Gwen Mueller is an IT Professional, #dnd Gamer-girl, #coffee drinker, geek in Secondary Education, editor on tumblr #education, curating #science, and #tech resources to inspire lifelong learning with 1/4 cup of #fun.
Imagine you forget to watch a new episode of Game of Thrones the night it airs. Even if coworkers stay mum about important plot points, Twitter is abuzz with spoilers. Fortunately, there’s Twivo, a new program that allows Twitter users to censor their feeds from mentioning a certain TV show (and its characters) for a set time period. Jennie Lamere, a 17-year-old girl, invented the software last month—and won the grand prize at a national coding competition where Lamere was the only female who presented a project, and the only developer to work alone. Internet: Meet the reason we need more women in tech.
The Central High School freshmen — known in competition as Rocket Power — will be one of 100 teams in the finals of the Team America Rocketry Challenge this week, a contest sponsored by the Aerospace Industries Association and the National Association of Rocketry for seventh to 12th-grade students across the country. Students from six other schools in the Washington region also are competing in the finals.
The girls, both 14 and Largo residents, are one of just eight female teams that qualified for the finals. They are the only squad of African American students to participate in the closing round.
Awesome opportunity at DSHA today! Jennifer Buffett in on-campus to talk with our girls about her philosophy of philanthropy; empowering girls and women to lift up half the sky.
My takeaway: Problem solving and collaboration, learning to embrace failures every day; these are important skills for our girls to find themselves and their place in the world so they can transform communities.
When our kids play with toys that we played with, we assume that they are the same as they were when we were younger. But they aren’t. Not at all. Our girls (and our boys) are now bombarded from the get-go with images of women whose bodies range from unattainable to implausible (Disney Princesses, anyone?).
A new paper in the May issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology suggests that even just seeing images of female role models can help women speak publicly and perform as leaders.
Previous research has found that the presence of female leaders in government has a significant effect on girls’ educational goals, and seeing other women in STEM careers can help women want to pursue those careers themselves. However, other studies have found that seeing high-level female leaders can actually make women feel inferior about their own leadership qualities.
Yes, I’m a junkie for PBS News Hour, watch this video and you’ll understand why! Last night they talked about Sheryl Sandberg’s (COO of Facebook) new book Lean In on female leadership. I found their panel’s insights into the book enlightening, so I’ve copied a bit of the video transcript down here.
The main responsibility for changing this situation cannot rest on individual women. There are plenty of women who have leaned in very hard and are just invisible to people who do not want to employ women. They may think they do, but each individual woman, somehow, she’s not the right woman.
That’s why I would place much more emphasis than Sheryl Sandberg does on things like affirmative action, anti-discrimination suits, quotas. Do you know that the only countries where women are gaining in representation in legislatures are countries that have quotas of how many women should be there and parties that have quotas of how many women candidates they put up?
The problem is she wrote a book that was for all women, as opposed to narrowing the focus there. And so I feel like that’s where a lot of this criticism and confusion is coming from, because a lot of things she says make sense if she is talking about her own peers. It doesn’t necessarily make sense if she’s talking about all women in general, because the plight of working-class, poor and middle-class women is demonstrably different.
It really boils down to family leave. I mean, women are trying to create this work-life balance. And until business accommodates that, it is always going to be an issue.
I think if we listen to her, however, we will not solve the problem that she herself so eloquently states, which is how do we get to a world where half of our leaders are women? And I believe if that’s our goal, which I think it should be, the problem is women aren’t leaning in not because they don’t know how to, but because they don’t like the wold they’re being asked to lean into.
JUDY WOODRUFF asks: So, you’re saying employers have responsibility here, too?
I think employers and our culture. I think it’s about what kind of leaders we want.
Do we want leaders only who go through this particular path? Or do we want to create other routes to leadership that allow for a diversity of people, broadly speaking, not just women, but men and women, to get to leadership positions with a different set of choices than Sheryl and her peers are making?
The video is definitely worth a watch, and it may even inspire you to pick up a copy of the book.
Math ability, in some societies, is gendered. That is, many people believe that boys and men are better at math than girls and women and, further, that this difference is biological (hormonal, neurological, or somehow encoded on the Y chromosome).
But actual data about gender differences in math ability tell a very different story.
So, with only the possible exception of genius-level math talent, men and women likely have equal potential to be good (or bad) at math. But, in societies in which women are told that they shouldn’t or can’t do math, they don’t. And, as Fatistician said, “math is a skill.” People who think practicing it is pointless won’t practice it. And those who don’t practice, won’t be any good at it… Y chromosome or no.
Today is International Women’s Day, and as one of our contributions to the celebration, we’re proud to support Voices Global Conference, presented by Global Tech Women. As part of this 24-hour live streamed event, Google will provide more than a dozen hours of free talks featuring women working in computer science, beginning today. To access the full schedule and our ongoing broadcasts, see our section on the Voices website, which will be updated throughout the day.
Today is the 105th International Women’s Day. The theme this year is “The Gender Agenda: Gaining Momentum.”
It’s hard at times to keep the movement forward in focus given the war on women’s rights on the past year. For every piece of good news, there is a piece of bad news. The good news is the President Obama signed the Violence Against Women act yesterday. The bad news is that there are 22 members of the United States House and 31 members of the US Senate who voted against it.
In the micro level of comics it also seems like for every two steps forward there is one step back.
But let’s focus on the positive today. Let’s focus on the things that make us happy and give us hope.
What is it in superhero comics that you think is worth celebrating for women, right now? What best represents how you want to see women portrayed. Please let me know. You can see what others have said in the past this blog and I welcome your submissions.
Sitting above my home office is one my favorite pieces of superhero artwork. The piece by Lucy Knisley is, I think, close to perfect for today.
This video explores how the Damsel in Distress became one of the most widely used gendered clichés in the history of gaming and why the trope has been core to the popularization and development of the medium itself.
As a trope the Damsel in Distress is a plot device in which a female character is placed in a perilous situation from which she cannot escape on her own and must then be rescued by a male character, usually providing a core incentive or motivation for the protagonist’s quest.
“We find that this gender difference in the response to competition is very short-lived and disappears if we encourage girls to stay in the game or structure the nature of the competition slightly,” Price said. In other words, we parents and teachers should keep at it, along with our daughters. The researcher admitted he was surprised the initial gender gaps could be eliminated simply by extending the competition. “I have two daughters and would love to see them feel comfortable competing at math and in other areas,” says Price. “It is really encouraging to know that we can structure competitions in a way to make this possible. The next challenge, though, will be sharing this information with girls so that they will be more willing to participate in math competitions.”
Many of the suggestion center around awareness, that girls can’t aspire to what they don’t know and aren’t introduced to. How have you tried to close the STEM gender gap?
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