News on girls succeeding in science and technology, quoted from the newsletter of the National Council for Research on Women:
For the first time, girls have swept the top honors of the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology. One of the nation’s most coveted student science awards, over 1,600 students nationwide entered the competition and 20 finalists were selected to receive scholarships ranging from $10,000 to $100,000. Eleven of the finalists were girls, marking this year as the first time that girls outnumbered boys in the final round.
“These strong results only reaffirm what was highlighted in our report Balancing the Equation: Where Are Women and Girls in Science, Engineering, and Technology. Research shows that girls have as much innate ability as boys to succeed in science, math, and technology, provided they are given sufficient opportunities and support programs,” said Council President Linda Basch.
Honorees included Janelle Schlossberger and Amanda Marinoff from Plainview, NY who took first prize in the team category for creating a molecule that helps block the reproduction of drug-resistant tuberculosis bacteria; Isha Himani Jain, from Bethlehem, PA, took first place in the individual category for her studies of bone growth in zebra fish. Other winners included Alicia Darnell from Pelham, NY who won second place for research that identified genetic defects that could play a role in the development of Lou Gehrig’s disease and the team of Naomi Collipp and Caroline Lang from Yardley, PA, and Rebecca Ehrhardt, from Hamilton Square, NJ, who placed fifth for their research on E. coli bacteria.
For more information about the Siemens prize, visit: http://www.siemens-foundation.org/en/
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Gendered Innovations conference coming up in March
We are all abuzz at the Clayman Institute about our forthcoming conference, Gendered Innovations in Science and Engineering II, on March 13 and 14. The conference is free, no registration required, and everyone is welcome.
We have some great speakers lined up, including Diane Greene, the CEO of hot Silicon Valley company VMware, who will be talking about women's experience of the Valley's entrepreneurial culture. I am particularly looking forward to the first panel of the first day, Women in Gaming and Virtual Worlds. Our panelists, Sheri Graner Ray, Vladlen Koltun, and Nick Yee, will be talking about how women as users influence the creation of video games and virtual worlds; plus how they impact the development of this media market as software engineers and creative artists.
I also hope they will have time to get into a discussion of why men so often choose to have a female avatar, when the reverse is not true of women! Is it because they want to play with gender identity, or is it just because they get more "free" stuff as women? Apparently the the owners of the King of the World MMORPG, Aurora Technology, recently banned men from having female avatars. How bizarre is that?
(Disclaimer: This story may not actually be true - see Ars Tecnica for skepticism on this story: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070927-chinese-mmorpg-banning-cross-gender-roleplayers.html. But it is still a good story, and the fact that it spread across the internet with such alacrity suggests that it resonates with a good many users! Maybe there are a lot more men out there pretending to be female than you might think!!)
Find out more about our conference at http://gender.stanford.edu
Friday, February 8, 2008
Are Scientists People Like Us?
You know what science is. You know how people go about “doing science”. We all do. We picture the chemist in his lab with his test tubes, the physicist thinking about hard equations in front of his computer, the astronomer with his telescope, the biologist with his microscope. He’s featured extensively in the media, in everything from dishwashing detergent adverts to CSI. We think we know all we need to know about him, the scientist.
But we need to step back and reconsider what we think we know. For the great majority of us, the scientist is unquestionably a “him” – and a him with white skin, the ubiquitous white coat, and probably mad hair too (denoting an Einstein-like genius and disregard for the mundane everyday). Social scientists have been administering a “Draw-a-Scientist” test to elementary and middle school students since the early 1980s. In the first wave of experiments, all elementary school students proved extremely likely to draw exactly the typical scientist stereotype. More recently, middle school students, who are being educated in a more critical reading of the way the media functions, are dividing along gender lines: the boys draw a man, while the girls are more likely (though by no means 100%) to draw a woman. Adult stereotyping of scientists is just as prevalent, though the general attitude towards scientists as a group seems to be becoming more positive as time goes by. Ask yourself this: if you sat down to draw a scientist right now, what would your picture portray?
This stereotype persists even though the reality and portrayal of science changing, albeit slowly. More films and TV shows are including women in professional and scientific roles (sometimes even without the white coat), though recent research has revealed that female characters are still very likely to be sexualized or used in a storyline in a way that emphasizes their romantic desires or physical attributes rather then intelligence, education, or experience. Ms Frizzle, of The Magic School Bus, is a schoolteacher who glories in the possibilities of science and whose racially diverse, gender-balanced class gets to experience the wonders of scientific discovery first hand; yet she retains the stereotypical characteristics of a mad scientist who functions outside the everyday world. If Ms. Frizzle is a scientist, she is not one of us.
(References: Jane Butler Kahle in Gender Issues in Science Education (Curtin University of Technology, 1987).
J. Steinke, M. K. Lapinski, N. Crocker, A. Zietsman-Thomas, Y. Williams, S. H. Evergreen, and S. Kuchibhotla, Assessing Media Influences on Middle School Aged Children's Perceptions of Women in Science Using the Draw-A-Scientist Test (DAST) Science Communication, September 1, 2007; 29(1): 35 - 64.
Losh, Susan. American Stereotypes about Scientists: Gender and Time Effects Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Montreal Convention Center, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Aug 10, 2006
Stacey L. Smith, unpublished research on gender in children’s TV and films for the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. http://www.thegeenadavisinstitute.org/research.php )
But we need to step back and reconsider what we think we know. For the great majority of us, the scientist is unquestionably a “him” – and a him with white skin, the ubiquitous white coat, and probably mad hair too (denoting an Einstein-like genius and disregard for the mundane everyday). Social scientists have been administering a “Draw-a-Scientist” test to elementary and middle school students since the early 1980s. In the first wave of experiments, all elementary school students proved extremely likely to draw exactly the typical scientist stereotype. More recently, middle school students, who are being educated in a more critical reading of the way the media functions, are dividing along gender lines: the boys draw a man, while the girls are more likely (though by no means 100%) to draw a woman. Adult stereotyping of scientists is just as prevalent, though the general attitude towards scientists as a group seems to be becoming more positive as time goes by. Ask yourself this: if you sat down to draw a scientist right now, what would your picture portray?
This stereotype persists even though the reality and portrayal of science changing, albeit slowly. More films and TV shows are including women in professional and scientific roles (sometimes even without the white coat), though recent research has revealed that female characters are still very likely to be sexualized or used in a storyline in a way that emphasizes their romantic desires or physical attributes rather then intelligence, education, or experience. Ms Frizzle, of The Magic School Bus, is a schoolteacher who glories in the possibilities of science and whose racially diverse, gender-balanced class gets to experience the wonders of scientific discovery first hand; yet she retains the stereotypical characteristics of a mad scientist who functions outside the everyday world. If Ms. Frizzle is a scientist, she is not one of us.
(References: Jane Butler Kahle in Gender Issues in Science Education (Curtin University of Technology, 1987).
J. Steinke, M. K. Lapinski, N. Crocker, A. Zietsman-Thomas, Y. Williams, S. H. Evergreen, and S. Kuchibhotla, Assessing Media Influences on Middle School Aged Children's Perceptions of Women in Science Using the Draw-A-Scientist Test (DAST) Science Communication, September 1, 2007; 29(1): 35 - 64.
Losh, Susan. American Stereotypes about Scientists: Gender and Time Effects Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Montreal Convention Center, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Aug 10, 2006
Stacey L. Smith, unpublished research on gender in children’s TV and films for the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. http://www.thegeenadavisinstitute.org/research.php )
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