Tag Archives: awards

2009 Tiptree Award Winners: Gilman and Yoshinaga

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The James Tiptree, Jr. award is a yearly “prize for science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores our understanding of gender.” The award council has just announced that the winners, for work published in 2009, are:

Greer Gilman, Cloud and Ashes: Three Winter’s Tales (Small Beer Press)

Fumi Yoshinaga, Ooku: The Inner Chambers, volumes 1 & 2 (VIZ Media)

Also check out the Honor List and Long List for other recent speculative fiction exploring gender. Stuff you can read online right now:

The Tiptree Award presentation is a highlight of WisCon, the feminist science fiction convention in May.  Just in case I won’t see you there to hear you enthuse about scifi in person, leave recommendations in the comments!

With a name like linkspam, it has to be good (8th March, 2010)

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If you have links of interest, please share them in comments here, or if you’re a delicious user, tag them “geekfeminism†to bring them to our attention. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links in comments and on del.icio.us (yes, I know they don’t care about the old-school URL anymore but I miss it).

Know a woman of vision? Nominate her!

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The Anita Borg institute is one of my favourite organisations out there for women in the tech field. Among their many activities, they have an annual award for Women of Vision, who have made a significant contribution to technology as innovators, leaders, or in creating social impact.

Last year’s award winners were Yuqing Gao, Senior Manager, IBM Research, IBM, for Innovation; Jan Cuny, Program Director, National Science Foundation, for Social Impact; and Mitchell Baker, Chairperson, Mozilla, for Leadership.

Nominations for the 2010 award have been extended til December 18th. If you know a woman who’s made a significant contribution to technology this year, visit the Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision website and nominate her!

Some of my best friends are linkspammers (2nd November, 2009)

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  • The Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision 2010 awards, honouring “women making significant contributions in the areas of Innovation, Social Impact and Leadership” are taking nominations until December 11.
  • the f word looked at salaries of men and women in science, engineering and technology on October 30, Equal Pay Day.
  • David Eaves examines the alleged structurelessness of FLOSS through Jo Freeman’s The Tyranny of Structurelessness
  • Felicia Day is taking all the fun out of galaxies colliding.
  • Sun Labs has a technical report out on the success of their mentoring programs.
  • Matt Zimmerman, who writes here, was interviewed by Amber Graner, and mentions his goals regarding women’s participation in the Ubuntu community.
  • Mary Alice Crim reports on a workshop at the National NOW conference to explore feminists’ roles in shaping Internet policy: The Internet is a feminist issue
  • Stephanie Pearl-McPhee was called away from the SOAR conference (a professional event) by family needs, and she’s not buying any pressure for a mother not to complain about having to do that.
  • Casey Johnston (herself a woman gamer) wrote 10 Reasons NOT to Date a Girl Gamer aimed at heterosexual men. The wow_ladies community on LiveJournal tried to figure out what was up with it; tongue-in-cheek?
  • Australian video game review TV show Good Game replaced host Jeremy Ray with Stephanie Bendixsen and Ray alleged that his gender was the primary reason. Sarah Stokely had a look at the PR issues involved.
  • MindTouch has a list of the most influential people in Open Source (from an executive/business perspective) which doesn’t include any women. Mozilla Corporation’s chairperson Mitchell Baker (herself a woman) was not impressed at either women or Mozilla as a whole not appearing.

If you have links of interest, please share them in comments here, or if you’re a delicious user, tag them “geekfeminism†to bring them to our attention. Thanks to everyone who suggested links in comments and on delicious.

A link roundup without a bicycle (2nd October, 2009)

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If you have links of interest, please share them in comments here, or if you’re a delicious user, tag them “geekfeminism†to bring them to our attention.

Quick hit: Macarthur Fellowship

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I was hoping to get round to doing this last week, but things exploded. Luckily, Peggy over at the Women in Science blog has written up a great post about Lin He and Beth Shapiro, two women scientists who received the $500,000, no-strings-attached grant this year:

Lin He’s research involves a class of small ribonucleic acid, or RNA, that are not transcribed into protein like messenger RNA. Instead, these microRNAs or miRNAs bind to messenger RNA to regulate the amount of protein produced. This entirely new level of dosage regulation in mammals was not realized until 2000, even though miRNAs were first discovered in 1993. Now, miRNAs have been shown to be involved in many aspects of development and diseases, He said.

