Tag Archives: women in science

Interview: Authors of the paper “Women’s Representation in Mathematics Subfields”

Right now, you can read a preliminary draft of a paper analyzing women’s representation in subfields of mathematics. The abstract:

We use data from papers posted to the Mathematics section of the arXiv to explore the representation of women in mathematics research. We show that women are under-represented as authors of mathematics papers on the arXiv, even in comparison to the proportion of women who hold full-time positions in mathematics departments. However, some subfields have much greater participation than others.

The authors, Dr. Abra Brisbin and Dr. Ursula Whitcher, are both scientists at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire. I interviewed Dr. Whitcher about their methodology, findings, and further hypotheses, and about the additional burden of doing diversity work in the sciences.

Continue reading →

If I had a million linkspams (13 October 2015)

  • Effective Learning Strategies for Programmers | Allison Kaptur (10 Oct): “In early September I gave a keynote at Kiwi PyCon in New Zealand on effective learning for programmers. There were two pieces to the talk: one about mindset, and one about particular strategies we can use. [Growth mindset or a fixed mindset; confidence and imposter syndrome]”
  • Interview: Web Developer Ashton Levier on Girl Develop It and Being a Woman in STEM | The Mary Sue (9 Oct): “Originally from Louisiana, Ashton Levier is a teacher turned web developer in Salt Lake City, Utah. Introduced to coding through Girl Develop It, Ashton then enrolled in Bloc’s online coding bootcamp. [This] is her Q and A on how she did it, and her thoughts on diversity in tech.”
  • Burning Out, Bowing Out, and How Bridges Sometimes Burn | Camille E. Acey (22 Sept): “I have been honored to join so very many clubs that invited me to be a member, and, furthermore, when I felt a new club needed to be created, I was ever at the ready to start/co-found it. From feminist book clubs to food cooperatives, I have been an eager member or initiator for all manner of activity groups. […] I am definitely in a reluctant bow out/quitting cycle (in order to make time for work, family, marriage, and socializing/sanity restoring self-care) and so I wanted to share some thoughts about it that might be useful to you.”
  • Inspiring and supporting tech’s next great engineers | Makinde Adeagbo at Medium (8 Oct): “/dev/color is a non-profit organization that provides Black engineers with the connections and skills needed to start and stay in the industry, and advance into leadership roles. Founded by some of the top software engineers in Silicon Valley, we’re a community for software engineers, by software engineers. We work with members throughout their careers, from college to industry, through mentorship, training and events.”
  • What makes a good community? | The Geekess (6 Oct): “There’s been a lot of discussion in my comment sections (and on LWN) about what makes a good community, along with suggestions of welcoming open source communities to check out. Your hearts are in the right place, but I’ve never found an open source community that doesn’t need improvement. The thing is, reaching the goal of a diverse community is a step-by-step process. There are no shortcuts. Each step has to be complete before the next level of cultural change is effective. It’s also worth noting that each step along the way benefits all community members, not just diverse contributors.”
  • What To Do If Your Workplace Is Too White | Stephanie Foo at transom (10 Aug): “There’s a question I’ve heard a lot lately. Program directors and hosts approach me at radio events more and more often (it’s not hard to spot me — I’m often one of the only People of Color [POC] in the room) and ask, “How do I reach a more diverse audience? And how do I hire more people of color?””
  • [warning for discussion of sexual harassment] Famous Berkeley Astronomer Violated Sexual Harassment Policies Over Many Years | Buzzfeed (10 Oct): “One of the world’s leading astronomers has become embroiled in an increasingly public controversy over sexual harassment. After a six-month investigation, Geoff Marcy — a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has been mentioned as a potential Nobel laureate — was found to have violated campus sexual harassment policies between 2001 and 2010. Four women alleged that Marcy repeatedly engaged in inappropriate physical behavior with students. […] After another undergraduate came forward with a complaint a year later, Murray-Clay, along with three other female graduate students and postdocs, tried to register an official complaint at the university level. But there, too, they were told they could not do so on someone else’s behalf.”
  • [warning for discussion of sexual harassment] The Long Con | Mahalo.ne.Trash (9 Oct): “Something that people rarely think of as a con game is sexual harassment, but after listening to the lived experiences of women who have been sexually harassed and/or assaulted, I feel the analogy is apt.”
  • [warning for discussion of sexual and racial harassment] The Cool Girl Trap: Or, Why Sexism in Tech Isn’t Going Away. | Kennedy Garza at Medium (6 Oct): “This status is only granted to girls who are cool on her male colleague’s terms — the second she steps outside the bounding box of that status, she is ostracized, or at the very least, looked at differently forever. It’s why sexism and other negative behaviors are so common in the industry. Speaking up about these things, once you’ve already been established as a ‘Cool Girl,’ can at minimum make you a social pariah and at worst, impact your career.”

