Yesterday morning, Cambridge computer science professor Karen Spärck Jones died — she was one of the pioneers in the field of computer science and a staunch advocate of women in tech. According to the Cambridge University announcement:

She had worked in automatic language and information processing research since the late 1950s when she co-authored a paper in one of the great founding collections of the discipline, the Proceedings of the 1958 International Conference on Scientific Information in Washington, DC.

She made outstanding theoretical contributions to information retrieval and natural language processing and built upon this theoretical framework through numerous experiments. Her work is among the most highly cited in the field and has influenced a whole generation of researchers and practitioners.

Jones is famous for saying that computer science is too important to be left to men.

Regular readers of this blog won’t be surprised to discover that the announcement of Jones’ death also includes a detailed description of her CS researcher husband Roger Needham’s work:

Karen married Roger Needham in 1958 when both were studying for PhD’s. Roger, who died in 2003, joined the Mathematical Laboratory, now known as the Computer Laboratory, in 1962. He eventually became its Head in 1980 for 15 years. In 1997 he started up the Microsoft Research Laboratory in Cambridge, which brings talent from all over the world to the city, and which is now housed in The Roger Needham Building at West Cambridge.

It’s all too typical that biographers consider a woman’s husband and family to be relevant to her professional life, while a man’s wife and children will be given but a footnote in a description of his scientific accomplishments. Here Needham is so far beyond footnote level that his work is actually described before we get any comments from colleagues about Jones’ work, and before famous quotes from Jones are mentioned.

Karen Spärck Jones 1935-2007 [via University of Cambridge News Service]

The 2007 Hugo nominations are in, and out of 20 fiction writers, only one woman was nominated: Naomi Novik, author of His Majesty’s Dragon. Well, gosh! I mean, I’m thrilled that the judges voters have found a sure-fire way to keep women from having their breasts fondled at the podium — just don’t let them up there in the first place! Or maybe it’s the other way around — next time, the women will learn to keep their mouth shut, or they don’t get to play in the sandbox at all.

One person comments here:

[Y]our stereotypical Hugo voter is unlikely to have read many books by women in the first place. Put it another way: I doubt there are many people who nominated Novik and Vernor Vinge. And I suspect a lot of people who nominated Vernor Vinge are looking at the shortlist going, “well, I know who Stross and Watts are, but who the hell is Naomi Novik?”

And here, Patrick Nielsen Hayden says:

That’s really remarkable. And remarkably stupid, considering how much good SF is written by women these days.

I didn’t notice it until you pointed it out. The essence of sexism is that “male” is the unremarkable “default state.”

Also, Ide Cyan notes:

And there are no Japanese nominees either, although Worldcon, where the Hugos are awarded, is taking place in Japan this year.

I was lucky enough to meet Camille Minichino last year at Writers With Drinks, a literary event I host in San Francisco. I remember thinking, what could be more geeky? She not only works at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, she also writes a series of mystery novels with a chemistry theme! They have titles like The Carbon Murder, The Oxygen Murder, The Helium Murder, The Boric Acid Murder, The Nitrogen Murder and The Beryllium Murder. I have the Carbon book and it’s awesome.

But now it turns out that Ann Parker, the woman Minichino shared an office with at Lawrence Livermore starting in 1978, is also a mystery novelist! Parker’s novels don’t actually have science themes, but they do a kick-ass female protagonist, Inez Stannert, and they take place during the silver rush in 1879.

Minichino’s own novels also have a female protagonist, a middle-aged physicist named Gloria Lamerino. Says Minichino:

I try to make it the norm… I pose the idea (that) here’s a woman and, by the way, she’s a physicist.

Minichino and Parker are reading at the San Leandro Main Library tomorrow.

We should all aspire to the geeky open-mindedness and unflappability of Nellie Chu. A man, who wasn’t a student, went into the UC Santa Cruz science library and wandered around videotaping women’s feet. Just their feet, not any other parts of them. The first time, three women confronted him and he fled. When he came back a few days later, they called the campus police, who inspected his camera and found that “the subject of his filming seemed to be ‘feet.’” He promised never to come back.

But the best part of the article is the quote from Chu, who presumably studies science of some sort:

Graduate student Nellie Chu said she wasn’t concerned.

“It’s odd, but I don’t think there’s any need to jump to conclusions,” Chu said. “Maybe he was doing research.”

Over the past couple of days, there’s been a flurry of discussion in female geek blogland over the web-stalking of techie expert Kathy Sierra. Apparently somebody or a group of somebodies has decided that it’s incredibly amusing to make mean, violent, and sexualized comments about her on her blog and elsewhere. Now the insults have escalated into Photoshopped pictures of Sierra with panties over her face. What’s sad is that Sierra — who has a reputation for being incredibly nice and non-controversial — has responded (understandably) with fear. After all, this griefer has posted about wanting to slit her throat and hang her. She’s called the FBI, and has cancelled public appearances because she’s afraid that her stalker may get violent in real life.

