Friday, December 02, 2005

Loving Computers, Revisited If you have not yet, go read Jane's comment on my post about Women Who Love Their Computers.  It thrills me to hear another woman techie talk passionately about her love for her work, in such a positive manner.  Jane calls herself a geek, and I've done the same in the past.     So can women be geeks?  We often refer to ourselves as such, because that's what people - men - who do science and engineering are supposed to be seen as.  In some ways, we are.  Women are just as capable as men of loving science and technology for its own sake - Jane and I love our computers as much as any geek boy.  But most women cannot be true geeks, I think, because a critical element of geekhood is masculinity.  Loving technology is a different way for men to signify that they are really a man.   Science and engineering codify gender relations to an extent that few other disciplines can approach.  Early on girls come to understand science and technology as masculine domains, and to understand their own presence in those areas as anomalous.  There must be something odd or different about themselves, they suppose, that makes them interested in these pursuits and allows them to take pleasure in them. Something not...quite...completely...feminine.  Something...geeky.     Characteristics of the geek are the inability to function effectively in normal human relations, and a lack of emotion.  Except - and this is a very big exception - the geek is allowed, even expected, to love his machines.  As Margolis and Fisher outlined in their influential book, "Unlocking the Clubhouse", love of the machine can come to replace love of/interaction with other humans, and truly interfere with social development for some young boys/men.  This does not seem to happen with women, at least not nearly as often.  The love I have felt for various pieces of technology, and for the scientific and technological work I've done with my own hands is real, but did not, of course, make me a real man.  I maintain that I am yet a human being, albeit a woman.  So this love of technology cannot be alien to me, cannot be unnatural.  I do not think that men and women have different capacities for loving technology.  I do think that men and women interpret and respond to that love differently, as a result of sociocultural conditioning.  Loving technology is an attribute of being human, not a signifier of manhood.  The ongoing obfuscation of this simple truth is harmful to both women and men.                          4:52:58 PM    comment [] Growing a STEM Team This came in over the PGELIST listserv and I am just reposting the whole announcement here, since some of you may be interested in outreach programs and looking for resources.  I am not acquainted with this resource but it has been highly praised by several leading experts in the women and science/engineering community, notably Jane Daniels, Sherry Woods, and Cinda-Sue Davis.  The Growing a STEM Team! Manual is designed to serve as a resource for people interested in conducting gender equitable outreach to K12 classrooms. The manual has two parts. The first part contains classroom tested engineering activities for 8th grade middle school classrooms such as "The Great Orange Juice Squeeze", "Binary in a Box" and "Design a Wacky Shoe". The second part describes how to form and prepare a team of students, faculty and practicing engineers (a Science Technology, Engineering and Mathematics or "STEM Team") to deliver these activities in the classroom. This project is sponsored by the Programs in Gender Equity (PGE) Division of the National Science Foundation (HRD 0217110). We have a limited number of copies to distribute free of charge. If you are interested in receiving a free copy of these materials, we ask that you go to the following website to enter your mailing information on or before October 26th, 2005. We hope the DVD will be completed and duplicated so that we can send the manual and DVD out together in early November, 2005. In addition to gathering your mailing information, the website has a short, 2 question questionnaire which will help us understand how these materials are being used. We will also be contacting you in a few months to ask for your feedback on these materials. We thank you in advance for your cooperation in sharing that feedback with us. If you have any further questions, please contact us at STEM at TUFTS dot EDU.              Thank you for your time! Sincerely, Meredith Knight Program Coordinator, STEM Team Project Center for Engineering Education Outreach Tufts University  4:20:14 PM    comment [] New Bibliography, Workshops, Articles on Gender & Science/Technology So many things to blog about today, it will take some time to get to all of them.  And I do want to respond to Jane's comment on yesterday's post about loving your computer.  First, however: A new resource is available from the Center for Women and Information Technology.  Jo Sanders, a gender equity specialist, has compiled a comprehensive bibliography on gender and technology in education, up to date as of 2005.  700 entries, annotated, key-worded, searchable, and available as PDF or Endnote.  What more could you want?!?!  Then, there are these juicy items to share from the AWIS Washington Wire - workshops for postdocs and grad students; a report on gender equity initiatives at top-tier institutions; and the latest from Nancy Hopkins (red link added by Zuska): NSF ADVANCE Programs The NSF ADVANCE Programs at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) and Virginia Tech are happy to announce upcoming professional development workshops for future science and engineering faculty. Programs are for post-doctoral research fellows and upper-level graduate students who are interested in pursuing a faculty career in the United States. There are two opportunities in July 2006, July 13-15 at UMBC and July 20-22 at VA Tech. Purpose: The workshops, funded by the NSF ADVANCE Program, are intended to provide post-doctoral research fellows and upper-level graduate students, particularly women, in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields with the skills necessary to become successful tenure-track faculty in the United States. Applications: Due to limited space, all participants must apply and be accepted to attend; participants will be selected for only one workshop. Funds are available to help defray the cost of participation. A joint application will be available online April 10-May 8, 2006. Additional Information: Email ADVANCE at UMBC dot EDU to receive announcements about these events. For the most up-to-date information, please visit the ADVANCE portal.    