We link to a variety of sources, some of which are personal blogs.  If you visit other sites linked herein, we ask that you respect the commenting policy and individual culture of those sites.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on Pinboard, or Diigo; or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

50 simple ways to spam the links (13 August 2015)

  •  More data on gender and literary prizes | Nicola Griffith at Goodreads (6 August): “[…] here are two new pie charts, following on from my previous post about what kind of book wins awards, this time on the most recent 15 years of the IMPAC Dublin Award and the Costa Novel Award. IMPAC CostaAs you can see, the IMPAC, one of the richest book prizes in the world, given for “excellence in world literature,” gives zero out of the last 15 prizes to stories by women about women—but 11 to stories by men about men.”
  • Uncomfortable conversations about money | Accidentally in Code (5 August): “When it comes to speaking at a conference which involves some travel costs, there are four main options: 1. The conference pays. 2. The company you work for pays. 3. You pay. 4. You don’t go.”
  • Why BioWare’s games inspire a unique kind of fandom | Sam Maggs at PCGamer (23 July): “the knowledge that we all feel the same passionately intense emotions for these lumps of pixels, no matter how well-written and complex they may be, gives us an instant connection—and isn’t that the best part of belonging to any fandom? We’re all in on the joke, all on the same level, and that’s what brings us together. But not all fan-created content is made completely in celebration of BioWare’s games; part of being a responsible and engaged fan is also writing constructive criticism of media we know could do better. And though not always perfect, BioWare is one of the few companies with a readily-accessible creative team that really takes note of and utilizes thoughtful, fan-written criticism. And being listened to is paramount to a fandom who dedicate so much time and emotional energy to these characters.”
  • Frances Oldham Kelsey, Who Saved U.S. Babies From Thalidomide, Dies at 101 | Robert McFadden at The New York Times (7 August): “[…] some data on the drug’s safety troubled Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey, a former family doctor and teacher in South Dakota who had just taken the F.D.A. job in Washington, reviewing requests to license new drugs. She asked the manufacturer, the William S. Merrell Company of Cincinnati, for more information. […] Dr. Kelsey, who died on Friday at the age of 101, became a 20th-century American heroine for her role in the thalidomide case, celebrated not only for her vigilance, which spared the United States from widespread birth deformities, but also for giving rise to modern laws regulating pharmaceuticals.”
  • Lost in Transition: ‘Rat Queens Special #1: Braga’ | Charlotte Finn at Comics Alliance (6 August): “Hi, I’m Charlotte Finn. I’m a lifelong comics fan and last year, I admitted to myself that I was transgender. Coming out as transgender means reassessing a lot about your life, your place in the world, and what that world’s been telling you about yourself before you even realized who you really were. In this occasional series, I’m going to be applying that reassessment to comics that feature people like me, or close to being like me, and look them over with a fresh set of eyes. Are they good? Are they bad? Are they somehow both, at the same time? In this regular series, I’ll offer my thoughts.”
  • How to Ensure You Don’t Hire Anyone | Morgane Santos at Medium (7 August): “A while ago I was looking for a new job, and as such, I interviewed at hella companies, from Big Names™ to tiny start-ups no one’s ever heard of, looking for the ~perfect place to trade my labor for wages~. Throughout this process, I had some hilarious interactions with companies who clearly aren’t actually trying to hire anyone. Let’s examine some of their fumbles and mishaps, and learn how to really turn people off from ever joining your company!”
  • Play Your Way: Women and Magic the Gathering (part 1) (part 2) | Nicole Jekich at Across the Board Games (13 July): “in April there was some internet hubbub over recent articles written by male Magic the Gathering players and their advice on how to get more women into the hobby. I have no qualms with men looking to help diversify the MTG fan base and to make official events and tournaments more welcoming. I do feel that what these articles lacked is input and experiences from women gamers. I wanted to learn more about how other women enjoy MTG – to understand, through reading their experiences, preferences, and suggestions how we as a community could help make women feel more welcome and how to bring more women into the MTG game and community. So I created a survey for women participants who used to or currently play Magic the Gathering. I asked women to answer questions about their history with MtG, the hows and whys. The survey was shared via social media and within 2 weeks, I collected 97 responses.”
  • Call for submissions: Instar books finction Anthology #000001 Almost Void | Instar Books (15 June): “For fiction that involves some or all of the following qualities: Privileging imaginative transformation of experience over experience directly (i.e., not necessarily memoir by other means); Concerned with atypical subject matter; Concerned with atypical emotional states (trauma, isolation, Zen acceptance, etc.); Concerned with sex; Written by people who haven’t necessarily had access to traditional means of publication by the literary establishment; and/or Funny, yet about something terrible.”

