When Women Don't Speak Up

From YahooNews:  When Women Don't Speak Up

Women who are outnumbered by men in a group are less likely to speak their mind.  In fact, new research has found that women speak 75 percent less than men when in such a setting.

To prove this, Chris Karpowitz, the lead study author and a political scientist at Brigham Young University, and Tali Mendelberg, study co-author and a professor at Princeton, observed how groups  discussed how to distribute money earned from a hypothetical task. The researchers had participants vote by secret ballot with half the groups following a majority vote and the other half following a unanimous vote.

"Women have something unique and important to add to the group, and that's being lost at least under some circumstances," Karpowitz said. "When women participated more, they brought unique and helpful perspectives to the issue under discussion. We’re not just losing the voice of someone who would say the same things as everybody else in the conversation."

When voting by majority decision, women deferred speaking if outnumbered by men in a group.  However, when voting unanimously, the researchers found that women were much more vocal , suggesting that consensus building was empowering for outnumbered women. The researchers also found that groups arrived at different decisions when women did participate. These findings, however, are not simply limited to business settings.

"In school boards, governing boards of organizations and firms, and legislative committees, women are often a minority of members and the group uses majority rule to make its decisions," Mendelberg said. "These settings will produce a dramatic inequality in women's floor time and in many other ways. Women are less likely to be viewed and to view themselves as influential in the group and to feel that their 'voice is heard.'"

The research was published by American Political Science Review, an academic journal specializing in political science. The researchers observed 94 groups of at least five people.

 

Female Science Gurus Become Mentors For Undergrad Girls

From the HuffPost:  Female Science Gurus Become Mentors For Undergrad Girls

Women in Technology Sharing Online (WitsOn) is a new six-week pilot program that will connect undergraduate students with prominent female online mentors in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields. The program is sponsored by Maria Klawe, president of Harvey Mudd College, and will begin October 1.
The New York Times reports that even though women earn more college degrees than men, they claim less than 20 percent of the undergraduate degrees in STEM fields.
Undergraduates at participating universities can submit questions to the online mentors, and receive answers, advice and maybe even job offers. Prominent mentors include Mae C. Jemison, the first black female astronaut and Jacqueline K. Barton, the chairwoman of the chemistry department at Caltech.
Dr. Erin Cadwalader, Public Policy Fellow at the Association for Women in Science, said her organization was thrilled to hear about the program. She says it’s important for women in science fields to see and interact with successful role models. “Feeling like you belong is a huge part of it, and it has a huge impact on whether women choose to go into these fields,” she said.
She said the most important thing a mentor could tell an undergraduate student would be to stress what makes science attractive in the first place, and to show young women that she is intellectually satisfied and has high job satisfaction. “You don’t want to spend your whole life fighting against the current. It’s important to know that there are lots of happy women in science,” she said.
Cadwalader says the program has great potential if it proves to be successful, and would like to see the idea expanded to reach women in all stages of their professional pathway: postdoctoral students, graduate students and even women applying for positions as professors in universities. “One of the big problems isn’t getting women into STEM jobs, but the many reasons why they drop out of the pipeline: lack of recognition, work-life satisfaction, or in engineering they feel isolated because they’re a minority... It doesn’t create an environment they want to stay in,” she said. “Helping women help other women is key to moving that forward,” she said.
Originally published on Youthradio.org, the premier source for youth generated news throughout the globe.

 

Posts resume 24 Sep 2012

My mom, who is 75, wants to go up to teeny tiny town near Rapid City, to see her sister, who is 80. They live in a house in the boonies and have no internet.

I'll be back online on Monday the 24th and promise not to miss another day.

Please bear with me, your patience is appreciated!

'Princess Scientist' Trend, Aimed To Draw Girls To STEM, Stirs Controversy

From Huff Post:  'Princess Scientist' Trend, Aimed To Draw Girls To STEM, Stirs Controversy 

By: Jeremy Hsu, InnovationNewsDaily Senior Writer
Published: 09/10/2012 11:48 AM EDT on InnovationNewsDaily

