My linkspam brings all the boys to the yard (30 April 2014)

• In memoriam: Wikimedia remembers two women who contributed hugely to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects: Adrianne Wadewitz (died April 8, see also New York Times and Los Angeles Times, and the memorial edit-a-thon in Los Angeles in May) and Cynthia Ashley-Nelson (died April 11)
• Audrey Tang spoke to TEDxTaipei on Programming Languages and RailsGirls Taiwan (程式語言與軌道女孩) on April 27. Slides (primarily in Chinese) and an English language translation of the transcript are up.
• The Anti-Nerd: Fear of a Black Time Traveler | Rafael Martinez at Black Girl Nerds (April 16): “It is something I have noticed. A lack of us being in the Time Traveling profession. I then Googled ‘Black time travelers’ and closest I got was, I kid you not–black traveling shoes.”
• Dealing with name changes in publication records for scientists | Savannah at lgbt+physicists+blog (April 21): “The basic idea here is that if one is assigned, for example, a female-typical name such as Robyn O’Troodle at birth, then publishes several papers under this name before transitioning to Jonathon O’Troodle, this would result in a jump from a female-typical name to a male-typical name that might appear awkward (or simply distracting) on one’s publication record.”
• Lady She-Woman: Female Superheroes, Codenames and Identity | Andrew Wheeler at Comics Alliance (April 23): “Identity is central to superhero fiction. It’s a genre that gives us heroes; big, broad, iconic modern gods that lift us up out of the uncertainties of our own lives to a place where who you are and what you stand for is known… For a lot of female heroes, owning a superhero identity presents an almost insurmountable challenge. A significant number of DC’s female heroes are based on other heroes, from Batgirl, Supergirl and Wonder Girl through Stargirl, Mary Marvel and Ravager.”
• Sex, Sexy & Sexism | Storify (April 24): a PAX East 2014 panel on fixing gender inequality in gaming. Featuring Susan Arendt, Brianna Wu, Tifa Robles, and Duane de Four, moderated by Ken Gagne
• No, I Don’t Work for Free | Julie Pagano (April 26): “Asking someone to come do professional work for your for-profit company for free is incredibly problematic. I would argue in many cases it is downright exploitative. I doubt they’d have asked me to come code for them for a few hours for free. They’d recognize how unacceptable that is. Why is it that other work is seen as valuable enough to ask for, but not valuable enough to pay for?”
• Dragon Age Goes Gender-Neutral! | Brad Baron at Gay Gamer (April 23): “Dragon Age: Inquisition… due out this fall, features a figure on its cover that could be any gender. The best part — the character’s gender is totally irrelevant!”

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.

When a link and a spam love each other very much (26 March 2014)

A couple of quick announcements to start us off:

• applications to attend AdaCamp Portland (June 21–22, ally skills track June 23) are open
• the call for submissions to another issue of Model View Culture is out: the Abuse issue. “This issue explores themes of harassment, microaggression, boundary violation, assault, discrimination and other forms of abuse in the tech community”.

Onto the spam you’re waiting for:

