Archive for December, 2011

Warning: linked posts have, and quote, misogynist commentary.

15yo atheist woman posts pic of herself with Carl Sagan book to the atheism sub-reddit. Misogynist jokes about rape, women’s appearance, women’s intelligence, women’s attention-seeking follow.

This week’s Wednesday Geek Woman is Fan Chung, leading combinatorics and graph theory researcher, and Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at UC San Diego.

I agree that having multiple “identities” is a huge asset to my work and creative abilities, bu I feel like… why are they making such a big deal about this, as if it’s some hugely abnormal thing. Why do people insist on compartmentalizing people into single skill sets?

I am sad, still sad, continually endlessly sad and angry at the way everyone else’s narratives collude to obscure Nina and her life.

This week’s Wednesday Geek Woman is Annie Jump Cannon, luminary in astronomical research and stellar classification.

Or as my sister put it, Algonquin + Darth Vader + Christmas. This is an open thread for general discussion on any topic, so feel free to post your own favourite geeky Christmas videos or ...

Angela Zhang of Cupertino won a $100,000 scholarship for her cancer fighting research. In her project, Zhang aimed to design a targeted gold and iron oxide-based nanoparticle with the potential to eradicate cancer stem cells ...

One of the panelists at ApolloCon, and at least two audience members chimed in with, “Well, the only reason you’re in the humanities is because you’ve been discouraged from being in STEM.” This is not the first place in geek culture I have seen a strong preference for STEM over the humanities.

What are some ways in which I can avoid rejecting people who suffer from impostor syndrome when they apply for a job?… I don’t want to lose out on quality applicants as they are modest about their achievements and abilities, due to impostor syndrome or otherwise.

Have you ever been watching a movie/TV show or reading a book/magazine article and all of a sudden been confronted with a reminder that you (a lady) are not the target audience?

This post addresses the trend I discussed in my post on “geek girls” and the problem of self-objectification. This post is cross-posted at From Austin to A&M. My friend Lola showed me this video from ...

This week’s Wednesday Geek Women are Moran Paldi, game designer; Leena van Deventer, gaming writing; and Catriona Wimberley, medical physics student.

I’m writing to ask you to donate to the Ada Initiative. A year ago, a friend of mine was groped at an open source conference. Again. I’ve personally been groped twice at conferences myself. But ...

I need to stop assuming that everyone else knows more about the tech than I do. Our sense of our own merit gets calibrated by feedback from the outside world, but sexism and impostor syndrome get in the way of that calibration. All the tentacles of this issue — the prejudice, the tokenization, the distorted self-perception, the discounting of one’s achievements and comparative lionization of others’ — bother me because they mess with proper judgement.

Linkspammed today: is geek feminism feminist enough, pronoun swap the Internet, and racism in Silicon Valley.

I recently found a means of quiet rebellion, not a revolution, mind you, but a personal epiphany: Ladies Dungeons & Dragons night.