Whenever Erika Ebbel Angle shows up wearing her Miss Massachusetts tiara at tapings of her television show, all the kids in the live studio audience go "Oooooh!" But it takes more than a tiara to define Angle: She's an MIT graduate with a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Boston University and the founder of the nonprofit organization Science from Scientists, as well as the host of a 10-minute science show on regional cable TV. And she's preparing to enter the entrepreneurial world with her own biotech startup.
The value of beauty and brains combined is rarely emphasized outside Hollywood, but early feedback from "The Dr. Erika Show" suggests many younger girls have embraced the message Angle is sending when she pairs the pageant tiara with a lab coat in her eponymous TV show. Girls have told the show's producers they want to become "princess scientists."
"Science comes with a stigma that if you are a female scientist, you have no other interests and you are a sweatpants-wearing person who has no interest in your own physical appearance or maintenance," Ebbel Angle said.
In Japan, a similar desire to combat the geeky stereotypes of science drives the "Miss Rikei Contest," organized by a student group and scheduled for Sept. 12. Six female finalists chosen from among Japanese university students and researchers will compete for votes based on the criteria of beauty, intelligence and making contributions to improving the image of science. ("Rikei" means "science" in Japanese.)
But female scientists may resent the idea that their physical appearance is up for scrutiny at all. Scientists of both genders are just as varied in appearance as those in any other profession, and several researchers interviewed by LiveScience suggested style choices shouldn't be nearly as discussion-worthy as their work. [5 Myths About Girls, Math and Science]
Efforts to incorporate feminine beauty into the role model for scientists can also touch a sensitive nerve because women have fought so long to get beyond female stereotypes in the historically male-dominated fields of science and engineering. While Ebbel Angle's TV show focuses on helping out students with their science projects or investigating science questions, the pageant-style format of the Miss Rikei Contest has received more mixed reactions.
Beauty and the geek
The Miss Rikei Contest caused a minor stir among U.S. scientists, journalists and educators after Joanne Manaster, online course developer and lecturer of science courses for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, alerted her Twitter followers to the pageant's existence.
"One of the websites I found [discussing the contest] included comments that were all from men who were viscerally reacting to the pretty women," Manaster said. "I think this bothers people who are in science, especially women who want to be taken seriously."
Organizers of the Miss Rikei Contest did not respond to requests for comment. But LiveScience also asked the opinions of three young Japanese women who received bachelor's degrees in science or engineering from universities in Japan. Two of the three agreed to comment only on condition of anonymity.
"Yukari," a biology researcher at a university in New York City, called the Miss Rikei Contest "superficial" and resisted the idea of trying to make science appear more overtly feminine, in the stereotypical sense of the word.
"I rather like the idea that it's an oasis for geeky people that doesn't much care about what the rest of the world is concerned about," Yukari said. "There's something about science for me that overrides this image of male-dominant and geeky, so that if you can see how important or fun science is, it doesn't matter if it's male-dominated or geeky or doesn't pay as much as finance."
"Rin," a neuroscience researcher at a university in New York City, predicted the Miss Rikei Contest would prove ineffective as a means of encouraging more Japanese women to pursue science careers. [Mommy Track: Why Women Leave Science, Math Careers]
"Any female scientists who have done great work in their field could be great models for young students," Rin said. "These scientists don't have to be like a super-model or actress."
Kanae Kobayashi, who is working for a Japanese securities company after earning bachelor's and master's degrees in industrial engineering, shrugged off the contest as harmless — "seems like fun" — but she, too, thinks it will do little to encourage young women to pursue science careers.
Helpful or harmful
Harmless or ineffective is one matter. But can promoting the ideal of female beauty and brains actually discourage girls or young women from pursuing science? That possibility arose from a University of Michigan study in the March issue of the journal Social Psychological & Personality Science.
The study found that feminine role models decreased girls' interest and ability in math, and also lowered their expectations of success in the short run. Such "beauty-focused" role models also discouraged future plans to study math among girls who had not previously identified an interest in science, technology, engineering or math.
Diana Betz and Denise Sekaquaptewa, the psychology researchers behind the Michigan study, noted that past research by Sapna Cheryan, a psychology researcher at the University of Washington, confirmed how "geeky role models" also can discourage women in fields such as computer science.
So what's a female role model to do?
"On the surface, it might look like a 'Damned if you're feminine, damned if you're not' situation," Betz and Sekaquaptewa told LiveScience in an email. "But really, it's about extremes: Role models should broaden examples of who can succeed in different fields, not limit them to one stereotyped image or another."
The researchers suggested that girls and young women need to see diversity among female role models so that they don't associate science with just one type of person — whether that type is "geeks" or "girly girls."
"Perhaps the best way to encourage girls to explore math and science is to expose them to real female mathematicians and scientists," Betz and Sekaquaptewa wrote. "Girls need to learn that scientists are real, complex people, just like them, and that they have diverse kinds of jobs with varied goals." [Creative Genius: The World's Greatest Minds]
The pair also pointed out that what discourages girls or young women is an unattainable ideal, but added that the idea of "unattainable" may change among different age groups. That's why young girls may idolize "Dr. Erika" for her pageant poise and science smarts even as middle-school girls turn away with resignation from super-model role models in science.
Giving science a makeover
Feminine stereotypes historically have haunted women scientists, including Rosalind Franklin, a co-discoverer of DNA. In his 1968 account "The Double Helix," James Watson, one of the genetics pioneers who had relied on Franklin's work, unflatteringly recounted Franklin's lack of lipstick and her unwillingness to dress in a more feminine manner.
But the idea of combining "beauty and brains" may represent progress of sorts. Two decades ago, Teen Talk Barbie was telling young American girls, "Math class is tough." The Miss Rikei Contest stands directly opposed to that message, as does Ebbel Angle's encouragement of young girls who want to become princess scientists.
Ebbel Angle defended the pageant idea behind the Japanese contest, but was careful to distinguish between beauty pageants (Miss Universe) and scholarship pageants (Miss America). She told of appreciating the social skills and confidence that came from competing over several years to become Miss Massachusetts after her friends at MIT initially signed her up for a local pageant without her knowledge.
"From what I can read about the Miss Science program, it gives them a chance to prove they have beauty and brains," Ebbel Angle told LiveScience. "I see nothing wrong with that. These are grown women who are in graduate programs and undergraduate programs, deciding what they want their image to be."
In the end, Ebbel Angle sees the pageant crown as a symbol of possibility — girls and young women having the ability to love science and also be dancers, musicians, soccer players or whatever they desire. "It's less about the crown, more about the message," Ebbel Angle said.
Manaster, the science educator who alerted so many people to the Miss Rikei Contest through Twitter, acknowledged her own appearance can make a difference when she does science outreach on TV or at an engineering camp for girls — she is a former fashion model. But she emphasized the importance of focusing on the love of doing science.
"Maybe it's enough to show women scientists who are passionate about their work," Manaster said. "Do science if you love it, and if you happen to be feminine, that's great. If you're not, that's great too."

