With the rapid demise of the #HackAHairDryer campaign, IBM’s ill-fated attempt to… wait, actually we have no idea. Were they convincing women that IT is relevant to their interests? As twitter commentators quickly pointed out, it’s really not that the ladies aren’t interested in STEM, it’s more that STEM doesn’t seem super interested in us.…
Brilliance is for Diamonds and Men, But Not For Ladies
Could expectations of sheer brilliance be the root of the gender imbalance across many academic fields? Not actual brilliance, mind you. Just expectations of brilliance. That is the argument made in “Expectations of Brilliance Underlie Gender Distributions Across Academic Disciplines” published this week in Science. The authors of the study argue that there is a…
Barbie Can’t Be a Computer Engineer. Because She is a Girl.
When I was a teenager, I broke up with Barbie. Not in a I stopped playing with Barbies kind of way, more in a burning this scourge from the face of the Earth kind of way. I don’t know what the final impetus was – that I realized Barbie’s itty-bitty ankles would snap like tiny…