Feminism

Some thoughts on gender and science/technology magazines

One day in 2010, I flipped through the latest issue of National Geographic and counted how many women and how many men were mentioned by name. It was actually an article about women in a particular country that sparked my curiosity. The unusually many women in that article (it turned out to be 8 women and 4 men) stood out in contrast with the rest of the magazine. The other feature articles (none of which were purportedly about men) mentioned in total 54 men and 12 women.

From celebrating women in computing to changing the system

You’re in a roomful of computer scientists. Most of them are women. All of them are there to promote women in computing.

What do you talk about?

What don’t you talk about?

What are you accomplishing?

What aren’t you accomplishing?

These are the questions I’ve been asking about the recent Ohio Celebration of Women in Computing (OCWiC).

The pseudo-science and pseudo-feminism of Women Don't Ask

“You should read this book,” a friend told me. “It says that women don’t make as much as men because they don’t negotiate their salaries.”

The book was Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide, by Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever, published in 2003. The notion that “women don’t make as much as men because they don’t negotiate their salaries”, it turns out, is a myth — a myth spun from the sloppy science and sexist assumptions of Women Don’t Ask.