We link to a variety of sources, some of which are personal blogs.  If you visit other sites linked herein, we ask that you respect the commenting policy and individual culture of those sites.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on Pinboard, or Diigo; or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

LEGO “Research Institute” features women in science

LEGO made a nice little splash when they introduced a female scientist figure a little while ago, and they’ve chosen to produce a pretty neat set as a followup:

We’re very excited to release Ellen Kooijman’s Female Minifigure set, featuring 3 scientists, now entitled “Research Institute” as our next LEGO Ideas set. This awesome model is an inspiring set that offers a lot for kids as well as adults. The final design, pricing and availability are still being worked out, but it’s on track to be released August 2014. For more information, see the LEGO Ideas Blog.

"Research Institute" LEGO set, including three female scientists: the Astronomer, the Paleontologist, and the Chemist

“Research Institute” LEGO set, including three female scientists: the Astronomer, the Paleontologist, and the Chemist

Here’s a link to the LEGO ideas project. But what I found even more interesting is designer Ellen Kooijman’s blog post about the design of the set:

I had been building with LEGO bricks for 10 years since coming out of my Dark Age (LEGO-devoid period), but I had never shared any of my creations online. This project was going to be the first creation I ever shared with people other than my husband. The idea for the project came very naturally and the question how I came up with it always makes me smile. As a female scientist I had noticed two things about the available LEGO sets: a skewed male/female minifigure ratio and a rather stereotypical representation of the available female figures. It seemed logical that I would suggest a small set of female minifigures in interesting professions to make our LEGO city communities more diverse.

As a geochemist I started with designs close to my own profession, a geologist and a chemist, and then expanded the series to include other sciences and other professions. Support rates in the first weeks after posting were slow, but at some point it started to pick up speed and many people left positive comments on the project, which encouraged me to expand and develop the project. I designed 12 little vignettes in total that consist of a minifigure with a 6×4 base plate and a corresponding setting to enhance the building experience and stimulate creativity. When designing the vignettes I tried to add things that would also make them attractive to people not necessarily interested in female figures. Especially the dinosaur skeleton turned out to be a real winner that is popular with a variety of people ranging from teenage boys, to parents, to AFOLs, etc. It is easy to imagine a different setting where the skeleton may come alive chasing the minifig or it could stimulate more building, for example a museum where it can be displayed.