•  Cloaking device | shonias at Hoyden about Town (March 23): “The moment I arrived [at Cisco Live!], unbeknownst to me, my cloaking device had been deployed. I stood waiting to register, and when a position was free, the bloke on it gestured to the man who had arrived after me. I just wasn’t there.”
• Silicon’s Valley’s Brutal Ageism | Noam Scheiber at New Republic (March 23): “‘Young people are just smarter,’ Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told an audience at Stanford back in 2007. As I write, the website of ServiceNow, a large Santa Clara–based I.T. services company, features the following advisory in large letters atop its ‘careers’ page: ‘We Want People Who Have Their Best Work Ahead of Them, Not Behind Them.’ And that’s just what gets said in public.”
• Iconic Girls in Pop Culture: Miyazaki’s Female Characters | Raizel Liebler at The Learned Fangirl (March 21): “…one of the elements I most appreciate is the focus on girls in that frequently awkward age between eight and twelve – too old to be little and cute, but too young to be a teen – with the freedoms and heartbreak of teenagehood.”
• Game designer cracks through myths about women in the games industry | Megan Farokhmanesh at Polygon (March 21): “[Game designer Elizabeth] Sampat… covered myths such as there are no women to hire, or female candidates not fitting company culture, suggested that companies use recruiters to draw in new candidates. Recruiters should stop looking for a dedication to gaming, she said, and find candidates with curiosity and current interest.”
• Why I’m Excited About !!Con | Sumana Harihareswara at Cogito, Ergo, Sumana (March 20): “Some get-togethers turn into dominance displays… Whenever possible, Hacker School culture assumes abundance rather than scarcity; attempts to rank projects or people would defile our ecology. And now we have a conference, !!Con, with that same philosophy.” !!Con is May 17–18 in New York City.
• Not buying sexism: How inclusive games show hope for gaming culture | Katherine Cross at Feministing (March 20): “…at least in the world of roleplaying gaming, the idea that sex and sexism sell is taking another hit from the opposite direction: we now have proof that games that resist sexist caricatures and that prominently feature women as strong and fully human characters can actually succeed where games more mired in outdated thinking have failed.”
• Male Superheroes in Female Superhero Poses | Brian Cronin at The Line It Is Drawn (March 21): A big collection of comics fanart with the male superheroes in the awkward and submissive poses and setups given to female superheroes.
• A Day of Honors for Women in the Video Game Industry | Laura Parker at New York Times ArtsBeat (March 20): “Female video game designers, producers and directors were honored at Microsoft’s Women in Gaming Awards here on Thursday in an event that has grown substantially in short order.”
• Self-Citation Gender Gap | Rina Shaikh-Lesko at The Scientist Magazine (March 18):
  “A study commissioned by The Chronicle of Higher Education shows that women in academia are much less likely than men to cite their own research. Because citation counts are now critical to many decisions about hiring and promotions, citations are becoming one more area where women are falling behind their male colleagues.” (The Chronicle‘s coverage is paywalled.)
• Mean Little Girls: Thoughts On Indie Game Journal | Becky Chambers at The Mary Sue (March 22): Chambers reflects on a game featuring a girl protagonist and childhood bullying in a problematic but interesting way.

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.

The linkspam is a harsh mistress (19 March 2014)

Super spam today folks!

Kicking off with our traditional can of miscellaneous linkspam:

• HOWTO design a code of conduct for your community | The Ada Initiative (February 18) “Now that we know it is possible to go to conferences and not be insulted or harassed, people are starting to wonder: Why can’t we have the same thing on mailing lists and wikis?”
• Open Sourcing Feminism: The Challenge of Collective Intelligence in 2014 | Loomio: (March 8) “Sexism exists in many (probably most) work environments, so why is it so critical to stamp out in the open source community? It matters here like nowhere else because open source is about collective intelligence.”
• The Next Big Thing You Missed: A Silicon Valley VC Firm That Dares to Invest in Diversity | Wired.com (March 11) … diversity in Silicon Valley is probably not the news we missed. “Jennifer Fonstad and Theresia Gouw believe there’s money to be made in bringing diversity to Silicon Valley. That’s why they left their respective venture capital firms last month to start Aspect Ventures.”
• Ian McKellen tweets a poster image for movie X-Men: Days of Future Past (March 16) Our linkspam submitter asks “But where the wimminz? Kittyyyyy?”
• Logins Do Change | Chris’s Wiki (March 14): “Every so often it’s popular to say that you will never, ever change a (Unix) login, an assigned email address, or whatever…People periodically have excellent, compelling reasons to change their login et al… If you aggressively stick to your ‘no changes’ view, it’s quite possible that very bad things will happen.”
• Negotiated Out of a Job | Inside Higher Ed (March 13) “The worst they can say is no… Sure, you might not get everything you want, but there’s no harm in trying… Or maybe not, according to recent post on Philosophy Smoker.”
• If Male Superhero Costumes were Designed Like Female Superhero Costumes! | Who are you people? A series of sketches of male superheros in skimpy and flimsy costumes.
• Code of conduct pledge and cosigner list | Web Kunoichi (March 14) An organised list of Code of Conduct Pledge co-signers. “Now, I’m no John Scalzi… BUT I think I can help this movement by developing a list of co-signers—a bit like Mr. Scalzi‘s, but hopefully in a format that can be sorted/filtered.

The Mythology edition of Model View Culture is out, and its entire table of contents is of interest! This spammer couldn’t trim it down!

