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The truth will set us free

Monday, December 18th, 2006

I think that Time magazine got it right when they named you the person of the year for the way that people are bringing all their perspectives online via social networks, blogs, podcasts, and videos. I especially appreciate and applaud the blogs written by a number of anonymous female scientists and engineers who give the dirt about what it’s like to be in their position. (Three examples are FemaleScienceProfessor, ScienceWoman, and the still-new Am I a Woman Scientist?, but each has links to plenty more such blogs kept by women in many different disciplines and at all levels of science from grad student to tenured professor.)

I wrote my essay for She’s Such a Geek because I wanted girls who were considering science as a career to learn from my mistakes. I believe my main mistake was that I didn’t talk to enough people to learn what a physics career really entailed before I committed to that path. Partly it was because I didn’t really give enough thought to issues pertaining to balancing work and personal life as an undergraduate—academic achievement had been priority #1 for me up until then, and I didn’t see anything changing any time soon—and also it was partly because I didn’t feel like there was any faculty member I could have opened up to and ask these things if I’d even known to ask them. Talking to a professor (and they were all male in the engineering and physics departments where I was) felt so intimidating compared to talking to the secretaries and admins there, who despite being warm, fabulous people, couldn’t give me the mentoring that I didn’t know I needed.

So my advice is, find female scientist mentors any way you can—and until you do, read these female scientist blogs. If you’re in a department where there’s only one or two female faculty members, you still can’t expect them to be able to mentor you. Those women have their research to do, just like every male professor in the department, and they probably have to work even harder to make sure that their work is perceived as equally competent to their peers’. Until you find the professor or postdoc or senior graduate students who you feel some chemistry with and who can give you practical, caring advice, you could do a lot worse than read these blogs telling the good, the bad, and the ugly about the lives of female scientists in academia today.

(Also note that this Dec. 19 NY Times article about some of the issues that female scientists are discussing today. It’s definitely progress that people are discussing issues such as unconscious bias, which weren’t even acknowledged when I was an undergrad and graduate student. I’d love to discuss this in a future post, because if I’m honest I internalized some of these biases myself—it would have been hard not to, being raised Catholic.)

Posted in Career advice, Inspiring women, Progress and politics, True confessions | 3 Comments »

The Women of Doctor Who

Sunday, December 17th, 2006

The featurettes on the new Doctor Who original series DVDs have been a trial to get through at times — you often feel as if the producers shot 55 minutes of interviews and used everything they shot. But there are some wonderfully revealing bits in some of them, and I’ve especially gained a new appreciation for some of the women working behind the scenes on the show.

For one thing, there’s Alice Frick, who took part in the early BBC meetings that came up with many of the concepts that would later become the basis of Doctor Who.

More importantly, the first producer of Doctor Who, Verity Lambert, was a 28-year-old newbie producer who faced down institutional sexism and rigidity to push her own vision of the show. She was originally saddled with an older executive producer, Rex Tucker, who tried to push her around. As she explained in an interview in the DVD featurette Doctor Who: Origins (on the Beginning box set), Tucker didn’t expect Lambert to push back:

From the time I arrived it was quite obvious that he and I didn’t agree on anything… we didn’t agree on casting. We didn’t agree on what sort of input I was going to have… I think he’d been led to believe that really there was this young producer coming in and he could hold her hand and make all the decisions. I’m afraid I wasn’t that sort of person.

Lambert also had to stare down her bosses, when they tried to pull the plug on the Daleks in Doctor Who’s second story. She had to battle with other departments at the BBC that tried to starve the show of resources due to petty turf battles. Doctor Who wouldn’t have lasted a dozen episodes if Lambert hadn’t been willing to kick a lot of ass. You also get the impression that the show would have been a lot more “educational” and less focused on being a really intense drama.

That featurette also showcases Delia Derbyshire, who turned Ron Grainer’s score for the show’s theme tune into a novel piece of electronic music. The well-known rumblety rumblety woooo of the theme tune owes much more to Derbyshire than Grainer. She painstakingly pasted together pieces of tape and electronic noises to make the arrangement of the theme tune that lasted from 1963 to 1980. Here’s an amazing video of her explaining how she cuts and pastes different sounds to create music. Record companies wouldn’t hire her in the early 60s because she was a woman, but she’s now regarded as one of the pioneers of electronic music.

Finally, I was really blown away by Paddy Russell, who directed a bunch of Who stories in the 60s and 70s. She was one of the first female production assistants at the BBC and then one of the first female directors. She was definitely the first woman to direct Doctor Who, and had to deal with the notorious diva William Hartnell. In the featurette on her directing career (on the Horror of Fang Rock DVD) she talks about how she used the fact that Hartnell was also playing the Doctor’s doppelganger to keep him off guard. She also had to convince Tom Baker to dress up like a mummy in Pyramids of Mars. On the Mars DVD, there’s some great stuff about how Russell and Elisabeth Sladen (who played companion Sarah Jane Smith) rewrote the scripts to make Sarah smarter. In several instances, they gave Sarah some of the Doctor’s lines, so instead of asking him what was up, she was figuring it out for herself.