Her other career women vignettes are also pretty awesome. I hope that some someday LEGO will consider producing those as well. Here’s a second science-y set to whet your appetites:

More scientist LEGO: Falconer with two birds, Geologist with compass and hammer in the field & Robotics Engineer designing a robot arm

More scientist LEGO: Falconer with two birds, Geologist with compass and hammer in the field & Robotics Engineer designing a robot arm

Visit the LEGO ideas page or the blog post about the sets to see the others!

The effect of linkspam on man-in-the-moon marigolds (29 March 2014)

Events, fundraisers and such:

Spam!

  • Dinner plans for all: How conference organizers can make newcomers feel welcome | Becky Yoose at The Ada Initiative (March 24): “Take a small group of conference attendees (mix of new and veteran attendees), add a restaurant of their choosing, throw in some planning, and you get a conference social activity that provides a safer, informal environment that anyone can participate in.”
  • Heroines of Cinema: Why Don’t More Women Make Movies? | Matthew Hammett Knott interviews Marian Evans at Indiewire (March 24): a must-read for anyone who wants to understand why we don’t see more women on-screen and behind the camera in our favorite films and what we can do about it
  • ‘Making games is easy. Belonging is hard’: #1ReasonToBe at GDC | Alex Wawro at Gamasutra (March 20): “[Leigh] Alexander says some members of the industry still feel less wanted, less welcome, and less safe than others because of who they are or how they identify themselves.”
  • Wonder Woman writer and artist Phil Jiminez talls to Joseph Phillip Illidge at Comic Book  Resources, Part 1 (March 21) and Part 2 (March 23): “I’ve mentioned in other works that I believe Diana is the ultimate ‘queer’ character — meaning ‘queer’ in its broadest sense — defiantly anti-assimilationist, anti-establishment, boundary breaking. Looking back at the early works of the 1940s, sifting through all the weird stories and strange characters, you can find a pretty progressive character with some pretty thought provoking ideas about sex, sex roles, power, men and women, feminine power, loving submission, sublimating anger, dominance in sexual roles, role playing and the like.”
  • Warning: domestic violence Spyware’s role in domestic violence | Rachel Olding at The Age (March 22): “In a Victorian study last year, 97 per cent of domestic violence workers reported that perpetrators were using mobile technologies to monitor and harass women in domestic situations.” [The study in question seems to be Delanie Woodlock (2013), Technology-facilitated Stalking: Findings and Recommendations from the SmartSafe Project, MSM can’t start linking/citing their sources soon enough for this spammer!]
  • Impostoritis: a lifelong, but treatable, condition | Maria Klawe at Slate (March 24)  “I’ve been the first woman to hold my position—head of computer science and dean of science at the University of British Columbia, dean of engineering at Princeton, and now president of Harvey Mudd College. As my career progressed, so did the intensity of my feelings of failure.”
  • The Aquanaut | Megan Garber at The Atlantic (March 13): “The first thing you should know about Sylvia Earle is that she has a LEGO figurine modeled after her. One that has little yellow flippers instead of little yellow feet. “
  • Condolences, You’re Hired! | Bryce Covert at Slate (March 25): “Evidence suggests that women are more likely to get promoted into leadership during particularly dicey times; then, when fortunes go south, the men who helped them get there scatter and the women are left holding the bag. This phenomenon is… known as the glass cliff“
  • Mistakes we’ve made | Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock at Hacker School Blog (March 25): Bergson-Shilcock describes ways Hacker School inadvertently deterred or misjudged female candidates and what they’re doing to improve.
  • A few comments on Brendan Eich’s hiring as Mozilla CEO, and his political donations to anti-marriage equality campaigns and candidates:
    • Against Tolerance (March 24) and I know it’s not raining (March 28), both by Tim Chevalier at Dreamwidth: “Apologizing for past wrongs doesn’t undo the past, but it does help rebuild trust and provide assurance that further abuse (or at least not the same kind!) won’t occur in the future. We’ve seen none of that — only tone policing and attempts at creating diversions. The message I take away from reading Brendan’s blog posts is ‘I’ll still try to destroy your family, but I won’t be rude to you to your face. Keep writing code for me!'”
    • Civil rights and CEOs | Alex Bromfield at Medium (March 25): “Eich asks people to put aside this issue because it is unrelated to the work that Mozilla does, but it is related, especially when the chief of HR reports to him.”

