Women’s participation level in tech entrepreneurship — at 4.3 percent, according to Dow Jones VentureSource — is significantly lower than their representation in the field—at 26 percent. This makes many observers feel that there’s more than just a lack of interest in technology keeping women from participating in business creation.

Several facets of successful business creation suggest that differing experiences of men and women, compounded with an under representation in the technology sector, might better account for their starkly low numbers.

Photographer’s Description: Evil woman offering the executive apple of knowledge to a perfectly innocent guy who didn’t want anything but to succeed in life.

More funny captions a la Photographer’s Descriptions: Late Night, Discrepancy

Being a sexual object is mortifying and irritating, yet it’s giving you power—an awful power that you’ve done nothing to deserve, a powerless power. I think some young women fall in love with that power, and it’s really objectifying.

When you first get boobs you notice the power, but it takes a lot longer for some people to figure out what a powerless power it is.

A documentary film about what happens at the righteous Rock Camp is out this week. Directed by Arne Johnson and Shane King, Girls Rock! tracks four girls from different backgrounds during a weeklong hideaway in Portland, where they form bands, write songs and eventually throw a concert for hundreds. It’s a touching film. Friendships develop amidst creativity and conflict, teaching girls the true value of communication and self-esteem. Even better, the girls are guided through the process by some admirable women of rock, including Sleater-Kinney’s guitar shredder/singer Carrie Brownstein as well as Beth Ditto, booming vocalist extraordinaire from The Gossip.

From the mouth of Sandra Fu: Rock Has Come For Your Daughters

Sapna Cheryan, Stanford University
The Consequences of Identity Denial for Female Engineers

Sapna started her career in psychology as an undergraduate at Northwestern, where she double majored in Psychology and American Studies. After graduating, she did a two-year stint as a management consultant in Washington, DC. Although being in the “real world” was fun for a while, Sapna missed doing research and the university setting so she returned to school pursue a PhD in social psychology. Sapna research career to date has been a productive one. Her senior honors thesis, with Galen Bodenhausen, on stereotype threat in Asian American women, was published in Psychological Science, and her Masters thesis, with Benoît Monin, on Asian Americans and identity denial, was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Sapna is currently working on her dissertation research at Stanford University, which brings her theory of identity denial to the question of why female engineers drop out of their majors at a rate higher than their male peers. She suggests that one reason for this may be because women do not fit the image of the prototypical male engineer and are reminded of that fact in daily interactions. Indeed, in a recently completed study, she found that female engineers were mistaken as non-engineers more often than male engineers, and they reported being met with more surprise upon revealing their majors to strangers. These interactions may (perhaps unintentionally) signal to these women that they do not belong in the field.          

As you can imagine, finding female engineers willing to give up some of their valuable time to participate in studies is quite a challenge, and Sapna greatly appreciates having the funds to pay them, making her job as a recruiter of participants much more successful!

“Bitch is the New Black” (transcript added)

FEY: And finally, the most important Women’s News item there is, we have our first serious female presidential candidate in Hillary Clinton.
And yet, women have come so far as feminists, that they don’t feel obligated to vote for a candidate just because she’s a woman.

Women today feel perfectly free to make whatever choice Oprah tells them to.

Which raises the question, why are people abandoning Hillary for Obama?

Some say that they’re put off by the fact that Hillary can’t control her husband, and that we would end up with co-presidents.

‘Cause that would be terrible, having two intelligent, qualified people working together to solve problems. Ugh.

Why would you let Starsky talk to Hutch? I wanna watch that show, Starsky.

You know, what is it, America? What is it, are you weirded out that they’re married?

‘Cause I can promise you that they are having exactly as much sex with each other as George Bush and Jeb Bush are.

Then there is the physical scrutiny of her physical appearance.

Rush Limbaugh, the Jeff Conaway of right wing radio, said that he doesn’t think America is ready to watch their president quote “turn into an old lady in front of them.” Really?

They didn’t seem to mind when Ronald Reagan did that.

Maybe what bothers me the most is that people say that Hillary is a bitch.

Let me say something about that: Yeah, she is.

And so am I and so is this one. (pointing to Amy Poehler)

POEHLER: Yeah, deal with it.

FEY: Know what? Bitches get stuff done.

(Amy says yeah and starts nodding her head, together they get in a rhythm, with Amy saying in response, more yeahs, uh huhs, with a ‘you go girl’ style)

Like back in grammar school,

they could have had priests teaching you but, no,

they had those tough old nuns who slept on cots

and who could hit ya and you HATED those bitches

But at the end of the school year

you sure KNEW the capital of Vermont!

So COME ON Texas and Ohio

Get on board, it’s not too late!…

BITCH IS THE NEW BLACK!

Re: San Francisco Magazine article: Marissa Meyers as “Googirl”

By some quirk of fate, a copy of San Francisco Magazine arrived at my house today. If you’ve noticed this vapid glossy magazine for aspiring Not-LA and Not-NYC socialites, you will know why I was automatically tossing it in the trash. But there on the cover were the words “Google’s geek goddess”, and I had to look, knowing how annoyed I was about to become.

According to SF Magazine writer Julian Guthrie, Google’s employee #20 and first female engineer Marissa Mayer is “not what you expect.”

What the hell do you expect? Who is “you”? Some drooling dinosaurish idiot who not only thinks the important thing about women is a mix of prettiness, girliness to the point of infantilization, sexiness, etc but who also thinks that “we” the readers of the article would expect a gazillionaire engineer-turned-corporate-executive to be some kind of Hollywood Geek Girl stereotype with unkempt hair who needs to take off her glasses and stop being obsessed with computers to become pretty.

The article descends further into idiocy, still on page 1 of framing Mayer as a person and as a professional, by quoting some Valleywag posts calling her a social climber, implying that she got her job or position by dating Larry Page, and “using her looks”.

Guthrie quotes a Valleywag editor saying, “Marissa is surprisingly pretty in person. That in itself is a rarity in Silicon Valley, and you’d have to be naive to think that doesn’t color people’s views of her.”

Great. This is a rhetorical strategy common to misogynist bullshitters: undermine a woman’s achievements by claiming her main “achievement” is being pretty, or worse, implying she used her sexuality to get a little dollop of fake power and status from someone Actually Powerful who deserved it. When powerful smart men are friends with other powerful smart men, those personal relationships aren’t framed as devaluing their talents and skills. But as soon as a woman has a personal relationship with a man, the power imbalance is assumed to be there along with a host of other assumptions about sexuality, the stereotype of a woman sleeping or flirting her way to her status…

(Articulated by Liz Henry)

I asked my 3-year-old daughter what would happen when she was a grown-up lady. The first thing she said was, “paint my nails.” I asked what else. “Get a box of tools.”

That’s my girl!

In Search of the She-Geek | Geekdad from Wired.com