Dangerous Ideas

Anita Borg had a dream: by the year 2020, half the graduates of computers science programs would be women. That’s a lot easier than having half the people in high tech be women, but it’s still a tall order. Anita passed away in 2003, but she still inspires people to work for the equality. She started a group called Systers that was one of the first online communities for women. Systers is a women-only group that provides an important network for women in science and technology. The Anita Borg Institute carries on some of Anita’s work. Recently, the Anita Borg Institute was given an anonymous challenge grant – every donation will be matched up to $15,000 through December 6. Here’s the message posted by Robin Jeffries of ABI to the Systers mailing list:

Systers,

The systers list is sponsored and supported by the Anita Borg Institute (ABI), a non-profit devoted to improving the lives of women technologies and helping technology improve the lives of women everywhere.

Like every other non-profit, they exist on the donations of others. Those donations provide systers with technical support (thanks, Kathy, for all you do), computing power, spam protection, support for pass-it-on grant reviewing, and may other things. In addition to systers, ABI runs the Grace Hopper celebration, administers several awards for women in computing – so that the male dominated industry will know who the brilliant women are, provides leadership training for women at various stages of their career, and a host of other things.

ABI has just been offered an anonymous challenge grant. From now until December 6, your individual donations will be matched dollar for dollar (up to $15,000), thanks to a generous grant from an anonymous donor. If they meet this goal, it will result in $30,000 in funding toward their many programs.

Please, consider giving to the Anita Borg Institute NOW (before December 6), while this challenge grant is active. I already have. Your donation makes a difference to our field, to many of the women working in it, and to women all over the world who want to better themselves through technology. Please pledge whatever you can (even $5 or $10) to help meet this $15,000 goal.

To learn how you can donate, go to http://anitaborg.org/get-involved/donate/

Thanks,

Robin Jeffries Her Systers’ Keeper

There are a lot of sexist jokes that go around, either verbally or digitally. Women in male-dominated fields, like computing, experience this regularly. When we complain, we’re often told that it’s “just a joke” or to “have a sense of humor about it”, or “it’s bad, but it’s not a really big deal”. Now there’s research that shows that sexist jokes encourage more tangible discrimination:

“We found that men with a high level of sexism were less likely to donate to the women’s organization after reading sexist jokes, but not after reading either sexist statements or neutral jokes,” Ford said.

In the second experiment, men were shown video clips of sexist or non-sexist comedy skits and were then asked to participate in a project designed to determine how funding cuts should be allocated amongst select student organizations.

“We found that, upon exposure to sexist humor, men higher in sexism discriminated against women by allocating larger funding cuts to a women’s organization than they did to other organizations,” Ford said.

“We also found that, in the presence of sexist humor, participants believed the other participants would approve of the funding cuts to women’s organizations,” he said. “We believe this shows that humorous disparagement creates the perception of a shared standard of tolerance of discrimination that may guide behavior when people believe others feel the same way.”

I like that the lead researcher, Thomas Ford, is a man. It’s good to have allies! Sometimes men ask how they can help women in computing, and being good allies is a great start. Not just by doing studies like this, but also by speaking out when someone says something stupid.

Actress Danica McKellar, who played Winnie Cooper on the Wonder Years and Elsie Snuffin on The West Wing, is a big mathematics fan. She’s a co-author of a proof for a theorem and offers mathematics advice on her Web site (which unfortunately uses frames so the first link will look like it’s missing something).

I just read an article about McKellar’s new book for girls, “Math Doesn’t Suck”:

In 2007, Hudson Street Press will publish Danica McKellar’s forthcoming book “Math Doesn’t Suck,” a groundbreaking book that uses hip and entertaining examples to teach middle-school girls and their parents how to master many of the tough concepts that are introduced in middle school – the time when young girls begin to shy away from math.

This sounds like a great book! And it’s a big plus that it’s being written by an actress which should help break the stereotype of math being uncool or unhip. Every once in a while I read a message from a techie woman who’s just discovered that actress Hedy Lamarr co-invented spread spectrum technology, a fundamental part of cellular and wireless networks today. The messages typically express how great it was to discover Lamar’s accomplishments, but sadness that they didn’t find out about this until years after she passed away. I think there’s just something about the glamour of the movies and science that, when mixed together, just seem inspiring. It’s great that in McKellar we have someone who’s currently active as both an actress and a mathematician!

As I was looking for references for this blog entry, I saw a bunch of references to McKellar’s advocacy for girls in science. She was recently a speaker at Stanford’s Women in Mathematics Forum), she’s been interviewed a few times about her interest in math, and she gave a speech in response to a congressional committee’s report on trying to attract more women and minorities to science, engineering, and technology. Here’s an excerpt from that last link:

I have had my share of run-ins with not fitting the “stereotype” of a scientifically-minded young woman. Every day, people approach me, and recognize me for my portrayal of the character “Winnie Cooper” on the television series “The Wonder Years.” And every day people ask me what I am doing now. When I tell them I took a break from acting in order to attend college, they inevitably ask what my major was. When I tell them “math”… Mouths drop open…mixed with stares of horror and confusion… usually followed by a looks of intrigue and newfound respect, but always the incredulous, “Why…?” They were not expecting that to come from me, since I do not fit among the ever popular stereotypical images of math nerds. (At least that’s what I like to think.)

Even more telling, was an experience I had in the 9th grade.

After our first test, my science teacher pulled me aside and expressed surprise at my high score, exclaiming how unexpected it was that I would be a good student in science. “You just seem so outgoing and you wear such brightly colored earrings… I just didn’t think you would be very smart.” All based on appearances, the teacher was judging me according to the stereotypes that are so deeply ingrained in our society: the socially inept, nerdy looking guy who doesn’t care about fashion. Here’s the most interesting part.

The teacher was a woman.

Go Danica! Wait, I seem to have written just that for another Danica not long ago … ;-)