As Sierra explains on her blog, her first impulse was to ignore the griefer responsible. After all, there are lots of creeps running around online who will say whatever they can to get attention. But then it began to dawn on her that people she respected were maintaining the websites where this griefer was posting, and not taking the posts down (they have been taken down now). And she also talked about how she’s been singled out for attention in part because she’s female:

I do not want to be part of a culture–the Blogosphere–where this is considered acceptable. Where the price for being a blogger is kevlar-coated skin and daughters who are tough enough to not have their “widdy biddy sensibilities offended” when they see their own mother Photoshopped into nothing more than an objectified sexual orifice, possibly suffocated as part of some sexual fetish. (And of course all coming on the heels of more explicit threats)

I do not want to be part of a culture where this is done not by some random person, but by some of the most respected people in the tech blogging world. People linked to by A-listers like Doc Searls, a co-author of Chris Locke. I do not want to be part of a culture of such hypocrisy where Jeneane Sessum can be a prominent member of blogher, a speaker at industry conferences, an outspoken advocate for women’s rights, and at the same time celebrate and encourage a site like meankids — where objectification of women is taken to a level that makes plain old porn seem quaintly sweet.

She also points out that people are always talking about how they want more women to come to conferences and other tech events — and yet those very same people tolerate these kind of freaky sexual insults in their communities.

As somebody who has also been stalked by griefers — and who has had to deal with the Slashdot crowd debating the relative merits of my body — I can understand why Sierra is disturbed. If it were me, I would be angry rather than afraid. But fear and anger are two faces of the same thing. They’re what we feel when we’re helpless to change something huge, like intrenched sexism, in the communities and industries we call home.

Annalee and I just did an interview for the world-renowned Bat Segundo Show about She’s Such A Geek:

Subjects Discussed: The gender divide in science and technology, whether empirical accounts can raise public awareness, present historical perceptions of gender in relation to past perceptions, female stereotypes, positive cultural portrayals of women, Trinity from The Matrix, Scarlett Thomas, the relationship between underground and mainstream culture, prognosticating gender roles, macho sentiment in the workplace, geek answer syndrome, sexual roles, jiggly breasts and video games, Ghost Rider, gender presentation vs. work performance, dress code, the “lawyer situation,” unisex possibilities, responding to Olivia Boler’s review, and the nature of geek.

Check it out!

So I mentioned a while back that I write science fiction, and I’m increasingly identifying as a science-fiction writer. This week, I was very proud to have my story Horatius and Clodia published at StrangeHorizons.com, one of the coolest science fiction publications (online or in print) these days. The story is about sentient electronic cash, which becomes maybe a little more self-aware than its creators had in mind.

For some reason, I’ve gotten more fan mail and props for this story than any other in recent memory. Maybe it’s just that StrangeHorizons has grown in popularity since the last time they published my fiction, a few years ago. (more…)

OK I officially hate Abigail Breslin who starred in Little Miss Sunshine. Not only is she wearing a giant pink pincushion thing at the Oscars, she also just set a total anti-geek girl example. Jaden Smith from the Pursuit of Happyness just asked her what her dad did, and she said, “computer systems analyst.” And Jaden responded, “but what does he do?” and she said, “I have no idea.” Which got a really feeble laugh from the audience. Dammit, Abigail, you SHOULD know what your dad does!

A group of female students at Shippensberg University have started doing podcasts to educate local high school girls about computer science, the Cumberland County Sentinel reports. They originally aimed the “Where is the Software” podcasts at local girls, but found that each podcast gets 100 listeners from all over.

“I am every excited with what we are doing,” said [sophomore Sarah] Joseph. “The biggest benefit of this podcast is the interaction we have with one another and other females who might need a little help. This community of women we have formed has been our biggest success so far.”

Topics include Malware, encryption, and genetic searching. If you ignore the cheesy effects and music, it’s awesome to see young geeky women holding forth with glee. The not-so-secret agenda of these podcasts is busting stereotypes about computer scientists. The women in the podcasts are happy, social and obviously enjoy explaining the differences between resident and non-resident viruses.
My favorite is the Malware podast.

Today two Ohio teens will be charged with illegal access to their high school’s computer. On Monday, the two girls posted a “school cancelled due to snow” announcement on their school’s website. They had somehow obtained a secret password to the school’s website, whether by social engineering (ie, tricking somebody into giving it to them, ala the infamous hacker Kevin Mitnick) or using some kind of simple password cracker (I’m guessing that this high school probably used a dictionary word for its “secret password,” it would be relatively easy to crack).

According to The Columbus Dispatch:

One of the girls, 16, was charged in Butler County Juvenile Court with delinquency counts of unauthorized use of a computer and records tampering. The other girl, 17, was charged with a delinquency count of complicity, Sheriff’s Sgt. Monte Mayer said. Their names were not released.

The company that runs the Web site, RCH Networks Inc. of Middletown, said the system was not hacked into because no security breach was detected. Administrators say the girls must have gotten the password.

“The Web site wasn’t hacked. It was accessed,” RCH President Craig Hesson said.

Um, yeah. FYI, “hacking” is one way that your web site can be “accessed.” Leave it to the girls to show you how lame your “security” software really is. Sorry, but a firewall from Symantec won’t protect you from kids who want the day off school.