• Sex and the Startup: Men, Women, and Work, by Kate Losse “Silicon Valley has built an architecture of compensation to distribute value, attention, and funding according to the narrow fantasies of venture capitalists.
• The Myth of the Non-Technical Startup Employee, by Zoelle Egner “I have literally lost count of the number of looks and comments and dismissals I’ve experienced from strangers upon introducing myself at parties and industry events.
• The Making of Myths, by Laurent Bossavit “The function of myth is often to reinforce a status quo; not just any aspect of the status quo, but a particular balance of power.”
• Tech in Underserved Communities: Beyond Feel Good Stories, by Stephanie Morillo “My own story has made me believe that maybe all of the kids smiling in brochures for coding programs need to be mentored by people that didn’t come from substantial privilege.”
• Chattanooga and Kansas City: New Tech Towns on the Gigabit Frontier, by Meghan O’Dea “The emergence of tech industry in cities outside of Silicon Valley is an opportunity for conversation – about what both the industry, and civic communities should look like.”
• Towards an Afrofuturist Narrative: Tech Mythology and the Africas, by Ēlen Awalom “Behind-the-scenes with stealth startup Curatoric, and conversations with creators, historians and curators of African and Diasporic African art. Part of a two article series.”
• There and Back Again, by Misty De Meo “The story of how Misty De Meo quit programming and then returned.
• Dissent Unheard Of, by Ashe Dryden “Perhaps the scariest part of speaking out is seeing the subtle insinuation of consequence and veiled threats by those you speak against.
• The Startup Mythologies Trifecta, by Shanley Kane “They work together in concert, and in practice, function to exclude and marginalize minorities in tech.”
• The Lesbians Who Tech Summit is the First Of Its Kind, by Kronda Adair “Start Somewhere founder Leanne Pittsford dreamed of being able to network openly with other queer women in the tech industry.”
• Data Scientists, by Amelia Greenhall “At first, I mentally filed ‘Data Scientist’ in the same place as ‘Growth Hacker’ — just another one of those words men made up. But I’ve come to start to see the invention and naming of these new types of technical roles as a crack in the system.
• Hashtags as Decolonial Projects with Radical Origins, by Suey Park “Twitter activism is not to be dismissed. Although Twitter exists to generate revenue off advertisements and corporations, it can also be used subversively – to go beyond imperial timelines.”

Look out for an interview with Model View Culture founders Amelia Greenhall and Shanley Kane on Geek Feminism tomorrow!

And finally, Julie Ann Horvath left Github, describing harassment and other inappropriate workplace behaviour. Some coverage and responses include:

• Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism And Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit | TechCrunch (March 15) “Horvath has given TechCrunch her version of the events, a story that contains serious allegations towards GitHub, its internal policies, and its culture. The situation has greater import than a single person’s struggle: Horvath’s story is a tale of what many underrepresented groups feel and experience in the tech sector.”
• Prominent GitHub Engineer Julie Ann Horvath Quits, Alleging Gender-Based Harassment | Re/code (March 15) A recap of Horvath’s tweets.
• Update on Julie Horvath’s Departure | Github (March 16) “We know we have to take action and have begun a full investigation. While that’s ongoing, and effective immediately, the relevant founder has been put on leave, as has the referenced GitHub engineer.”
• Warning for account of racist violence On GitHub and speaking out | Global Nerdy (March 17) “I’ve seen this scenario time and again, in which a privileged group fails to see a problem and makes speaking out difficult. I’ve also seen it happen to me.”
• managers are awesome / managers are cool when they’re part of your team | tecznotes (March 16) “Github employees can work on what they feel like, subject to the strategic direction set for the company. There are no managers. This bothered me a bit when I heard it last summer, and it’s gotten increasingly more uncomfortable since.”

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.

not a beard

This is a guest post by Mari Huertas (@marihuertas).  She is an Obama for America Technology (#ofatech) alumna and instructor at the University of Chicago. She currently is working on an idea to shift self-publishing with fellow OFA alum Nick Leeper (@lucky33). She lives in Chicago with her husband, bossy cat, and an ever-rotating supply of tea. This post originally appeared on her blog.

It was a tongue-in-cheek joke on the campaign trail, and I smiled about it for a while – the recurring meme about the “bearded” Obama Technology team, a group of dudes who wore flannels and didn’t shave and didn’t care at all about either, thankyouverymuch. I smiled about it because it was true, to a point, and I felt we were a family, and family made jokes like that, even if not everyone was into it.

Then came the post-election press, some of which picked up the “beards” gag and, fawning over its delicious cleverness, wrapped it into numerous mentions of the Technology team’s accomplishments. Andrew Sullivan even wrote a post that referred to the Technology team as “Obama’s Bears”.