 

Iran's War on Women Students May Backfire

From the HuffPost - An Op Ed Piece:  Iran's War on Women Students May Backfire

Iran's woeful deception and hypocrisy on women's human rights is particularly prominent this week while Tehran hosts the 16th Non-Aligned Movement summit to "eliminate international problems" and assumes the NAM's presidency for the next three years.

The summit follows the recent announcement of a ban on female students in Iranian universities.
In the coming academic year, 36 universities will implement exclusion of women from 77 fields of study, including chemistry, computer science, nuclear physics, engineering, business management, education and English. Gholamrez Rashed, the head of the University of Petroleum Technology, declared: "We do not need female students at all."

Science Minister Kamran Daneshjoo claimed that sexual segregation was of the utmost priority in order to uphold moral standards and effect greater balance in gender enrolment. About 70 percent of science graduates are female.

Other concerns include an unemployment rate of more than 20 percent for people under 30 and about 28 percent for women, and the trend for more traditional families to seek education for daughters, allowing them unsupervised boarding in cities.

The rise of female education is associated with declining rates of marriage and birth. Fertility has dropped from about six children a family at the time of the Iranian revolution to fewer than two.

Educated women are more likely to marry later and less likely to marry uneducated men.

Educated and unemployed women who know their rights are a danger to a male-dominated culture that relegates them to second-class status, and to religio-political authorities that derive legitimacy from patriarchy, supremacism and claims to exclusive knowledge of the divine.

The latest bans continue the Islamic Republic's policy of oppressing and disempowering women through sexual segregation, enforced Islamic dress codes, polygyny, early marriage, court testimony worth half that of a man's, leniency for honor killings, stoning sentences, blocking reformist websites and so on.

Activists involved with the One Million Signatures Campaign Demanding Changes to Discriminatory Laws have been persecuted and imprisoned since 2005.

Unlike in most other Muslim countries, political dissent in post-revolutionary Iran has been expressed in universities rather than mosques, which has led the regime to fear these institutions as incubators of subversion. Feminist student groups are regarded as the most seditious.

Noble Laureate Shirin Ebadi has declared that the new educational restrictions are designed to undermine the feminist movement by reducing the numbers of female students from 65 percent at present to 50 percent, and has made a formal complaint to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

U.N. protection for Iranian women would seem unlikely, as the organisation has not offered much support to reformers in the past.

