misbehaving.net

How a girl becomes a scientist

Lynn Margulis's early interest in the wonders of the microscopic world began when she was a "boy crazy" adolescent, who was amazed to learn that some minuscule creatures never need sex in order to reproduce. Enter a teenage heartthrob: the budding astrophysicist Carl Sagan. ("Tall, handsome in a sort of galooty way, with a shock of brown-black hair, he captivated me.") She was 16 when they met; eventually they married.

Sagan's fascination with "billions and billions" of cosmic bodies resonated with her own fixation on the billions of microcosms to be observed through the microscope. Margulis's study subjects have included a tiny animal in a termite's gut that is made up of five distinct genomes cobbled together. She has argued that we and other animals are composite critters, whose every cell harbors long-ago invaders--minute symbiotic organisms that became part of our makeup. Her innovative approach to evolution has profoundly influenced biology.

From Scientific American's review of John Brockman's Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist, a collection of autobiographical essays (via 3quarksdaily).

What were the early signs of your tech inclinations? I don't have any tales of precocity. My mother knew she could safely leave my toddler self unattended at home because she'd find me where she left me: concentratedly picking fluff balls out of the carpet. But perhaps that was preparation of a kind...

Better Read This

I've been reading this new book by Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever called "Women Don't Ask" and it's pretty amazing. Thanks to Betsy Devine for bringing it to my attention. Here's Amazon's synopsis for starters:

When Linda Babcock asked why so many male graduate students were teaching their own courses and most female students were assigned as assistants, her dean said: "More men ask. The women just don't ask." It turns out that whether they want higher salaries or more help at home, women often find it hard to ask. Sometimes they don't know that change is possible--they don't know that they can ask. Sometimes they fear that asking may damage a relationship. And sometimes they don't ask because they've learned that society can react badly to women asserting their own needs and desires.

By looking at the barriers holding women back and the social forces constraining them, Women Don't Ask shows women how to reframe their interactions and more accurately evaluate their opportunities. It teaches them how to ask for what they want in ways that feel comfortable and possible, taking into account the impact of asking on their relationships. And it teaches all of us how to recognize the ways in which our institutions, child-rearing practices, and unspoken assumptions perpetuate inequalities--inequalities that are not only fundamentally unfair but also inefficient and economically unsound.

With women's progress toward full economic and social equality stalled, women's lives becoming increasingly complex, and the structures of businesses changing, the ability to negotiate is no longer a luxury but a necessity. Drawing on research in psychology, sociology, economics, and organizational behavior as well as dozens of interviews with men and women from all walks of life, Women Don't Ask is the first book to identify the dramatic difference between men and women in their propensity to negotiate for what they want. It tells women how to ask, and why they should.

playing dumb

While reading Erving Goffman's "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life," Joi Ito blogged a passage on performance that is worth considering:

American college girls did, and no doubt do, play down their intelligence, skills, and determinativeness when in the presence of datable boys, thereby manifesting a profound psychic discipline in spite of their international reputation for flightiness. These performers are reported to allow their boy friends to explain things to them tediously that they already know; they conceal proficiency in mathematics from their less able consorts; they lose ping-pong games just before the ending.

Joi asks whether this is true today, and i thought that this is a good fodder for discussion. How relevant is this passage to the (lack of) participation of women in technology?

women

They must have known that I'd love it: they gave me Annie Leibovitz's Women, a book full of wonderful photographs of women, women in almost every profession you can think of, famous women, ordinary women, astronauts, farmers, race car drivers, waitresses, politicians, CEOs, show girls, mothers, activists, maids, poets, actors, writers, teachers, coal miners, soldiers, surgeons. The portraits are large and generous. Some women smile, most are serious, and each one of them looks beautiful. Not in that standard textbook manner, no no, this is a much deeper and much more important kind of beauty, a more genuine beauty, the kind of beauty you can see in the people you love. Being able to show such beauty in a fickle photograph must take great skill and generosity in the photographer.

I spent an hour leafing through the pages with my daughter. So many possible lives, for a woman. Reading out the professions for my daughter I realise that this is what we need for our daughters, for ourselves: real portraits of real women.

new book

Women, Art, and Technology is a new book from MIT Press which is "a compendium of the work of women artists who have played a central role in the development of new media practice." It's edited by Judy Malloy, and there's a table of contents etc at her website.

Sadie Plant's Zeroes + Ones

I leave tomorrow for Monterey, where I'll be speaking at the Internet Librarian conference. (Any misbehaving readers in Monterey, or going to the conference? I've got free time Sunday...)

On the airplane, I'll be reading a book that a colleague gave me some time ago, but that I promptly lost. Now that I've unearthed it, and read the Amazon.com review, I'm eager to read it at last.

Meet Ada Lovelace, daughter of mathematician Annabella Byron and poet Lord Byron, and a major contributor to Charles Babbage's famous Analytic Engine. Lovelace is in many ways the patron saint of Sadie Plant's exploration of women's roles in the creation of modern technology. The book begins with Lovelace's story, and elements of her writings appear throughout the book--sometimes to emphasize points but often to exemplify attitude. They also serve to anchor Plant's dynamic, almost stream-of-conscious approach as we travel to 19th-century Europe to meet the nameless women who laid the foundation of modern technology with the development of weaving, survey the major female technological innovators of today, and even explore female figures in technology-based fiction.

Plant's "cyberfeminist rant," as William Gibson calls it, attempts to demonstrate that women have always used technology. You won't find victims here, rather women who were empowered by the technological innovations in their lives. What emerges is a very nontraditional feminist picture, one in which women are neither bystanders nor victims but are in many ways the unsung heroes of technical innovation. The author also points to a future where, within zeros and ones of cyberspace many such dichotomies of life/machine, let alone male/female, may blur in unexpected ways

I'll post my reaction to the book as a comment to this post once I'm safely ensconsed in the Marriott tomorrow.