Now, let us be clear about a few things:

1. I was on that team.
2. I’m not at all bearded.
3. I’m definitely not a bear.
4. Nerdy? Sure. I’ll own that one.

And other women were on that Technology team, too – smart, savvy women. One managed the creation of an incredible system that our vendor integration and other technology components all could hit so we could operate as synced as possible (Carol Davidsen). One trained an entire digital SWAT team of interns and volunteers to handle Dashboard support (Brady Kriss). One spearheaded the development of our voter outreach and GOTV technologies (Winnie Lam). One reached into the tech community and rallied volunteers to help us build certain pieces of our infrastructure (Catherine Bracy).

Yet some articles skipped mentioning women almost entirely. Rolling Stonenamed one; Mother Jones listed zero before backpedaling under scrutiny and adding a handful at the bottom of the article. Both were chided and scorned for it. It was surprising but not unexpected that so few of my sex were included in articles about winning the election – recognizing women has been a historical, long-standing problem. But these women in particular had done outstanding, difficult work – they had just re-elected a president, for heaven’s sake – so if not now, when should they expect to be recognized for their contributions?

I write this now, in the waning halo of winning the election, because in the past few months, I’ve come to see in a painfully clear light how important it remains to rally and recognize women working in technology. From the dearth of women as speakers and panel members to the lack of diversity on development, IT, and product teams, we have a serious listing that needs to be righted. As I wrote at the end of 2012, we need to elevate the profiles of successful women so that others will see them and want to work alongside them – so they will know what roles are available and what roles they can make.

I want other females, young and old, to feel encouraged by the women who worked on this re-election campaign and in technology, civics, and government as a whole. I want girls and young professionals to find their way by the determined wakes we leave. We’re doing important, satisfying, fun work – we should broaden and extend our purview so more can wade into the fray.

Now, I want to make this next point as clear as the glass ceiling beyond which many women in technology have yet to climb: I love, support, and cheer on my tech brethren, bearded or bare-faced, because they are completely, indisputably awesome and deserve every word of the recognition they receive. I have sat in the front row of the conferences at which they presented and beamed and clapped hard while they stood and spoke. I have touted them publicly on social channels and privately in emails and discussions with others. I wish them every success and am fantastically proud to call them friends and co-workers.

But equal consideration and recognition for the work, contributions, and fur-free faces of the ladies who rocked alongside them?

We need that – not just for this campaign or election, but for all we do. Let’s make that happen.

Resources:

• Swiss Miss is compiling a list of female entrepreneurs; you are welcome to add to it.
• Change the Ratio works to improve the balance between men and women and ensure a diverse workforce.
• Suggest others I should add by writing me on Twitter @marihuertas or putting it my questions page here on Tumblr.

Repost: How Not to Do Ada Lovelace Day

I originally posted this in March 2010, just after Ada Lovelace Day. I thought it bore repeating in the leadup to Ada Lovelace Day 2011. Note that while we support it strongly, neither the Geek Feminism blog nor myself are affiliated with Ada Lovelace Day: this is personal opinion.

I’ve seen a couple of ways of observing Ada Lovelace Day that seem to be missing the point a little. Here’s what it would be great if Ada Lovelace Day ended with: the end of invisibility of women in science and technology. There are thousands, hundreds of thousands, of us. And yet, when people are asked to name prominent scientists and technologists, many are capable of coming up with a list entirely of men’s names, and even when asked especially for women’s names some people draw a blank. A blank. From hundreds of thousands of possibilities.

There are a few examples of posts that don’t help with this, and which in fact contribute to the invisibility of women by suggesting that the author couldn’t think of even one specific woman and the work that she does:

• a general non-specific celebration of women: “I want to salute all women in science and technology! Yeah!”;
• doing no more than naming a woman and highlighting her as a woman you’ve heard of in science or technology; no hint of what she does or why you admire or remember her in particular; or
• highlighting a woman or several women for facilitating your own work in tech with their non-technical activities. The most obvious example is “thanks to my significant other, for allowing me to spend time on technical hobbies.” It’s absolutely good to acknowledge the shoulders your own work stands on, but it doesn’t advance the goal of ending the invisibility problem if you choose to use Ada Lovelace Day to do it.

Ada Lovelace Day is about women’s own work in science and technology. Contribute to women’s visibility with specific names and with examples of work you admire deeply or use every day or can’t imagine how to do in such an elegant way as she did.

