The Third Bit

The Nerd Girls are supposed to be on the Today show tomorrow (Friday July 18) — anyone have details?

Equity

Interesting article; reactions?

Equity

The New York Times ran a piece today on the under-representation of women in the sciences—in the Fashion and Style section, of course, because hey, women don’t read the business pages, do they? *sigh*

Later: a friend pointed me at this piece in the Boston Globe, titled “The Freedom to Say No”. Its basic thrust is that women are scarce in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) because they’d rather do other things. There’s acknowledgment of “rampant sexism” (the article, quoting a study), but most of the article is based on “men like things, women like people, so self-selection explains the imbalance”. It’s a pity its author appears not to have read Ceci and Williams, or s/he might have realized just how many holes there are in that argument.

Equity

Via Lin Zhou:

From: Susan Dorward

Google has started offering coaching to most of their employees, and I’ve been lucky enough to be approved as one of their coaches. They recently sponsored a series of talks given by their coaches and they have posted videos of these talks up on YouTube. My talk is about patterns I’ve seen when coaching technical women, and suggestions around how we can handle these common issues.

If you are interested, you can access the the talks by going to YouTube.com and searching for “Google techtalks coaching”. There are currently six talks there, including one that I gave. Here are the topics:

• Accomplishing More By Doing Less
• Leading from Strength: Making a Difference
• What Tech Women Really Want (Dorward’s)
• Impactful Communication
• Create the Career You Want
• Advancing Toward Your Dreams & Goals

Equity, Teaching

I couldn’t attend the first SciBarCamp last weekend (I was three time zones away), but Nature magazine said good things, as others.  W00t!

Equity

Registration is open for the next Toronto Girl Geek Dinner on Wednesday, February 20.  No word yet on whether there are sponsored spots for students…

Equity girl geek dinners

The next Toronto Girl Geek Dinner is set for next Wednesday, the 17th, at 7pm and they have sponsored spots for 12 students.  It’s a great networking opportunity: please visit http://torontogirlgeekdinners.pbwiki.com/ to sign up.

Equity

Thanks to generous sponsorship from TUCOWS, the Toronto Geek Girls dinner series has spots for up to 25 female students (graduate or undergraduate) to attend the next dinner and talk on September 19.  Space is limited, so sign up now!

Equity

Tatiana Apandi at O’Reilly has organized a series of “Women in Tech” articles, the first of which is now up on the web. The blurb says:

The timely new series reveals the challenges, rewards, and, sometimes, frustrations of being a woman in an industry still dominated by men. “Each day, we’ll present a different woman’s story that I believe will open readers’ eyes to her unique perspective,” explains Apandi. “We have contributions from conference organizers, authors, programmers, developers, and more–women who have pioneered prosperous careers in technology.”

Contributors will include:

• Anna Martelli, Ravenscroft, Pythonista
• Audrey Eschright, independent programmer/designer/publisher
• CJ Rayhill, SVP of Product Management and Technology for Safari Books

Online

• Dawn Foster, Director of Developer Relations at Jive Software
• Dru Lavigne, Chair of the BSD Certification Group Inc
• Gabrielle Roth, member of the Portland Perl Mongers
• Jeni Tennison, independent consultant and author
• Jill Dyche, partner and co-founder of Baseline Consulting
• Juliet Kemp, Systems Administrator for the Astrophysics group at

Imperial College

• Julia Lerman, Board member of the Vermont Software Developer Alliance,

runs the Vermont.NET User Group

• Kaliya Hamlin, unconference Shesgeeky.org organizer
• Kirsten Jones, webmaster for The Perl Foundation
• Lauren Wood, Chaired for the W3C DOM Working Group
• Leslie Hawthorn, works for Open Source Programs Office at Google
• Selena Deckelmann, leads PDXPUG, a PostgreSQL Users Group
• Shelley Powers, software developer/architect, photographer, and author

RSS is available at http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/feed/78?format=rss2 — it promises to be a very interesting read.

Equity

The second Toronto Girl Geeks Dinner will be held on Wednesday, Sept. 19, at 6:00 pm (tentatively, at the Hot House restaurant downtown). The speaker will be Leila Boujnane, co–founder and CEO of Idée Inc. Leila has been instrumental in making Idée the leader in visual search and image recognition technologies for the digital imaging, media and entertainment industries. She is responsible for all aspects of the company’s strategy and operations. For more information please visit the TGGD Blog.

Location & details

Wednesday September 19th 6:00 p.m.

Equity