Wanoah

I recently wrote about Ada Lovelace Day and I men­tioned in passing that girls tend to ini­tially sur­pass boys  at math­em­at­ics in school. Then some­thing hap­pens, and girls almost entirely dis­ap­pear from maths and the sci­ences. I vaguely remembered read­ing about this diver­gence in maths abil­it­ies as chil­dren pro­gress through school some­where, and went look­ing for sources. It seemed like there was this clear cause and effect thing going on: girls dis­ap­pear from the sci­ence dis­cip­lines at school for some reason,  res­ult­ing in a gender imbal­ance in related careers. After writ­ing that, it seemed like a gross sim­pli­fic­a­tion, and I thought I’d try and find out a bit more about what’s going on.

First, some more simplification:

Cour­tesy of xkcd.

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24^th March 2010 is Ada Lovelace Day.

Ada Lovelace Day is an inter­na­tional day of blog­ging to cel­eb­rate the achieve­ments of women in tech­no­logy and sci­ence. The idea is to write some­thing about a woman in tech­no­logy or sci­ence that you admire.

Mar­vel­lous! This is some­thing I can get behind. Hav­ing worked in IT for over a dec­ade now, I can say from my own exper­i­ence that it’s a field that remains heav­ily pop­u­lated by the male gender, with women a dis­tinct minor­ity. I also work for a large man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pany, and have wit­nessed the scarcity of women in the engin­eer­ing dis­cip­lines. It seems to me that we need to be encour­aging more women to join these pro­fes­sions. Sign me up.

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Scott Reid swore as he tripped over the chalk­board sign. Gusts of wind were howl­ing out of the North tonight, let­ting every­one know that winter still had some bite in it yet, and cas­u­ally mak­ing Scott’s life miser­able. He hadn’t grabbed his coat on the way out and, as a con­sequence, he was bloody frozen. Now, the wind had con­spired to knock this sign over for him to trip over in the dark­ness. The sign announced “Quiz Night!” to the sky. Scott kicked it out of his way, only slightly hurt­ing his foot, his mood unim­proved by the new intel­li­gence that the pub he was going into was hav­ing a quiz night.

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It should have been easy. I should keep remind­ing myself that that is a bad sign.

I’d been talk­ing with a friend, and I for­get all the details or how this came about, but there was a pub and there was a pub quiz involved. We got to the point where we were say­ing, “Yeah, and you’d prob­ably pull out a shot­gun and start killing people. Haha!” It struck me, then, that there was the germ of a story here: girl goes bal­listic at a pub quiz and starts shoot­ing people. I said, “This sounds like the begin­nings of a story here,” and that was it, I was com­mit­ted to it. (more…)

dadadadada DaDaDaDaDa DADADADADA

I wake up with a jerk and grope for the ‘OK’ but­ton on my phone to silence the alarm. Six thirty.

dadadadada DaDaDaDaDa DADADADADA

I wake up with a jerk and grope for the ‘OK’ but­ton on my phone to silence the alarm. Six thirty. I groan at the earli­ness. It’s inhu­man to be awake at this hour. (more…)

I felt a small tingle of excite­ment as I walked out of the sta­tion and clambered into the back of a black cab. Was it excite­ment? Or just a touch of nerves? They can feel like the same thing, can’t they? I’m not really sure what I’m anti­cip­at­ing, but this city holds some pretty strong memor­ies for me. It’s dif­fi­cult. I haven’t been back here since…well it’s been a while. It’s like return­ing to the scene of a crime. I’m hoping…I’m hop­ing for what exactly? For it to still be the place that lives and breathes in my mind? For it not to have changed? Or for it to have changed out of all recog­ni­tion? I’m really not sure. Every street is paved with his­tory. (more…)