Iran also enjoys prominent positions in major U.N. voting blocs such as the NAM, which comprises two-thirds of U.N. members, and the Organisation of Islamic Co-operation with 56 member countries.
During the recent meeting of the OIC, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was pointedly placed next to the Saudi monarch.

Nevertheless, in March last year, 52 nations, including many members of the U.N. not on the 47-member Human Rights Council, co-sponsored a resolution calling for a special investigator to monitor Iran's compliance with international human rights standards.

The decision followed reports of persecution of minority groups including the Baha'is, who have suffered a long-term ban on university attendance.

Women fought hard against educational sanctions and other restrictions imposed by the Islamic Republic. By 1991, they had won the right to quotas within certain academic fields, and during a period of limited freedom of assembly and association under reformist president Mohammad Khatami, activists established more than 600 non-government organisations that advanced women's rights.

Restriction of freedom was intensified under Ahmadinejad, who introduced gender-based policies to decrease female quotas and increase male quotas in some university fields.

Activists who organised university sit-ins for women's rights and street demonstrations have risked beatings and detention, and many still languish in prison.

Women marched in the forefront of the protests following Ahmadinejad's disputed re-election in 2009, and were arguably the vanguard for the uprisings of the Arab Spring.

The government, which has distanced itself from the recent education bans introduced by universities, risks a backlash.

The women's movement emerged in part to oppose the regime's policy of limiting admittance of female students to universities and women activists have shown remarkable courage in challenging the authoritarian theocracy.

Reformers will see through the current hypocrisy and blame the government for the latest round.

Iranian feminists still retain potent reserves of energy and determination for confrontation with their turbaned inquisitors. And in truth they have little left to lose.

Stanford biologist and computer scientist discover the 'anternet'

From Stanford Engineering:  Stanford biologist and computer scientist discover the 'anternet'

A collaboration between a Stanford ant biologist and a computer scientist has revealed that the behavior of harvester ants as they forage for food mirrors the protocols that control traffic on the Internet.

By Bjorn Carey

On the surface, ants and the Internet don't seem to have much in common. But two Stanford researchers have discovered that a species of harvester ants determine how many foragers to send out of the nest in much the same way that Internet protocols discover how much bandwidth is available for the transfer of data. The researchers are calling it the "anternet."

Deborah Gordon, a biology professor at Stanford, has been studying ants for more than 20 years. When she figured out how the harvester ant colonies she had been observing in Arizona decided when to send out more ants to get food, she called across campus to Balaji Prabhakar, a professor of computer science at Stanford and an expert on how files are transferred on a computer network. At first he didn't see any overlap between his and Gordon's work, but inspiration would soon strike.

"The next day it occurred to me, 'Oh wait, this is almost the same as how [Internet] protocols discover how much bandwidth is available for transferring a file!'" Prabhakar said. "The algorithm the ants were using to discover how much food there is available is essentially the same as that used in the Transmission Control Protocol."

Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP, is an algorithm that manages data congestion on the Internet, and as such was integral in allowing the early web to scale up from a few dozen nodes to the billions in use today. Here's how it works: As a source, A, transfers a file to a destination, B, the file is broken into numbered packets. When B receives each packet, it sends an acknowledgment, or an ack, to A, that the packet arrived.
This feedback loop allows TCP to run congestion avoidance: If acks return at a slower rate than the data was sent out, that indicates that there is little bandwidth available, and the source throttles data transmission down accordingly. If acks return quickly, the source boosts its transmission speed. The process determines how much bandwidth is available and throttles data transmission accordingly.

It turns out that harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex barbatus) behave nearly the same way when searching for food. Gordon has found that the rate at which harvester ants – which forage for seeds as individuals – leave the nest to search for food corresponds to food availability.

A forager won't return to the nest until it finds food. If seeds are plentiful, foragers return faster, and more ants leave the nest to forage. If, however, ants begin returning empty handed, the search is slowed, and perhaps called off.

Prabhakar wrote an ant algorithm to predict foraging behavior depending on the amount of food – i.e., bandwidth – available. Gordon's experiments manipulate the rate of forager return. Working with Stanford student Katie Dektar, they found that the TCP-influenced algorithm almost exactly matched the ant behavior found in Gordon's experiments.

"Ants have discovered an algorithm that we know well, and they've been doing it for millions of years," Prabhakar said.

They also found that the ants followed two other phases of TCP. One phase is known as slow start, which describes how a source sends out a large wave of packets at the beginning of a transmission to gauge bandwidth; similarly, when the harvester ants begin foraging, they send out foragers to scope out food availability before scaling up or down the rate of outgoing foragers.