We link to a variety of sources, some of which are personal blogs.  If you visit other sites linked herein, we ask that you respect the commenting policy and individual culture of those sites.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on Pinboard, Delicious or Diigo; or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

Sexist or Insensitive? Either way – It’s just lazy, and it is keeping women from taking part.

This post is by a guest blogger who wishes to remain anonymous.

I recently received an invitation to attend a guest lecture in my research institute entitled: “Tits struggling to keep up (with climate change)”. Is this funny? Is it a clever pun? Is it sexist? Is it insensitive?

I have seen many cases of scientists trying to make their topics more inviting with a ‘sexy’ title to a paper or talk, and, if followed through properly, it can be a very effective way of engaging an audience who might otherwise be bored by the topic. This example, however, does not qualify in my mind as an effective tool for communication. Instead, I would say that this is exactly the kind of lazy title-tweaking that makes up some of the subtle sexism that continues to pervade the higher education research environment.

I call this lazy for two reasons: first, because it cashes in on the sexist structures which are widespread in our society, and the assumption that simply linking an idea to female sexual organs will be enough to make it interesting to the masses; second, because in order for a ‘sexy’ title to be truly effective, it needs to be placed in the context of a larger theme within the paper or talk, which will continue to highlight the ‘fun’ side of the research while presenting the relevant data. I hardly think that the presentation is peppered with pictures of the breasts of aging women instead of birds.

Recently it was mentioned to me by (male) senior members of staff that the institute is trying to encourage women to enter and remain in research. So, a female colleague and I discussed the sexist/insensitive attitude of the title and decided to comment. The institute’s response? “There is no pun.”

Now, I find this hard to believe, considering the construction of the sentence. If there were no pun, the use of parenthesis would be unnecessary. However, it is just barely possible that the scientist in question has a poor understanding of parenthetical usage. It is also possible that the title was meant as a joke, which we were meant to find mildly amusing, and enticing enough to attend the lecture.

In the end, it doesn’t matter; whether the title was meant as an ‘inoffensive’ joke, or was simply insensitive, these are the small pin-pricks that jab at female scientists on a daily basis. To be reminded that your worth as a human being, in a societal context, is still largely based on your appearance and adherence to strict sexual and social norms, despite your ground-breaking research, and to have this happen while you are at work, and to be expected to laugh at this reminder, rather than mention how unwelcome it is, is not acceptable. It is this laziness and this insensitivity that subtly reminds women of ‘their place’ in even the most prestigious labs and universities.

Let Us Never Forget Their Names

Content Note: This post deals with the École Polytechnique massacre and violence against women.

24 years ago today, 14 women were killed in an act of sickening violence at the École Polytechnique in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Targeted for being women and for being engineers, we must never forget their names.

  • Geneviève Bergeron (born 1968), civil engineering student
  • Hélène Colgan (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
  • Nathalie Croteau (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
  • Barbara Daigneault (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
  • Anne-Marie Edward (born 1968), chemical engineering student
  • Maud Haviernick (born 1960), materials engineering student
  • Maryse Laganière (born 1964), budget clerk in the École Polytechnique’s finance department
  • Maryse Leclair (born 1966), materials engineering student
  • Anne-Marie Lemay (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
  • Sonia Pelletier (born 1961), mechanical engineering student
  • Michèle Richard (born 1968), materials engineering student
  • Annie St-Arneault (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
  • Annie Turcotte (born 1969), materials engineering student
  • Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz (born 1958), nursing student

For those of us who grew up in Canada, the white ribbons of December were a reminder not just of the work left to do in stopping gender violence, but of the links between that violence, deeply held notions of gender roles and “women’s place”, and the importance of pioneering women’s work in science and engineering. While Montreal stands out in our timeline as one of the few acts of outright violence documented there, we must remember that the “tits or GTFO”s of the world exist on a spectrum of micro– and macro-aggressions, oppression, and violence that we must be vigilant for in our communities, online and offline.