Doctor Who has a much-deserved reputation for sexism, in both its old and new incarnations. But it’s cool to realize that some totally kick-ass pioneers worked on the show behind the scenes.

Posted in Games and play, Inspiring women | 2 Comments »

Watch Aomowa on Wired Science Jan. 3!

Friday, December 15th, 2006

Female geeks are taking over the world! OK, we’re just taking over PBS. Aomowa Shields, who wrote an essay about her career as an astronomer for She’s Such a Geek, is going to be a correspondent on Wired magazine’s new PBS show, Wired Science. Go, Aomowa! The first episode will air Jan. 3.

Watch Wired Science Jan. 3 [via Wired Science Blog]

Posted in Accolades, Games and play, Inspiring women | 2 Comments »

“The biggest obstacle was brute force”

Sunday, December 10th, 2006

There’s progress on women’s representation in the sciences, but not fast enough or significant enough. That’s the overarching message of a new Newsweek article and a recent talk by North Carolina State University professor Mary Wyer. The Newsweek article looks at the rising number of female faculty members in the UC Berkeley physics department, but notes that they still only account for 10 percent of professors. The article sees signs of hope in the 20 percent of physics undergrad and grad students who are female. (Although one thing that jumped out at me when I was co-editing essays for She’s Such A Geek was the fact that many women made it to grad school, at the top of their classes, and then found massive barriers suddenly in their way. The article goes on to say:

To women in other professions—law, publishing, even politics—academic science can sometimes seem like the world that time forgot. Decades after women began scaling the corporate ladder, female physicists, chemists, mathematicians and engineers are still struggling to find their place at the nation’s major research universities. Although women now earn about half the graduate degrees in math and chemistry, for example, they hold only about 10 percent of the faculty jobs in those fields. “The U.S. needs as much scientific and technologic brain power as it can get,” says Georgia Tech’s Sue Rosser, author of “The Science Glass Ceiling.” “It makes no sense to exclude half the population.”

The article also talks about the “biological clock” and steps that some universities have taken to allow for women scientists to have children. It also talks about a study that found women professors were making less than men in the sciences, and steps some institutions have made to counteract that bias. And then there’s my favorite quote in the article, from Berkeley physics grad student Lorraine Sadler:

“The biggest obstacle I’ve had is brute force,” says Sadler. “Most of the things in this lab are heavy, so I started lifting weights.” She looks proudly around the sophisticated equipment that records her experiments. “I built this entire lab from an empty room,” she says.

Meanwhile, Wyer blamed biases against women for keeping them out of the sciences. She ran a study at NC State which divided a required ecology course into three groups. One group had a lot of material about women’s contributions to science and bias against women incorporated into the course, complete with quizzes. A second group had less material from women’s studies classes. A third group had no extra material about women. She surveyed each group at the start and end of the semester, and found that each group’s attitudes to women in science had changed commensurate with the amount of material it studied. (The group that had no extra material showed no change in its attitudes.)

Actually, I’m not sure what lesson we’re supposed to take away from that study, except maybe that talking about women in science, and educating people about women’s potential in the sciences, is a Good Thing.

Posted in Career advice, Inspiring women, They actually said that? | No Comments »

Geeky realization

Thursday, November 23rd, 2006

I was finishing up my big college search when I realized why this book was created. But more on that later. It all started the same weekend I needed to finalize my college list. My entire family was celebrating my grandpa’s 80th birthday by the ocean, so I wandered off for a few hours with my college list to try to choose a college list. I found this amazing place where the water had cleared out a tunnel, leaving a narrow bridge of rock over the open gully. The way the waves thwacked against the back of the cave was *so cool*. I could hear it a half-mile away (at night I thought it was a pile-driver. Fifty miles away from the nearest city). Anyway.

So I sit down with my list, and I center. I think roots and branches, very California new age. Since I haven’t been accepted anywhere I am merely choosing where I want to try to get in. So I try to decide the course of my life. And then I get stuck. My mind is blank, I stare at some birds and am non-productive. So I tried a different tact. I think “Who do I want to be when I grow up”. I could think of musicians, politicians, and teachers who I would love to grow up to be, but when I tried to think of women computer scientists I drew a blank. Ok, I know Grace Hopper and Radia Pearlman, but I did not have as clear a vision of what life might be like to be a computer scientist.

It’s not the all-male environment: I love wrestling and most of my friends from middle-school are boys, so I’m ok with that part. But the stories are what I miss. I have stories about singers, about politicians and teachers giving me a potential road-map for my future. But I was missing the stories about women computer scientists. I wanted to know what other women had done when working in a team where all of the men assume you’ll be the secretary. What the justifications for being ultra-fem in a masculine environment are. I could not think of any role models for how to live fully as myself in a challenging environment.

