Gender

cheap after-christmas makeup sales are great

hot on the tail of “to be feminine or not to be” (which remains unresolved although people have been emailing me interesting thoughts) i would like to announce that after-christmas makeup gift kit sales are the best! they’ll probably also give me skin cancer in 10 years but whatever I’m only wearing them at home anyway.

target had E.L.F. makeup which was pretty cheap ($1 to $3 items for things that usually cost in the $10 range, e.g. mascara or eyeshadow). HOWEVER! at Walgreens 50% off (for the most things, it was a bit tricky) Christmas Sale I found $1 for 24 colors of eyeshadow and $5 for 18 colors of nail polish!

upside-down for more brain flexibility!

 so great. all the nyan will soon be mine. mwahaha

after being home for a week i have also rapidly diminished the amount of time it takes me to apply eyeliner, and hopefully i will not be interested beyond the basics of makeup. so i think this phase of my life should be pretty short. maybe up-dos (hair) are next. MAYBE IN A YEAR I WILL LIKE SPORTS. ahhh fake identity crises are so much more fun than the real thing

anyway so i can spend 5 minutes and troll the world so great.

look i’m trying to be feminine in the safety of my house where guys I interact with won’t get the wrong idea (although my parents will get the wrong idea that I am doing it to find a boyfriend =__= NOT. I’m doing it to troll the engineering world*) and I won’t be harassed on the street. bring it on internet haters. in the picture but probably too grainy to tell: earrings, lip stain + lipstick, nail polish, eyeshadow, eyeliner.

*EDIT: Actually I feel the need to more explicitly state my feelings on this matter. (A) I’m an engineer from MIT working on my own company. Really, whoever I date had better not think that my appearance is more important than my other characteristics. (B) The whole idea of doing things because they “appeal to guys” is just plain insulting to me. I put on makeup to have fun with identity and appearances — that is, I do things for myself, not out of subservience to some abstract male opinion of me. (C) It also sucks that society devalues being single, as if we are somehow broken or less happy if we decide to focus on work instead of relationships. My friends and I are not daunted by the prospect of never finding a partner, because we are happy by ourselves, and I think we are better off for it. END EDIT.

Although I must admit that when I had rainbow hair

thanks Annie!

(but was dressed in my normal no-makeup, free [male] tshirt, jeans) in Cambridge, MA, and MIT the only comments I ever got to my face were very positive (“your hair is awesome!” along those lines). so maybe the world is great so long as I don’t wear a skirt! WE’LL SEE system identification on the real world for the win. let’s give it some feminine input and see the output.

Judy taught me this trick: put a base coat on and then after the first coat dries put on a coat of glitter!

some day soon i will write a longer story about how awesome feminine people like Jordan and Maja and Judy broke the stereotype in my head that feminine = incompetent / ditzy. because they are some really fantastically competent people. and then i was like WHOA FASCINATING NEW WORLD and then here i am.

also people spend so much time on sports / games, why is spending time on makeup considered for “non-engineers”? yea, stop and think about that. the only plausible reason is because it’s associated with being feminine and therefore stereotypically inferior.

…i never thought i’d be a makeup person either.

the current plan is to be feminine half the time and a male hipster the other half of the time in the course videos

😛 okay just kidding I have no idea what I’ll end up doing, probably whatever I feel like when I wake up the day we film. We might even design the course so that there’s no facetime and it’s all handwriting.

ALSO EGADS I posted a selfie I don’t know how I feel about myself anymore

Happy holidays all!

Gender, Thoughtful

To be feminine or not to be (as an engineer)

This is an email I sent out to poll my friends, but as it also serves as a useful summary of my recent readings, I will post it here in all its messed-up footnotes glory:
How much should i emphasize that I am female in my life if the goal is to have the most impact on female representation in STEM I can as one person?

But actually i would really appreciate thoughts or research or statistics on this.

If we accept the premise that stereotypes play a role in all this, [6]
in my mind there are two approaches to being a female entrepreneur:
1) be a diva (combat “1337 male hacker” with “1337 female hacker”)
2) be an everyday person (“all types can be female programmer”)
For 1), I look up to people like ladyada (on the cover of WIRED) and debbie sterling (goldieblox). When I talked to ladayada / ptorrone they said they explicitly grew the company so that ladyada (a) gets to do as much technical work as possible and (b) remains as the publicly visible front of the company. And it’s sort of nice in an aggressive way to be in-your-face feminine and competent, to try to break the link between feminine and competency. Also people have told me that female role models are very important.

For 2), there’s a reactionary sentiment against over-sensationalizing that you’re female [3] and  instead emphasizing being a human being [7], but I don’t know if this is just “be humble” “be quiet and skinny and take up less space.”  [5] In this case, I’ll should just be my normal not particularly feminine self.
In particular, I would appreciate help finding science about either of these approaches instead of just gut instincts / blog posts. I can’t seem to word my question appropriately for google scholar though.