Another protocol, called time-out, occurs when a data transfer link breaks or is disrupted, and the source stops sending packets. Similarly, when foragers are prevented from returning to the nest for more than 20 minutes, no more foragers leave the nest.

Prabhakar said that had this discovery been made in the 1970s, before TCP was written, harvester ants very well could have influenced the design of the Internet.

Gordon thinks that scientists have just scratched the surface for how ant colony behavior could help us in the design of networked systems.

There are 11,000 species of ants, living in every habitat and dealing with every type of ecological problem, Gordon said. "Ants have evolved ways of doing things that we haven't thought up, but could apply in computer systems. Computationally speaking, each ant has limited capabilities, but the collective can perform complex tasks.

"So ant algorithms have to be simple, distributed and scalable – the very qualities that we need in large engineered distributed systems," she said. "I think as we start understanding more about how species of ants regulate their behavior, we'll find many more useful applications for network algorithms."

The paper, "The Regulation of Ant Colony Foraging Activity without Spatial Information," appears in the August 23 issue of PLoS Computational Biology.

 

‘Marie Curie and Her Daughters’ by Shelley Emling

From the Boston Globe:  ‘Marie Curie and Her Daughters’ by Shelley Emling

Marie Curie achieved many “firsts” in her lifetime. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, and the first to win it twice. She remains the only laureate to have won in two scientific fields: physics (1903) and chemistry (1911). Along with her husband, Pierre, she discovered two new elements, radium and polonium. And she was the first person to use the word “radioactivity.”

Of course, author Shelley Emling is hardly the first to chronicle the extraordinary life of Madame Curie, born Marie Sklodowska in Warsaw in 1867. Just two years ago, Lauren Redniss published “Radioactive,” a remarkable, gorgeously designed book accompanied by the author’s cyanotype artwork and drawings.
In “Marie Curie and Her Daughters,” Emling covers some familiar terrain, but whereas many biographical accounts of Curie conclude after the scientist’s second Nobel Prize, this book essentially begins in 1911, exploring in depth the last 20 or so years of Curie’s life. Until her final days (she died in 1934), Curie remained a dedicated and much-celebrated scientist — launching not one but two major research institutes — yet she never profited financially from her achievements.

Most notably, Emling offers an intimate look at Curie’s relationship with her children, which involved many long separations but lacked no shortage of mutual devotion. Curie’s granddaughter Helene shared with Emling her mother’s private reminiscences of Curie, as well as a trove of more than 200 letters between Marie and her two daughters. The correspondence reveals how, even as Curie’s daughters yearned for her, they accepted how utterly dedicated she was to her scientific work. Because of her career demands, Curie missed several of her daughters’ birthdays. At the end of her life, she was clearly playing catch up — making up for lost time, getting to know her daughters on a deeper level, and becoming a doting grandmother.
Curie had become a single mother at 38, when Pierre died (in 1906) after being run over by a horse-drawn wagon in Paris. She was left alone to raise two young children — Irene, who also became a Nobel Prize-winning chemist; and Eve, a humanitarian who would write an award-winning biography of her mother (and who lived to the age of 102).

After Pierre’s death, Curie fell in love with a married scientist, Paul Langevin. Their affair was bitterly exposed by Langevin’s wife, who released the couple’s anguished love letters to the press. Curie was devastated. She suffered public humiliation, severe damage to her reputation, and became suicidal. Her recovery from this painful period was lengthy and arduous.

Emling shows how Curie’s 1921 trip to the United States, to raise funding for her Radium Institute in Paris, proved transformative. A comeback of sorts, it also allowed her a seven-week trip with her daughters. They treasured this precious time with her. Curie was treated to a stream of ceremonies, celebrations, and honorary degrees. Like a rock star, she was besieged by fans at every stop. She also formed a close friendship with a journalist, Missy Meloney, who had helped bring Curie to the States and championed her work. Curie, who was later able to make one more trip to the United States, despite her failing health, felt deeply grateful for America’s generosity and open-hearted spirit.

This fascinating, moving story falters only in the last few chapters, when it runs out of steam and includes some needless filler. The book’s final line is an inexplicable clunker, as if written for a high school textbook: “And if for no other reason, that is why ‘Manya’ Marie Sklodowska Curie is one person worth learning more about.”

Still, that weak conclusion doesn’t diminish the inspiring message conveyed throughout the book: that Curie was driven by “the sheer pleasure of the beauty of science, and the enormous satisfaction derived from making the previously unknowable known.”