Sugar and spice, and everything linkspam (31st July, 2011)

• 18 year old German woman Lisa Sauermann has just won the International Mathematics Olympiad (contested between talented high school students) with a perfect score of 42. This is Sauermann’s fifth medal, four of them gold and one silver, the best series of performances ever. (Some sources say she’s the first recipient of four golds, there have actually been two others.)
• BU Today reviews Project Artmesis, a five week summer computing program for high school girls that has just wound up.
• Please Sir, I Want Some More: LGBTQs need more and deserve more. We need escapism just like our cis straight brothers and sisters. We need to be portrayed in roles we wouldn’t be expected to be in. (See comments for why this link was removed.) (For that matter, new to this linkspammer: the Gay YA site where this appeared.)
• Help Us Find These 1970s AT&T Engineers: In this 1975 AT&T film, five female AT&T engineers are profiled. The film starts with male attitudes towards women working as engineers. There are no surprises there… What’s most interesting, though, is that AT&T apparently cannot locate any of these five — they (and I) would like to ask followup questions and learn how things have changed since 1975.
• Open Source Community, Simplified: The Bugzilla community’s secrets. Not specifically feminist advice, but advice that will help create a woman-friendly coding space.
• Erase me: And, basically, it comes down to authors wanting either something exotic or inclusion cookies without putting in any real effort or respect into their characters or having any awareness of the tropes and stereotypes they are tapping into… So I’ve finally come down on saying – stop. Erase me. No, really. I’d much rather be erased than tokenised or stereotyped.
• Girls Go Geek… Again! and Normalizing Female Computer Programmers in the ’60s: This article appeared in a 1967 issue of Cosmopolitan and quotes computer scientist Dr. Grace Hopper, a pioneer in the field, discussing why programming is a perfect fit for women — by drawing partly on gender stereotypes by assuming women are naturals at programming because they’re patient and pay attention to details…

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious, freelish.us or 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.

Linkspam made the top 10 (24th June, 2011)

• Color Lines gives us The Ultimate 21st Century People of Color Sci-Fi List
  

  It seems that when it comes to sci-fi, cultural experiences of the melanin-inclined are merely reserved for exotic backdrop (ahem, “Stargate”) and half-assed tokenization (ahem, the horrible Mandarin in “Firefly”). […] This is for all the disappointed moviegoers who felt the title “Minority Report” was misleading.

• Forbes lists The 10 Most Powerful Women Authors The list only counts living authors, but includes both Pulitzer-Prize winners and bestsellers
• on privilege denial within disability: If the only time you bring up being not abled is when someone calls you out on being ableist, this may apply to you.
• An Open Letter to Courtney Martin, an Editor at Feministing.Com: To offer a review on a feminist Web site of Octavia Butler’s work without discussing, in depth, her contribution to feminism in general and black feminism specifically is to do the legacy of Octavia Butler a tremendous disservice.
• (Warning: extensive anti-women/feminist statements quoted, some advocating violence.) How to choose the absolutely wrong person to write about girls and D&D — the title really says it all. The article in question has since been removed.
• On Geekdom and Privilege: Sympathy For The “Pretty’?: All of which is not to say that celebrities or hot people can never be members of the community. In calling herself a history geek, Campanella herself seems to fit the definition of a geek ally: she has some geeky interests, and she believes in evolution (thank goodness), but it’s not like she chose to cosplay Wonder Woman for the swimsuit competition, either.
• Ann Leckie: Wiscon-Related Thoughts pt 1: But we still do it, ourselves. Some portions of the eternal what’s really science fiction debate seem focused on excluding pears and oranges from our basket on the grounds that they’re not really fruit. Except no definition that excludes oranges and pears will also include every sort of apple.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious, freelish.us or 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.

Linkspam isn’t saying no… (13th June, 2011)

• Talk on June 15 at Melbourne University: Dr Cathy Foley, 100 years later: has anything changed for women in science?: This talk will look at what is the status of women in science in Australia, report on the Women in Science and Engineering summit held in Parliament House in April this year. I will then reflect on ways to enhance careers for women in science and the need not only for equity but also for improved productivity and innovation by capturing the full human potential in Australia.
• Why are more women not speaking at technical conferences? Insights from the WiT discussion at CodeStock: Jennifer Marsman discusses the points raised in her panel, with some suggested solutions.
• The Australian talks about online harassment of (female) journalists, which will sound familiar to many other women online: [Trigger warning: online harassment/bullying] War of the Words
  

  And therein lies the Catch-22 for women in the cyber-firing line. On the one hand, they believe it is essential to expose the level of abuse and misogyny that has flourished on the largely unregulated new media. On the other, they fear the only effect that would have is to discourage women from participating in public debates.