To some extent it doesn’t matter immediately since i know which approach i prefer (#2) and it’s better to act than philosophize all the time, but I am struggling to find research that isn’t just a bunch of academics being confused as to why progress is stalled [1] [2] (maybe it is a reflection of conditions 10 years ago?). But in media production for the course, I can easily play up being feminine (nail polish, makeup, clothing) or not. I wouldn’t mind this at all, and it sort of plays out haphazardly right now depending on how I feel.

Footnotes
[1] ” Moreover, as we will elaborate further, we have noticed a sense of alarm concerning trend in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines in general, and engineering in particular. It was possible in the recent past to point to gradual increases in the numbers of women in engineering and to define those increases as positive indicators. Any confidence that it was just a matter of time before gender equality in engineering would be achieved has, instead, been undermined by the reality that those increases have either slowed or stopped altogether.”
http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/swe/litreview2012/#/226 SWE 2012 compendium. I uploaded the relevant portion as a PDF here.

[2] “Women Gain in Some STEM Fields, but Not Computer Science”
“Computer science actually is more male-dominated today than it was two decades ago: Women received 29.6 percent of computer science B.A.’s in 1991, compared with 18.2 percent in 2010.” http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/15/women-gain-in-some-stem-fields-but-not-computer-science/

[3] ” I don’t see any solution other than time and perseverance.  Meanwhile I’m sick of writing about it; I’m bored silly with it.  So I’m going to cut to the chase, close my eyes, and pretend the problem is solved; we’ve made a great cultural leap forward and the whole issue is over with. And I’m going to write the profile of an impressive astronomer and not once mention that she’s a woman.”
http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2013/01/17/5266/

[4] http://miters.mit.edu/blog/2012/11/02/what-is-a-miters-2/ or for more commentary, skim through http://orangenarwhals.blogspot.com/2013/12/my-reply-to-charless-on-200gokart-us.html
In response to whether people were intimidated by MITERS’s reputation or not sent to all MIT undergraduate dorms via email:
 

[5] I also remember reading somewhere how this one programmer felt strongly that she was a “normal female” who left work at 5 and went out to shop for shoes and didn’t do hackathons during the weekends, and so she doesn’t really have role models she relates to. I also feel this way strongly due to my experience with MITERS where both M and F were “intimidated” by the hacker stereotype (although F more so statistically [4]).

[6] “But even when fields are defined more precisely, countries differ in some unexpected ways. A case in point is computer science in Malaysia and the U.S. While American computer scientists are depicted as male hackers and geeks, computer science in Malaysia is deemed well-suited for women because it’s seen as theoretical (not physical) and it takes place almost exclusively in offices (thought to be woman-friendly spaces). About half of Malaysian computer science degrees go to women.” http://contexts.org/articles/spring-2011/what-gender-is-science/

Look at all these countries with >50% of science degrees going to females! (it sounds like the post-graduation opportunities are still lacking though)

[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finkbeiner_test

. To pass the test, an article about a female scientist must not mention:

  • The fact that she’s a woman
  • Her husband’s job
  • …

END.

Uncategorized

donation time!

I almost never give to people on the streets. I think my logic is very flawed (irrational fear I’m being taken for naive idiot (does my chinese-american culture play into this?)), but it’s habit by now. I will redress my beliefs at some point in the near future with more research.

In the meantime as I’ve graduated college and started to become an adult, it’s time to consider contributing to organizations I believe in. It’s also true I shouldn’t be thinking about this just once a year, but I think I’ll take this step first and then worry about how morally correct or hypocritical all my actions are.

In part this self-reflection is triggered by this really funny and sobering TED talk:
“In one of the studies, we bring in rich and poor members of the community into the lab and give each of them the equivalent of 10 dollars. We told the participants that they could keep these 10 dollars for themselves, or they could share a portion of it, if they wanted to, with a stranger who is totally anonymous. They’ll never meet that stranger and the stranger will never meet them. And we just monitor how much people give. Individuals who made 25,000 sometimes under 15,000 dollars a year, gave 44 percent more of their money to the stranger than did individuals making 150,000 or 200,000 dollars a year.”

To that end:
(some research that I then ignore)

I live in Boston/Somerville:

These issues affect people I know:

That’s it for today. Man, it sort of sucks that for all of these online donations at least 3% of it goes to credit card companies. Oh well, price of living.
 
Future research:
http://blog.ted.com/2013/05/20/20-resources-for-better-giving-and-living-a-more-altruistic-life/
Peter Singer is pretty controversial in that he proposes that “Effective altruism begins with reason – the realization that all lives are of equal value — and looking for charities that affect the most lives, the most effectively.” People (myself included) always get squeamish when we start applying economics to giving.

He started this site where people pledge to give 10% of their income:
http://www.givingwhatwecan.org/

with some more (interesting!) philosophizing here, where he answers thoughtful questions by readers:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/24/magazine/24singerqa.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

projects blog (nouyang)