Amazon mailed me the book two days ago. After an embarrassing session with dancing and singing “I’m published, I’m published” I started reading everyone else’s essays. And I now I have those role models. I can’t wait to read the rest of the essays.

I am about to send in a large sections of my applications. I chose only schools with strong computer science and music, and where I could see myself matriculating. I’m glad I now can see how other geeks have dealt with college and life-after before me.

Anyhoo, that’s my tryptophan induced rant, hope you’re having a great turkey day!

Posted in Accolades, Inspiring women, True confessions | 2 Comments »

Top Ten Girl Geeks, or C|Net Completely Misses the Point

Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006

Slashdot has linked to a C|Net UK article that purports to list the top ten girl geeks. No mention of the book, and for some unfathomable reason it mentions Paris Hilton. I have no idea how to react to this trainwreck. While I’m encouraged by the mere existence of such a post, I cringe over some of the choices. Lisa Simpson? Darryl Hannah? Ooookay. Wither Willow Rosenberg, then?

Also, I’m completely in agreement with those comments nominating Hedy Lamarr and Mythbuster Keri Byron instead.

Who would you add to the list?

Posted in Inspiring women, Tech talk, They actually said that? | 7 Comments »

Linkblogging

Friday, November 17th, 2006

Madsciencemama highlights a New Yorker excerpt about Virginia Apgar, who became a doctor in 1933 and revolutionized how doctors looked at newborn children.
You should sign this petition encouraging Congress to end “drive-thru mastectomies.” Notyourwoman has the details.
The National Center for Women and Information Technology unveils “turnkey” (I hate that word) best practices for companies and institutions to mentor and support women in IT.
Women inventors registered three patents for military technology, 11 electrical patents and 633 mechanical patents from 1808 to 1895, according to this handy index.

Posted in Inspiring women, Progress and politics, Tech talk | No Comments »

Housework Hacking

Sunday, November 12th, 2006

Ever since Phil Torrone showed me how to use a bluetooth dongle to take control of my Roomba – a little round vacuum cleaner robot — I’ve been following the growth of Roomba hacking. Roomba manufacturer iRobot released its specs earlier this year, thus making it clear that people weren’t breaking some obscure copyright law by taking their vacuum cleaners apart and turning them into fighting machines (or whatever). In fact, the relatively simple controls on the Roomba make it an excellent device for beginners to get into robot hacking.

Now there’s a book devoted to Roomba hacking, which is great for those of us who still enjoy the form factor of this venerable but vanishing print medium.

What’s interesting to is the way Roomba hacking has turned what was once a “woman’s thing” — the vacuum cleaner — into something that has very little gendered subtext. Sure, hacking is associated with boy’s play. But hacking a vacuum cleaner? Not so much.

Robotics is also a less male-dominated area than computer science, and one of our era’s most famous roboticists is Cynthia Breazeal. Now if only we could create the perfect artificial womb, we could all get together and hack childbirth too.

Posted in Beautiful geekery, Inspiring women, Tech talk | 1 Comment »

Yay, a White Town reference! Our favorite band!

Friday, November 3rd, 2006

From Chicagoist:

Women in technology are hard to find, and we don’t mean the White Town album. According to the 2001 Current Population Survey data, one out of 10 employed engineers was a woman, while two out of 10 employed engineering technologists and technicians were women. Women made up 17 percent of all industrial engineers, 12 percent of metallurgical/metal engineers and 11.5 percent of chemical engineers. Among all other engineering specialties, women represented fewer than 11 percent.

Such statistics make us happy that organizations such as Women in Technology International exist. And on Thursday at Northwestern’s Kellogg Conference Center, the organization will honor those women who have excelled as industry and civic leaders in the Chicago IT community.

Posted in Career advice, Inspiring women, Tech talk | No Comments »

Overalls and cliffs: we’re all feminists

Thursday, November 2nd, 2006

Margaret Atwood admitted she likes science fiction at a Barnes & Noble reading, according to Bookish Love. Asked whether she considers herself a feminist writer, though, she got “subtly indignant.”

…not towards the woman who asked the question, but towards the need for the question in the first place. She said terms like that were “filing mechanisms.” Then, she addressed the audience as a whole, saying, first we have to talk about what you mean by feminism. Are we talking about driving all the men off a cliff, wearing overalls, or equal rights under the law? She said if she held a tally right now, she would guess we all were feminists. First, she said, the question would be do we think women are human beings or animals? She guessed we’d all say human beings. Then, she continued with a list of several questions in her hypothetical survey, do we think women should be able to learn to read and write, to vote, and then to the “more sticky” question of should women earn and equal amount as men for the same work, in the same position. Her final point being, implicitly, we should all be considering ourselves feminists if we understand our definitions correctly.

Posted in Beautiful geekery, Inspiring women, Progress and politics | 1 Comment »