wants to help stop global warming, and then her mom disappears.

Not only that, but they’re one of the first films to go carbon neutral:

Future Weather will be the first carbon neutral film shot in Pennsylvania, but our green initiatives won’t end there. Our goal is to create a viable blue- or “green”-print for other local films to follow by testing inventive new green initiatives and creating partnerships with local business with sustainable practices.

Our goals are to conserve energy, reduce emissions, renew materials and finally, offset our unavoidable emissions. We will work with guidelines set forth by such groups as the Environmental Media Association and partner with an ecological consultant to create a practical plan for implementing green practices at our various locations. We will examine everything from our modes of transport to the solid waste we generate to the materials we use, including food, water, paper and cleaning supplies, and strive to use the ecological aternative. We are looking into obtaining alternative energy sources including solar power and biodiesel.

They’re trying to raise donations to finish the film.

Future Weather (via Zuska)

For the third year in a row, the National Medal of Science recipients were all men, according to a release from the Society for Women’s Health Research. Out of 97 winners over the past ten years, only ten have been women, the Society notes. Says Society CEO Phyllis Greenberger:

When the significant and ongoing contributions of women in science go unacknowledged, it can discourage even the best and brightest women from pursuing a career in these disciplines.

The Society is sponsoring the RAISE project, aimed at making sure qualified women are nominated for awards in science, medicine and engineering. The Society also offers its own award for women who make advancements in women’s health research.

But nothing else can substitute for calling out the National Science Foundation for its blinkered sexism. As usual, Zuska is on the case, and she attracts comments that are a mixture of illuminating and depressing. There’s also a link to a fascinating study on “Nepotism and Sexism In Peer Review.“

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.”

A sexy calendar of women engineering students from University of Illinois sparked some controversy, according to the IEEE Spectrum. After a dozen female engineering students posed in varying states of undress, the story got picked up in newspapers. And then Playboy weighed in, saying the engineers weren’t “knockouts,” but were “the total package,” smart as well as cute. Whatevs. It sounds as though the calendar didn’t do that well, and one woman who posed for it says she’s disappointed that it didn’t reflect more of her geeky skillz as well as her sexiness.

The article concludes with a fascinating interview with Karen Hopkin, who created the calendar “Studmuffins of Science,” featuring male science PhDs in saucy poses. The 1990s calendar series did so well, she considered expanding it to include women, only to hit a snag:

“Whereas hundreds of guys had sent in pictures, I got maybe four women,” says Hopkin, herself a Ph.D., in biochemistry, and a science writer for the National Institutes of Health. “And they all accompanied their photos with several-page letters saying that they liked my idea but needed to know what I was doing. It had to be tasteful; they didn’t want to jeopardize their careers.”

The men hadn’t minded at all. One did tell her that he’d been a bit worried to see his calendar photo mixed in among his journal articles during his final interview for academic tenure, but then the department head slapped him on the back and told him it was okay. Another, a cover model, credited the calendar with introducing him to his future girlfriend. Hopkin concluded that men have less to fear from exposing themselves, both literally and figuratively.

She says she supports the Illinois calendar project completely, that it’s great to let people know that engineering and science “can be done by women, and by good-looking, sexy women.” The problem, though, is that just about any woman with a Ph.D., well along in her career, will shy away from what to an undergrad might seem merely a lark.

I don’t know why she needed PhDs instead of students, but this sort of reminds me of the comment thread on my post the other day. It’s hard enough for a woman with a PhD in the sciences to be taken seriously and get a secure job track. I’m sure very very few female science PhDs feel secure enough to portray themselves as sex objects on top of that. So don’t blame the sexual double-standard in this case — it’s much more to do with the leaky pipeline in general.

The gender gap among science PhDs in California has narrowed a fair bit, according to a new analysis by the Sacramento Bee:

In the UC system between 1994 and 1996, 527 women received doctorates in those disciplines, according to the California Postsecondary Education Commission. From 2003 to 2005, the most recent years available, that number rose to 681. That’s a roughly 30 percent increase.

A big, obvious gap still exists — but it’s shrinking. Across the UC system, the ratio of men-to-women doctorates in those four disciplines went from 4.8 to 1 a decade ago to 3.5 to 1 in the most recent figures.

The Bee found similar numbers for private colleges, and said the number of women getting PhDs in the sciences nationally went up about 20 percent in the past decade. The reason? A “snowball” effect: the more women role models you have in the sciences, the more women get into the sciences, and so on. Offhand, these statistics sound like a good start, but obviously a 1:1 ratio would be better. And the next hurdle for these women, once they have their PhDs, is getting a tenure-track job.