A recent study conducted by the Consumer Electronics Association discovered that older women play far more computer games than older men.

The survey suggests that only 35% of men aged 25-34 play computer games whilst a staggering 65% of women of the same age play games. Women are more likely to play free games such as Solitaire and Minesweeper than a man and so despite having minimal representation in the worlds of PC and console gaming, in the world of the freebie game, woman is King (or rather, Queen).

Alas, if you'd like to know more, looks like you'll have to fork over $499 for the privilege. Studies don't grow on trees, you know.

Call me a humorless feminist if you like, but if their readership is really 98% male and 110% heterosexual, they have nobody to blame but themselves.

(A Goatse theme would have been kind of funny, though)

Born in contemporary times, free of the male-dominated legacy common to other sciences and engineering, computer science could have become a model for gender equality. In the early 1980s, it had one of the highest proportions of female undergraduates in science and engineering. And yet with remarkable speed, it has become one of the least gender-balanced fields in American society.

In a year of heated debate about why there aren't more women in science, the conversation has focused largely on discrimination, the conflicts between the time demands of the scientific career track and family life, and what Harvard University President Lawrence H. Summers famously dubbed ''intrinsic aptitude."

But the history of computer science demonstrates that more elusive cultural factors can have a major impact on a field's ability to attract women.

As the popularity of computer science soared in the first half of the 1980s, many university departments became overburdened and more competitive, some professors argue. Introductory classes were taught in a way that emphasized technical minutiae over a broader sense of what was important and exciting about the field, a style catering to the diehard -- and overwhelmingly male -- techies rather than curious new recruits. The last thing educators, besieged by students, worried about was attracting more, so they didn't see the need to combat the image that took root in popular culture of the male computer geek with poor hygiene and glazed eyes.

The article suggests that if schools don't start trying to explain the "big picture" behind computer science and make it sound more appealing soon, the United States will be in trouble:

Though the enormous impact of computers on society makes the development of computer science at the college level unique in some ways, some scientists believe it offers a warning to other sciences as well. In fact, something similar happened in physics after World War II, when the atomic bomb catapulted the subject to preeminence in society, according to David Kaiser, a physicist and historian of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Facing a sudden and dramatic rise in enrollments, physics departments grew less intimate and coped with the crowds by teaching the subject in a more routinized and less creative way.

The percentage of women studying physics, already low, dropped dramatically and stayed in the single digits for decades. Eventually the physics bubble burst for men as well, and today a high percentage of the country's physicists are foreign-born.

Some computer scientists fear that they may be going in the same direction. They view the dearth of women as symptomatic of a larger failure in their field, which has recently become less attractive to promising young men, as well. Women are ''the canaries in the mine," said Harvard computer science professor Barbara J. Grosz.

In the wake of the dot-com bust, the number of new computer science majors in 2004 was 40 percent lower than in 2000, according to the Computing Research Association. The field has seen ups and downs before, and some think the numbers for men will soon improve at least a bit. But the percentage of undergraduate majors who are female has barely budged in a dozen years.

The shortage of new computer scientists threatens American leadership in technological innovation just as countries such as China and India are gearing up for the kind of competition the United States has never before faced.

Some schools are organizations are trying to come up with creative solutions.

Introductory classes zeroed in on programming and other technical aspects of the field, rather than explaining big ideas or talking about how computing can impact society, many professors say. That approach led to a misconception among students that computer science is the same thing as computer programming. Computer scientists say that view shortchanges the field, which is far broader and more intellectually rich. It is applied math and design, they say; it is about modeling human behavior and thinking about the simplest way to accomplish a complex task.

When [Diane] Souvaine joined the Tufts faculty in 1998, she was dismayed that there were few female students in the introductory course. So she and a colleague designed a new freshman seminar focused on problem-solving and real-life applications.

On a recent afternoon, Soha Hassoun, who is now teaching that class, lit up a drab cinder-block classroom with her boisterous questions. The topic of the day was how to get a computer to determine whether a particular point is inside or outside a geometric shape.

Hassoun's focus was on logical thinking, and she set aside only a few minutes for students to write their answers in computer code.

''Here's the big question. Why do we care about this?" she asked rhetorically, then went on to explain that that same method could help determine which diabetes tests are the best predictors of the disease. The class would later work on just that task.

The first time Souvaine taught the freshman seminar, there were 14 men and 14 women, and seven of each gender went on to major in the field. The number of female undergraduate majors remains low, but Souvaine sees reason for hope. About 30 percent of students now in lower-level classes are women.

