To return to a former topic: I've collected a number of interesting links regarding women in computer science, and while none have individually warranted a blog post on their own the aggregation is now large enough to post.
- The Truth About Gender and Math: An entry in the always-interesting Sociological Images blog, this one discussing an NTY article on how gender, math scores, and culture interrelate. Take away points: if there is an inherent difference in mathematical aptitude between the genders, it seems to vary from sub-area to sub-area in mathematics. In some areas, males do better than females, an vice-versa in other areas. However, this seems to be swamped by the effect of culture. A field-wide difference in aptitude is correlated with general gender inequalities in the culture. Lots more details at the link.
- Sent to me by Andromeda, who puts it better than I could: "I hope this is the world's most perfect bit of self-aware irony...but I doubt it." http://twitter.com/Syliss/status/10461097632
- Via the Freakonomics blog, an interesting paper on Why do women leave? A new working paper on the gender gap in the sciences. Take-away: It's not the lack of family-friendly policies. It's frustration with promotion opportunities, and (apparently) the lack of women in engineering. I need to read the paper myself before I can comment more intelligently on it, but the interested reader will probably beat me to it, frankly.
- Geeks drive girls out of computer science: This has a very misleading title. Rather than being about, well, that geeks drive women out of computer science, it focuses on the (many) things that can be done about it on the individual level. The list focuses on the junior-high and high-school levels (probably due to the background of the author) but some might apply at the introductory-college level as well.