Fellow blogger Lukas writes:

This event was a catalyst for action in Canada, spawning a monument for the deceased, a national Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women in Canada, and a White Ribbon Campaign (started by and targeted at men in order to address and confront male violence against women). For me, Dec 6th marked the beginning of my independent feminist organizing. It happened when I was just starting high school and shortly afterward a few classmates and I started a feminist club at our school. We attended local vigils for women who died at the hands of their male partners. We educated ourselves about issues facing women beyond just our small city and we organized gatherings to share this information with others. In the years that followed Dec 6th was a touchstone for doing actions that both drew attention to women and domestic violence but in recent years since moving into the tech world it’s developed a whole other layer of relevance to me.

 

When this date rolls around I am reminded that the outreach I do in the tech community matters, to be proud of being feminist, taking space in engineering, and also being someone who works diligently to make space for more women and underrepresented groups to join me. It may not always be through a directly violent act but there are many ways women and minority groups are being told they do not belong here and there are some of us are proving ‘them’ wrong. We are designers, engineers, problem solvers, big thinkers, dreamers, creators, makers, and people who can help make worlds both big and small better for others. We can be a pipeline for new arrivals, be mentors, be allies. On this day I am grateful for my allies both within the geek feminism community and without who work side by side with me to work on improving equality, seeking justice, and calling for the end of violence and discrimination in the technology space.

Never forget their names.

All your linkspam are belong to us (19 November 2013)

  •  Ms. Male Character – Tropes vs Women in Video Games | Feminist Frequency on YouTube: “In this episode we examine the Ms. Male Character trope and briefly discuss a related pattern called the Smurfette Principle. We’ve defined the Ms. Male Character Trope as: The female version of an already established or default male character. Ms. Male Characters are defined primarily by their relationship to their male counterparts via visual properties, narrative connection or occasionally through promotional materials.”
  • So Many Reasons | Can’t Stop the Serenity: “Can’t Stop the Serenity (CSTS) is a unique opportunity to indulge your geeky side while doing some good! Since 2006, fans have organized screenings of Joss Whedon’s Serenity to raise funds and awareness to support Equality Now in their work for the protection and promotion of the human rights of women around the world. Join us as we aim to misbehave for a good cause!” (also have a look at the items available to buy/bid for on Ebay)
  • Sexual Harassment in Comics: The Tipping Point | Comics Alliance: “Since [Tess] Fowler’s comments [about sexual harassment in the comics industry], and the wider-ranging debate that followed, I have seen conversation after conversation of men debating with other men whether or not the reality of women is real, men asking other men to confirm that what women were saying was true, men testifying that they’d never seen harassment – or else piping up that they knew there was harassment, yes, but it wasn’t as bad as people were saying. As though they, somehow, were some sort of authority on the experiences of women.”
  • There’s an All-Female Team of Spelunking Scientists Making Amazing Discoveries Right This Very Moment | The Mary Sue: “A veritable treasure trove of prehistoric bones is discovered. A small team is needed to retrieve what could be evidence of a new human ancestor. The chosen few have to be scientists and experienced cavers. Of the 57 applicants, six were selected for this highly dangerous mission. And they all just so happen to be women.”
  • Who Wants to Work for a Woman? | Harvard Business Review: “Gallup’s question asked, “If you were taking a new job and had your choice of boss, would you prefer a man or a woman?” Only 25% of Americans expressed no preference in 1953 but today it’s 41%.”
  • On Accepting Privilege | Lindsey Bieda: “Understanding your own privileges means also understanding how your own axes of identity intersect and how they interact. Things people can see about you and things you can’t hide in your sleeves and pretend they aren’t there usually are bigger effectors of privilege. By this I mean; I’m an atheist you can’t tell by looking at me that I am an atheist (my shoes definitely don’t say atheist), so anyone who might discriminate against non-christians would not be aware unless I said something. However, a woman who was non-gender conforming was denied a tip because of her appearance.”