On a broader level, the National Science Foundation will soon announce a new set of grants to universities, high schools, and industry groups with creative ideas for attracting women to computer science. A two-year-old organization called the National Center for Women & Information Technology has designated several schools and groups, including the Girl Scouts, to identify solutions.

"In computer science, a growing gender gap", Marcella Bombardieri, Boston Globe, December 18, 2005

From the Oakland Tribune:

In Erin Zane's science classroom at Bret Harte Middle School after classes Tuesday, 18 girls made lists of fun uses for everyday items.

A paper clip could be used as a bending toy, one group concluded. A penny could be tossed or hidden. A Post-It note could be folded into a miniature paper airplane.

The point of the exercise was to get the girls to think differently about common objects and to learn a bit about play. It will help them as they develop new toys, acting as mechanical engineers for the after-school Techbridge program sponsored by Chabot Space & Science Center.

Techbridge was developed by Chabot in 2000 to get girls interested in science. They are introduced to scientific concepts through dialogue and hands-on activities in girls-only classrooms.

--> "Girls show off technical skills; Techbridge program introduces students to scientific concepts through a hands-on approach", Laura Casey, Oakland Tribune, December 14, 2005

The GamerGirl team over at Gamergod.com has an interesting article delving into a male driven industry. This time the subject of discussion is the sometimes overzealous portrayal of women in games." A well-considered piece, with thoughtful references to the works of Camille Paglia and Naomi Wolf. From the article: "He also highlights several games that, instead of focusing on the female form in its big-breasted glory, showcase women who are intelligent, strong, and powerful. He insists, 'The protagonists highlighted above illustrate that plenty of excitement can be provided by female leads who will, in turn, bring in female gamers - not to speak of richer gameplay options. Additionally, as McIntosh says, most women gamers are "confident enough not to feel threatened" by sexist imagery, merely finding it annoying and disappointing.'"

In the ensuing discussion, one Slashdotter was moved to make this inspiring statement:

"I'd rather live in a society where female video game characters are portrayed the way horny teen males wold [sic] have them rather than a society where character designs are dictated to you in the name of equality."

Normally, Womeninit tries not to dabble in sarcasm, but is this time moved to enquire whether there's a third option on offer... 

For extra credit in a math class Britney was given the challenge to fold anything in half 12 times.  After extensive experimentation, she folded a sheet of gold foil 12 times, breaking the record. This was using alternate directions of folding.  But, the challenge was then redefined to fold a piece of paper. She studied the problem and was the first person to realize the basic cause for the limits.  She then derived the folding limit equation for any given dimension. Limiting equations were derived for the case of folding in alternate directions and for the case of folding in a single direction using a long strip of paper. The merits of both folding  approaches are discussed, but for high numbers of folds, single direction folding requires less paper.

--> http://accordionguy.blogware.com/blog/ _archives/2005/11/16/1408517.html

It turns out even the president of Women in Technology International, which had a booth at the show, is a man. David Leighton said his mother founded the group, and he has since taken over.

Leighton said he believes the male skew is largely due to the newness of the medium and the fact that many of the most popular podcasts focus on, uh, podcasting.

"Any of these new, cool mediums tend to attract guys at first," he said. "Right now, it's technology for technology's sake. Once we see more practical uses, we'll start seeing more women. It was that way with the internet and e-mail usage, too."

Safety concerns may also play a role, since podcasting is less anonymous than a website can be. One female-run podcast stopped production after receiving threats from a male stalker.

--> "Women Warm the Podcast Bench", Steve Frieiss, Wired, November 16, 2005, http://www.wired.com/news/culture/ 0,1284,69583,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_2

Pamela Samuelson honored by the Anita Borg Institute

Pamela Samuelson was recently honored by the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology. She is the first Women of Vision winner in the Social Impact category.

The Women of Vision Award winners were selected from a field of more than 60 nominees, all of who are engaged in technology in industry, academia or government. The Women of Vision Award for Social Impact recognizes a woman who has significantly influenced the ways in which technology impacts society and/or the community, creating positive change in our world.

Pamela Samuelson is a McArthur Prize Winner and a professor at the University of California at Berkeley with a joint appointment in the School of Information Management & Systems and the School of Law. She teaches courses on intellectual property, cyber law and information policy. Pam received the University of Hawaii 's distinguished alumni award, has been named one of the nation's 50 most influential lawyers, one of the 100 most influential people in the digital age, and one of the 25 most intriguing minds of the new economy.

