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.

People always try to claim that the pay gap between men and women stems from voluntary factors. Women choose not to work as hard as men. Women don’t want to prioritize careers over family. And so on. But it turns out that even if you control for those factors, men still end up earning more:

Analyzing U.S. Department of Education data on 19,000 men and women, Hill’s team found that one year out of college, women in 1994 earned 80% of what their male counterparts made. By 2003, a decade after graduation, they had fallen further behind, to 69% of men’s incomes.

Controlling for the number of hours worked, parenthood and other factors, college-educated women still earned 12% less than their male peers, according to the report.

The trick is for more women to get into science and technology. For that to happen, role models need to convey the “joy and creativity” in dry-appearing fields, says one expert. Also, women need to get more hard-nosed about bargaining, and ask for raises more often:

No employer has an obligation to whisper in the woman’s ear, “Hey, you know, you just lost out on more money because you didn’t speak up.” If she accepts the salary offered, so be it. But the consequences of failing to negotiate a first salary can lead women to lose more than $500,000 by age 60.

NOW also argues that the government should pass legislation requiring equivalent jobs to pay the same amount, which I’m pretty sure isn’t going to happen in our lifetimes.

The New York Times has an interesting article about colleges trying to reverse a steep decline in the number of women taking computer science:

For decades, undergraduate women have been moving in ever greater numbers into science and engineering departments at American universities. Yet even as they approach or exceed enrollment parity in mathematics, biology and other fields, there is one area in which their presence relative to men is static or even shrinking: computer science.

Women received about 38 percent of the computer science bachelor’s degrees awarded in the United States in 1985, the peak year, but in 2003, the figure was only about 28 percent, according to the National Science Foundation.

The article goes on to talk about how women are the “canaries in the coal mine” and the factors driving us out of computer science will eventually drive away men too. And it talks about some of the things colleges are doing to try and attract more women back to the field. The Times also hosted a discussion. The comments range from the inane (computer programming = addictive behavior, and women are less prone to addiction) to the hopeful (if women saw how amazing and useful CS was, you’d have more women in the field).

One of the interesting (and controversial) statements in the article and discussion: more women would be attracted to computer if there was less of an emphasis on programming. Some commenters at Slashdot compare this to taking the math problems out of a mathematics course, provoking this comment:

For fucks sake, I think a lot of people here in slashdot should go and study Computer Science to realize that CS is NOT all about programming, there are countless branches of Computer Science where programming has *nothing* to do. … It is completely possible to study in a subfield of Computer Science (in fact in many of them) without knowing how to program (in fact, many of my fellow PhD students do exactly that, oh, and my own supervisor [a Prof. in Comp. Science] does not “code”).

In some ways, the changes to the computer science program at Carnegie Mellon sound as if the department has learned something from programs like Mills College’s interdisciplinary studies program. There’s more of an emphasis on looking for well-rounded students instead of students with tons of programming experience. They’re looking for “high overall achievement and broad interests, diverse perspectives and whether applicants seem to have potential to be future leaders.”