This sounds like good stuff!  If you are a P.I., let your students know.  If you are a student or postdoc - apply! Women on the Rise The famous remarks of Harvard University President Lawrence Summers speculated that female scientists may have difficulty winning tenure because of differences in "intrinsic aptitude," - and the furor generated by these remarks has actually had positive a effect on the debate about discrimination against women in academic science. In the aftermath of his remarks, a number of universities, including Harvard, have taken steps to improve the climate for female scientists and other women on their campuses. For more on this, visit this site.    This piece discusses initiatives underway at several top-tier institutions.  Most of them are focused on the notion that child-bearing and child-rearing are (the) major obstacles to the success of women faculty in the sciences.  Programs such as on-site daycare, mandatory stop-the-tenure-clock programs for both men and women who have children, and reduced-time appointments for faculty with children, are proposed as solutions.  These are good programs, and nice, but they don't address every issue.  It's not like women without children have smooth sailing all the way and never encounter any gender issues that negatively affect their success.  Recruiting is discussed, and then we hear the same tired excuse that we have to wait for all the tenured white guys to retire.  Zuska is sooooo bored with that.  The end of the article discusses teaching women to be better negotiators, and Zuska is fully on-board with that.  Negotiating like a tough-ass gets you two things:  more of the stuff you need to succeed, and the respect of the men, who will admire you for having balls.    A Decade of Progress for Women in Science ... Nancy Hopkins, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writes her view of where academic women are, where they've been, and where they're going. She hopes for "perhaps a gender-blind workplace in another decade (or two)." To read the viewpoint of this pioneer woman scientist, visit this site.   I admire the hell out of Nancy Hopkins, and she has led MIT through great and significant improvements for women faculty.  But she is incredibly optimistic to think that within a decade or two we will achieve a genderblind workplace in science and engineering.  We won't even have achieved 25% women on the faculty in engineering within a decade, is my prediction, let alone genderblind work environments.  How does Professor Hopkins suggest that genderblind uptopia will be reached?  "The same way that sexual harassment has largely been eliminated from classrooms and workplaces: by the protracted process of education and understanding, combined with legal action and fewer women and men tolerating it."  Um, I hate to burst her bubble, but sexual harassment has not actually been eliminated from classrooms and workplaces, at least in the world of engineering.  "In 1995," says Professor Hopkins, " 'baby' was still a 'four-letter word' ".  May I direct your attention to the case of Sherry Towers?    "The protracted process of education..."  I know, I know, that's what everyone thinks is needed.  But I would like to just issue a large mallet to every woman scientist and engineer, and everytime some mullet-headed ignoramus does something discriminatory or harassing or undermining, she could just whap him upside the head with her mallet.  In short time, we'd see much better behavior.  Imagine...you are in meeting...you propose an idea...a colleague talks right over you and/or takes credit for your idea...WHAP!  You are talking with another female colleague on campus, and a male superior walks by and says "Just what are you ladies up to now? No self-segregating!"  WHAP! You've had a baby, and your P.I. makes it impossible for you to take the maternity leave officially available to you...WHAP! WHAP!  Lewd magazine photos as pin-ups in the laboratory, put there by the male grad students and tolerated by the male P.I....WHAP! WHAP! WHAP!  Male classmates deface an announcement for a gathering sponsored by SWE or the Women in Engineering Program...WHAP! WHAP! WHAP! WHAP! WHAP!  A female intern at an engineering company must listen to her boss constantly comment on her appearance and dress...she designs a motorized whapper to help prevent carpal-tunel syndrome.  WHAP! Zuska imagines the satisfactory sound of whapping all across the nation.  Of course, as satisfying - and perhaps necessary - as it might be to whap individual perpetrators of institutionalized sexism, we must remember that it is, in fact, institutionalized, and it is a system that they, and we, operate within.  Which is what makes it so maddening when colleagues and department heads and deans try to dismiss or downplay particular incidents as "just his quirks" or "not that big a deal" or "let's not make a fuss over this minor incident" or "do you have to take everything so seriously?" or "just ignore him, he's always been that way."  All those lines are themselves part of the institutionalized system of sexism and anyone who tries to make excuses for harassers, discriminators, and underminers, is guilty of helping to perpetuate the system.  And for that, Zuska says...WHAP!    2:40:28 PM    comment []

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