For more information on Professor Samuelson or to read her acceptance speech, please go to http://www.anitaborg.org/womenofvision/winners05/psamuelson_acc.htm.

 Congratulations, Professor Samuelson!

--> www.blogher.org 

The main article begins thusly:

The rest of us were left with a nagging question: What is the latest science on the differences between men's and women's aptitudes, anyway? Is it true, even a little bit, that men are better equipped for scientific genius? Or is it ridiculous—even pernicious—to ask such a question in the year 2005?

It's always perilous to use science to resolve festering public debates. Everyone sees something different—like 100 people finding shapes in clouds. By the time they make up their minds, the clouds have drifted beyond the horizon. But scientists who have spent their lives studying sex differences in the brain (some of whom defend Summers and some of whom dismiss him as an ignoramus) generally concede that he was not entirely wrong. Thanks to new brain-imaging technology, we know there are indeed real differences between the male and the female brain, more differences than we would have imagined a decade ago. "The brain is a sex organ," says Sandra Witelson, a neuroscientist who became famous in the 1990s for her study of Albert Einstein's brain. "In the last dozen years, there has been an exponential increase in the number of studies that have found differences in the brain. It's very exciting."

But that's just the beginning of the conversation. It turns out that many of those differences don't seem to change our behavior. Others do—in ways we might not expect. Some of the most dramatic differences are not just in our brains but also in our eyes, noses and ears—which feed information to our brains. Still, almost none of those differences are static. The brain is constantly changing in response to hormones, encouragement, practice, diet and drugs. Brain patterns fluctuate within the same person, in fact, depending on age and time of day. So while Summers was also right that more men than women make up the extreme high—and low—scorers in science and math tests, it's absurd to conclude that the difference is primarily because of biology—or environment. The two interact from the time of conception, which only makes life more interesting.

• Who Says A Woman Can't Be Einstein? Amanda Ripley, Time, March 7, 2005
  
• Steering Girls into Science, Julie Rawe, Time, March 7, 2005 
• The Iceland Exception, Vivian Walt, Time, March 7, 2005
• First Person/"Bad Idea. You'll Flunk Out", Pat Galloway, Time, March 7, 2005
  

Fiorina topped Fortune magazine's "50 Most Powerful Women in Business" list every year from the list's introduction in 1988 through to 2004, when eBay's Meg Whitman displaced her. After majoring in college in medieval history and philosophy, Fiorina went on to a business career that began with a position as a sales representative at AT&T Corp. and led to Lucent Technologies, where she guided its 1996 initial public offering and subsequent spin-off from AT&T. That put the ambitious Fiorina on the business world's radar, and soon after, HP wooed her to be its CEO.

In a paper scheduled to appear in the journal Intelligence... scientists in Germany report that only women with relatively low testosterone exposure scored worse than men on tests of spatial and numerical ability. Women with relatively high exposure compared with other women -- half the sample -- scored as well as men. However testosterone boosts the brain's spatial and numerical ability, an awful lot of women are getting enough of it to benefit, even when they're getting less than men.

In general, for every finding that boy brains have an edge (they're bigger) there's a finding that girl brains do. For instance, scientists reported in Nature Neuroscience last year that women's cortexes are more complex, with more of the intricate folds that underlie higher brain function such as that needed for science.

More important, if scientists have learned one thing about the brain it is that our gray matter is highly malleable, responding to signals from the outside world...

There's too much to quote, so it's worth reading the whole article, as well as two accompanying opinion pieces.

• "Harvard chief's words on innate differences lack basis in science", Sharon Begley, January 28, 2005, AP News / SFGate.com, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi? file=/news/archive/2005/01/28/financial1004EST0073.DTL
• "Encouragement, not gender, key to success in science", Janet L. Holmgren and Linda Basch, January 28, 2005, The Wall Street Journal / SFGate.com, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi? file=/chronicle/archive/2005/01/28/EDGD5B104O1.DTL
• "EDITORIAL: UC's women scientists", January 28, 2005, San Francisco Chronicle, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi? file=/chronicle/archive/2005/01/28/EDGD5B10541.DTL

Girls and young women in North America seem to do pretty darn well until they encounter the bullshit that is the culture of old-boy scientific and technical education. Then, amazingly, the genetic difference seems to kick in, somewhere between first year of undergrad and getting tenure and senior management positions. It must be a sort of delayed thing. As evidence, Summers cited his young daughter who played with trucks and named them mummy and daddy trucks. I had trucks too and I lost them in the sandbox, which clearly demonstrates my XX-dependent lack of spatial skills.