We link to a variety of sources, some of which are personal blogs.  If you visit other sites linked herein, we ask that you respect the commenting policy and individual culture of those sites.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

Why I Keep Coming Back to Mentor with TechWomen

This is a cross-post, written by Larissa Shapiro, from the TechWomen blog. Larissa Shapiro is the Head of Contributor Development at Mozilla.

TechWomen is an initiative of the US Department of State, administered by the Institute of International Education. TechWomen brings professional women in STEM fields from the Middle East and Africa to the SF Bay Area for month-long mentorships with women in industry and academia here. The “Emerging Leaders” are paired with a “professional” mentor (I have been honored to hold this role three times for the program) – who has the Emerging Leader with her at her workplace for a month, and a “cultural” mentor who shares the local culture and her own community and family life. The Emerging Leaders and their mentors also have the opportunity to travel to Washington, DC together in a delegation to the State Department and to other meetings with political and social movers and shakers in the capitol. Some mentors are also able to travel to the Middle East and Africa on delegations, as I was privileged to do in 2011 to Morocco. If any readers of Geek Feminism are interested in more information about the project, please visit the TechWomen page or reach out to me directly

I came across TechWomen by chance. A former colleague forwarded me a note from a local Women in Tech newsletter calling for mentors for a new State-Department-sponsored mentoring program. I thought… hmm…. am I ready for that? I’d gotten tremendous benefit from the mentors in my own life (I still do). I wanted to “give back” but felt terribly… green. I’d been in tech for about 15 years at the time, yet I felt unsure. I took a deep breath, filled in the application and sent it off, thinking there was no way I’d be accepted! In retrospect, I had Impostor Syndrome about becoming a mentor. What I did not realize then was how much mentoring would change my life, and change what I do with my life.

I was honored to be chosen for the first mentor cohort of TechWomen. I remember the first mentor meeting, and the incredible caliber of the women I met – I knew right away that this community of mentors would be a critical part of my TechWomen experience. Through mentoring, I have met and become friends with a network of amazing technical professional women with similar goals; all of us are dedicated to supporting each other and women in STEM around the world. Lifelong friendships have been built.

When my Emerging Leader arrived, I was impressed with her skills, talent, and intellect right away. It was not shocking – the women selected for this program are less than one out of ten of those applying. In 2013, 2000 women applied and 78 were selected. From the beginning I knew that I wanted to know every Emerging Leader well, and that we would never get enough time together.

Sanae and I dove into her mentorship, in which she studied project management techniques. We spent a lot of time at the French bakery down the road over coffee, learning how much we had in common. As much as I know I passed on wisdom to her about specific technical matters, she gave me her deep insights into my work relationships, and our friendship has continued. One of the biggest realizations for me in my first year as a mentor was that the technical mentorship is a container for work, but it is filled with deep international perspective, caring relationships, growth, and connection. The official “work” of the mentoring project turns out to not be the real “work” at all – not that it is not important.

As part of the program I was able to travel to both Washington, DC and to Morocco. Washington, DC was a wonderful trip – sharing both a city and a national heritage I love with new friends – that first year we happened to be in DC over the 4th of July and got to watch the fireworks from the top of the State Department. I felt like the luckiest American of all. Even more deeply meaningful for me was joining the TechWomen mentor delegation to Morocco – we travelled to Marrakech, Casablanca, and Rabat. One day we visited a house that provides care for girls who move to the city to attend secondary school – which they cannot do in their villages. The girls spoke mainly Berber, Arabic and French, but a few also spoke English and we talked with some of them. One told me of her determination to become a doctor and return to her village to improve healthcare for women and girls. At twelve years old, she spoke with an adult understanding of the world. I see the same fire in many girls who want to go into STEM – to change their circumstance – to change the world. She inspired me.

TechWomen moved into its second year, and expanded into more countries. I was thrilled to apply again – and my company wanted me to as well, having seen what an outstanding networking opportunity it was. I was matched with a brilliant emerging leader – an IT instructor from Tunisia. She chose a technical research project, studying the penetration of the IPv6 address protocol in Tunisia. She was also engaged in politics in her home country following its “Arab Spring” and taught me so much, giving me ever more respect for the work that goes into fighting for and building democracy.