And…

Beth Shapiro is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology at Pennsylvania State University. She is “an evolutionary biologist who integrates molecular phylogenetics with advanced computational biostatistics to reconstruct the influences on population dynamics in a wide variety of organisms.” She is using the methods she and her colleagues developed to study the population history of recently extinct (like the dodo) or currently threatened species to assess the effects of environmental change on polar bear populations, an approach that will help in shaping conservation efforts. She also has been studying the evolution of RNA viruses in individual patients, an approach that may help in understanding the development of virulence in human pathogens.

Penny’s post also includes video and further links.

HOWTO: Create an award for girls in tech

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Emma Jane Hogbin is an open source nerd, crafty advocate and small town champion. She blogs at emmajane.net; this HOWTO was originally posted there.

This week I started an award at my former high school for a senior female student that has demonstrated creative use of technology. She doesn’t need to have the best marks, she doesn’t need to have sustained performance. She just needs to have shown a sliver of inspiration and interest in technology to be rewarded and encouraged. In the game of Alice’s Restaurant and World Domination, you have to start by doing one thing different. Here’s the FAQ on why I did it and how you can start your own award too.

Why a high school award?
Every November at West Hill Secodary School there’s an award ceremony. Kids who win awards get to stand up in front of their entire school and be recognized for something they’ve accomplished. The whole school claps. The award winner then gets a line on their resume that says they’ve won an award. It doesn’t matter how much money the award is, you still get to say that you’re an award winning student and that can be the difference between getting accepted into the program you want, and just being another faceless application.

Creative use of tech? Huh? What’s up with that?
This isn’t an award for being a nerd or being a jock. It’s an award for two words that hardly ever go together in high school: creativity and technology. That means an entire school full of students are going to be exposed to the idea of creative and technology going together. It comes with a small sum of money, which means some of the students will work towards achieving this award.

Why a senior student?
This is an award that students can work towards over the course of their four years in high school. Student projects in the junior grades (ought to be about) mastering specific techniques and tools, by their senior years students should have the skills they need to start expressing themselves with the tools they’ve learned. Of course there are some truly exceptional young technologists (Drupal has a 13 year old core developer who’s already been around for two or three years), but these geniuses are probably winning other awards too.

Why a female student?
Because I want to encourage girls to use technology in ways that interest them.

I am still working with West Hill to roll out the award, but it was remarkably easy to get the process started. Here’s how you too can start an award to encourage girls to stay engaged with technology.

  1. Phone up your alma mater (your old high school).
  2. Ask to speak with the guidance department. These folks know everything. Tell them you’re an alumni and that you want to sponsor an award. You will be redirected to the right department from here.
  3. When you redirected to the right department, start over. Explain that you want to sponsor an award.
  4. Choose your own criteria, but don’t be too specific. If you are too specific will be too difficult to match your award to a student (and they may not be able to actually give the award out). The school should work with you to come up with the exact language for the award criteria and the name of the award. Have some ideas before you phone.
  5. Make the amount of the award up to the value of one billable hour of your time. The award is not about the amount of money, it’s about (1) promoting technology (2) giving a student a line on their resume. It’s also about being sustainable. You want to make sure you can afford to give this award every year. In some cases you may be asked to set up a fund for an ongoing award. If you have the funds, go ahead and do that. If not, ask if you can sponsor a one-time award. In my case they didn’t ask for anything more than this year’s award. They will send me a form letter next year to remind me to send another cheque.
  6. Write a cheque to the appropriate school division. (Mine is made out to the school board.) You should be issued a tax receipt for your donation. Ask them about this if they don’t mention it.

And that’s it! One billable hour of your money (and a stamp and envelope for the cheque). 20 minutes of your time. And you have made a female student an award winning technologist. Now get out there and do it!