• Forever 21 Pulls “I’m Too Pretty To Do Math” Magnet From Online Store: Our submitter writes: OK, it’s not just bad that this was made in the first place. But around the article? Let’s see, You might like: The Top 10 Lies Women Tell Men; 12 Stars Posing Naked With Super Random Props; and the poll of important information: Does Flirting Over Facebook & Twitter Count As Cheating?; Please Just Kill Me NOW.
• Becky Stern has crafted TV-B-Gone (a universal remote for switching off TVs) into a jacket for subtlety: TV-B-Gone jacket (via BoingBoing).
• [Trigger warning: very frank anti-rape campaign] Don’t be that guy: a surprisingly refreshing anti-rape campaign targeting men is now making its way to other Canadian cities.
  

  Typically, sexual assault awareness campaigns target potential victims by urging women to restrict their behavior. Research is telling us that targeting the behavior of victims is not only ineffective, but also contributes to how much they blame themselves after the assault. That’s why our campaign is targeting potential offenders – they are the ones responsible for the assault and responsible for stopping it. By addressing alcohol-facilitated sexual assault without victim-blaming, we intend to mark Edmonton on the map as a model for other cities.

• Androcentrism: It’s Okay to Be a Boy, but Being a Girl…: androcentrism… a new kind of sexism, one that replaces the favoring of men over women with the favoring of masculinity over femininity.
• Researcher reveals how “Computer Geeks” replaced “Computer Girls”, an account of a talk by Nathan Ensmenger. (Don’t forget Jennifer Light, when namechecking people to quote on this!)
• Rebecca Koeser of Emory University, won a prize in the DevCSI challenge at Open Repositories 2011 for her use of Microsoft Pivot as a repository-visualization tool. Here’s a picture of Koeser accepting her prize.
• Women Atop Their Fields Discuss the Scientific Life: Elena Aprile, Joy Hirsch, Mary-Claire King and Tal Rabin talk about their scientific work and life.
• How Not To Be An Asshole: A Guide For Men: Chris Clarke re-posts this in ‘honour’ of Tammy Camp’s harassment experience

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious, freelish.us or 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.

From comments: women in science, their history as told by… men?

A few strands are coming together in comments.

First, our linkspam linked to Richard Holmes’s The Royal Society’s lost women scientists, and Lesley Hall then commented:

I’m somewhat annoyed at all the coverage A MAN talking about lost women scientists is getting, when we have several decades-worth of women historians of science who have been saying the exact same thing. This seems to me pretty much the standard thing of no-one listening until it’s said by a bloke (even if the women have already been saying it).

Meanwhile on the Wednesday Geek Woman post on Maria Goeppert-Mayer, Chronic Geek asks:

As a side note. I have been searching for a good book on a history of women in sciences. Can anyone recommend one?

The following have already been recommended:

• Margaret Wertheim (1995) Pythagoras’s Trousers: God, Physics, and the Gender War
• Julie Des Jardins (2010) The Madame Curie Complex: The Hidden History of Women in Science

Lesley Hall herself also has a book chapter: (2010) ‘Beyond Madame Curie? The Invisibility of Women’s Narratives in Science’ in L Timmel Duchamp (ed), Narrative Power: Encounters, Celebrations, Struggles.

For readers just starting out on this, what works would you recommend on the history of women in science and the invisibility of women in science? What women historians of science do work you love?

I want to be the girl with the most links (22nd November, 2010)

• (Trigger warning for ‘net harassment.) Surprise surprise, it turns out that if you describe harassment and don’t name the harasser, you get criticised a lot too! Silencing, coming to a cinema near you. Daddy Blogger Skeeves Out Mommy Bloggers, Starts Flame-War.
• And in response to the comments on the above link Catherine critiques the commenters indulging in another round of sneering at mommy bloggers and their “dramas” (that is, victimisation by harassers).
• Where Are All The Atheist Women? Same place all the women bloggers are hiding, I guess!
• Help Fast Company Find the Most Influential Women In Tech 2011. Or perhaps they could look at existing lists?
• The Royal Society’s lost women scientists: A study of the Royal Society’s archives reveals that women played a far more important role in the development and dissemination of science than had previously been thought
• Rock Stars Vs Cheerleaders:scicurious questions the Science Cheerleaders and whether scientists and rock stars do much for science by hanging out in GQ.
• Why There Are So Few Women in Tech – BusinessWeek: How does telling your board you're pregnant go down?
• Stung by gender bias, author Tawni O’Dell stings back: Oh yeah, even in book publishing the bigotry lives.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the geekfeminism tag on delicious 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.