

Girl geek appeal: Women's movement online  - bootload
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8663593.stm

======
bootload
_"... Our logos are all pink and that is meant to be tongue-in-cheek. It's
friendly but it walks the line between the serious issues and gathering to
have fun. ..."_

This is an interesting point. One of the quickest way to stop women according
to _"Sapna Cheryan"_ (Uni.Washington) is _"You can get a message about whether
you want to join a certain group just by seeing the physical environment that
that group is associated with,"_ For men, it was reported, decor made no
difference.[0]

 _"... "The feminist movement was incredibly important to people like my mum
who had to argue with people like my programming teacher so that I could stay
in my course," explained Judith Lewis ..."_

That is really sad.

[0] Wired, Lisa Grossman, _"Star Trek Stops Women From Becoming Computer
Scientists"_ ~ [http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/12/star-trek-keeps-
wo...](http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/12/star-trek-keeps-women-
computer-science/#ixzz0nF5aekTY)

~~~
_delirium
I wonder how old Judith Lewis is, or if this varies by area and subject? My
mom was a chemistry BS and MS major in the late 60s / early 70s, and she seems
to think that when she started in 1966, there were a lot of "women don't
belong in science" dinosaur professors, but by the early 1970s they were
almost all gone, or at least had been "encouraged" into keeping quiet.

~~~
yardie
Maybe they went into engineering. I started uni in the late 90s, the natural
sciences already had a nice mix of men and women, except physics. Engineering
was still a man's world even then. Then one of my professors dropped the
proverbial bomb in class, declaring that "women don't belong in engineering".

It was a fiasco for a little while, the university stated its disagreement but
couldn't fire him. He retired a year later (the guy looked like he was on
death's doorstop).

The school has been trying, for years, to get more women and minorities into
engineering but it's usually just a modest bump in good years, when they have
money to actively search. Leaner times, like now, may mean small drop in an
already small pool of viable candidates.

~~~
hugh3
_more women and minorities into engineering_

More minorities into engineering? What school did you go to that the
engineering classes weren't almost entirely Asian and/or Indian?

~~~
gte910h
I believe they mean Latino and Black students, which are underrepresented.
NACME for instance, is trying to get a engineering racial makeup much more
similar to that of the US at large.

<http://www.nacme.org/NACME_D.aspx?pageid=96>

And while many of the sub-continent students (Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi)
would love to stay, many of them are foreign nationals, and will likely have
to leave (or choose to).

~~~
hugh3
So out of all the hundreds of minorities, only the two biggest minorities
count as "minorities"?

I love US racial doublespeak circa 2010.

------
jacktang
How many girl geeks here?

~~~
jacquesm
Quite a few <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=749617> , lots of them in
'stealth' mode to ward off unwanted attention.

------
klaut
me :)