I am now in my third year with TechWomen. I changed jobs during this year, and I was so determined to mentor again that I made my participation a criterion of my hire. I’m loving every minute with my newest Emerging Leader, Imen Rahal, who is very excited about the mission and projects of my present employer, Mozilla. Her enthusiasm is contagious. She has jumped in with both feet and is exceeding my expectations, taking on our modified Agile development process in the FirefoxOS project. I am very lucky that Imen’s Cultural Mentor is my friend (and Mentoring Process Architect) Katy Dickinson, and we have made cultural excursions together already, most recently to the redwoods near my Santa Cruz home.

Why do I mentor? Why wouldn’t I? For me, mentoring has become an emotional, networking, and perspective-building bank account where what I get back in “interest” is much more than what I put in. These women inspire me, bring my “game up” and become deeply cherished friends. If you have the chance to Mentor… I cannot recommend it enough.

Wednesday Geek Woman: Mildred Dresselhaus

This post is based on a piece which originally appeared at Let’s Talk About Science.

To celebrate Ada Lovelace Day, a day of blogging about women in science, I wanted to tell you all about Mildred Dresselhaus, the MIT physics professor and giant of nanoscience sometimes known as ‘the queen of carbon’. For the last twenty years or so, materials made from carbon have been getting exponentially more and more attention. Carbon is an essential building block in many of the chemicals that are important for life, but there are also huge differences between materials made from carbon depending on how the carbon is bonded. Diamonds and coal are both forms of carbon, but with wildly different crystal structure. So many of the hot carbon materials from recent years have come from new ways that the carbon atoms can be arranged. For example, carbon nanotubes are like rolled up sheets of carbon, and graphene is a sheet of carbon that’s only one atom thick. Both carbon nanotubes and graphene have very high mechanical strength, electrical and thermal conductivity, and low permeability for their size. And there are a lot of other ways carbon can be nanostructured, collectively referred to as allotropes of carbon.

But Dresselhaus was into carbon before it was cool, and has been a professor at MIT since the 60s studying the physics of carbon materials. Her work has focused on the thermal and electrical properties of nanomaterials, and the way in which energy dissipation is different in nanostructured carbon. Her early work focused on difficult experimental studies of the electronic band structure of carbon materials and the effects of nanoscale confinement. And she was able to theoretically predict the existence of carbon nanotubes, some of their electronic properties, and the properties of graphene, years before either of these materials were prepared and measured. Her scientific achievements are extremely impressive, and she has gotten a lot of honors accordingly.

And as you can imagine, things have changed a lot for women in science over the course of her career. When she began at MIT, less than 5% of students were female, and these days it’s more like 40%. But of course, it helps female students quite a bit to see female role models, like Dresselhaus. She discusses the importance of mentoring in her career in this interview:

Hunter High School was a real turning point for me. I found out about its existence through the music school. Nobody I knew had gone to one of these special high schools, and my teachers didn’t think it was possible to get in. But Hunter sent me a practice exam, and I studied what I needed to know to pass the exam. It was an excellent school with excellent teachers.

By the end you were already known as a science and math whiz. Yet you didn’t think a science career was possible.

At that time there were only three kinds of jobs commonly open to women: teaching, nursing and secretarial work. I went on to Hunter College thinking I would be an elementary schoolteacher.

But then you met Rosalyn Yalow, the future Nobel laureate.

I took her class in elementary nuclear physics. It was a tiny class, maybe 3 students, maybe 10. She was a real leader and a very domineering person. You met her and she said, “You’re going to do this.” She told me I should focus on science. She left the exact science unspecified but said I should do something at the forefront of some area. After that, she was always in my life, writing letters of recommendation for me, keeping up with my progress.

And for more about Mildred Dresselhaus’ scientific achievements, you can read this citation of her work from winning the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience in 2012.