"Revenge of the Nerdette" debatessss

Se publico un articulo en revista Newsweek sobre un grupo llamado NerdGirls
Os lo pegamos qaui abajo asi como alguna reacción que hemos encontrado en otros lugares...

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As geeks become chic in all levels of society, an unlikely subset is starting to roar. Meet the Nerd Girls: they're smart, they're techie and they're hot.

It's sweltering in Boston, and a dozen Tufts University coeds are out in shorts and tanks, attracting the usual stares. Only today the stares are for a different reason: the girls are huddled around a 750-pound machine that looks like a spaceship, long and wide with a bubble-shaped cockpit open to reveal a mass of pipes and wires. It's actually a solar car—one they've built from the ground up and hope to race next year. Suddenly sparks fly, and the girls jump back. They may be engineering whizzes, but they know a hazard when they see one. They call a teacher over to help solve the problem, as Alex McGourty, 21, gets ready to take the wheel. A junior with blond hair and freckles, she built her first car engine in high school: a biodiesel "veggie mobile" she ran on McDonald's fryer oil. McGourty revs out of the driveway, and almost immediately dislodges the car's chain. Campus police block off the street, and the baseball team, just returned from practice, lines up to watch. "Look out," a construction worker yells. "It's the Nerd Girls!"

The Nerd Girls may not look like your stereotypical pocket-protector-loving misfits—their adviser, Karen Panetta, has a thing for pink heels—but they're part of a growing breed of young women who are claiming the nerd label for themselves. In doing so, they're challenging the notion of what a geek should look like, either by intentionally sexing up their tech personas, or by simply finding no disconnect between their geeky pursuits and more traditionally girly interests such as fashion, makeup and high heels. In fact, calling them "nerd" is no insult at all—the Nerd Girls have T shirts emblazoned with the slogan. The crew includes Cristina Sanchez, a master's student in biomedical engineering (and a former cheerleader) who can talk for hours about aerodynamics. Caitrin Eaton, a freshman, asked her boyfriend for a soldering iron last Christmas. Juniors Courtney Mario and Perry Ross giggle when they talk about what fascinated them most about "No Country for Old Men": how did the assassin's air gun work?

These girl geeks aren't social misfits; their identities don't hinge on outsider status. They may love all things sci-tech, but first and foremost they are girls—and they've made that part of their appeal. They've modeled themselves after icons such as Tina Fey, whose character on "30 Rock" is a "Star Wars"-loving, tech-obsessed, glasses-wearing geek, but who's garnered mainstream appeal and a few fashion-magazine covers. Or on actress Danica McKellar, who coauthored a math theorem, wrote a book for girls called "Math Doesn't Suck" and posed in a bikini for Stuff magazine. Or even Ellen Spertus, a Mills College professor and research scientist at Google—and the 2001 winner of the Silicon Valley "Sexiest Geek Alive" pageant. They tune in to shows like "GeekBrief.TV," a daily Web series hosted by 26-year-old Cali Lewis, and meet friends at Girl Geek Dinners, the first of which drew more than 600 women. However they choose to geek out, they consciously tweak the two chief archetypes of geeks: that they're unattractive outcasts, and that they're male. "For a long time, there's been this stereotype that either you're ugly and smart or cute and not suited for careers in math, science or engineering," says Annalee Newitz, the co-editor of "She's Such a Geek!", a 2006 anthology of women writing about math, tech and science. "One of the big differences between Generation X geeks and girls in their teens now is really just an attitude—an indication that they're much more comfortable."

That comfort level has as much to do with culture as it does with technology. Depictions of geeks as socially awkward math whizzes date back to caricatures in tech-school humor magazines from the 1950s, such as MIT's Voodoo. But the geeks of MIT were strictly male, as were subsequent takes on the stereotype, such as the nerdy men of 1984's "Revenge of the Nerds," and Screech on "Saved by the Bell." Today's girl geeks are members of the first generation to have been truly reared on technology. They grew up on gender-neutral movies like "Hackers" and "The Matrix," and saw the transformation of Willow on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" from awkward geek to smart and sassy sex symbol. They've watched the geeky pursuits of technology and comic books transform from fringe subculture to pop mainstream, and they've capitalized on that geek-chic mentality to elbow their way into it.

In 2007, girls won both the team and the individual categories of the Siemens Competition for high-school students in math, science and technology for the first time in the competition's history. A recent Pew Internet & American Life project found that among users 12 to 17, girls dominate the blogosphere and social networking sites; they're also beating boys when it comes to creating Web sites of their own. Even women gamers far outnumber men ages 25 to 34, according to a 2006 study by the Consumer Electronics Association. "Back when the Nerd Girls began [in 2000], people would say, 'Why do you have to call yourselves nerds?'—like it was a bad thing," says Panetta, an electrical- and computer-engineering professor at Tufts and the founder of the group. "But I never get that question anymore. It's OK, it's smart, it's cool to be a nerd, and the girls are just embracing that."

Yet there is still a dichotomy between the culture and the workplace. Forty years ago women made up just 3 percent of science and engineering jobs; now they make up about 20 percent. That sounds promising, until you consider that women earn 56 percent of the degrees in those fields. A recent Center for Work-Life Policy study found that 52 percent of women leave those jobs, with 63 percent saying they experienced workplace harassment and more than half believing they needed to "act like a man" in order to succeed. In the past, women dealt with that reality in two ways: some buried their femininity, while others simply gave up their techie interests to appear more feminine. "For most of my life I hid my passion for all things scientific and tried to focus on pursuits that were 'allowable'," says Cathy Malmrose, a Berkeley, Calif., mom who, at 38, is now the CEO of a computer manufacturer. "Instead of getting to play on my brother's TRS80 [computer] and study the sciences, I went into elementary education."

Which may be one reason that many of these tech-friendly women are working their pumps so hard. They're trying to break down stereotypes by being as proud of their sexuality as they are of their geekiness. "Just because I get dressed up Saturday night, that doesn't mean I won't do better [than a guy] on a test on Monday," says Nerd Girl Sanchez. Turning geek into chic isn't always easy. It took Google's Spertus, who is 39, years before she could proclaim herself girl and geek in the same breath. But it happened when she won the award for "Sexiest Geek Alive," a now annual pageant that began in 2000 as a spoof of People magazine's "Sexiest Man Alive." Spertus beat out the men in her competition, and at her crowning, she paraded onstage in a corset made out of a circuit board and a high-slit skirt with a slide rule strapped to her leg. Still, some women worry that being too sexy could hurt them. At the San Francisco Girl Geek Dinner earlier this year, Leah Culver, 25, the developer of Pownce, a microblogging platform, described the extra efforts she's made to convince potential employers that despite being attractive, she's actually, like, competent. "I used to carry around a copy of my computer-science degree in my purse," she said. The ideal, of course, is having gender be a nonissue, and for a few, it is. "I consider myself a normal girl who happens to like math and science," Sanchez says.

She may not be in the majority now, but if her fellow geek girls have anything to do with it, she will be. Outreach programs such as TechBridge, an after-school workshop for middle- and high-school girls, and MAGIC (More Active Girls In Computing), a national mentoring program for aspiring computer scientists, are among the dozens of programs aimed at getting girls to think about futures in science and technology. The Nerd Girls also conduct weekly outreach: "We try to give them real examples of what engineers do," says Panetta. "You love watching special effects in 'Harry Potter'? That's an engineer. You like the iPhone? An engineer made that. Cheerleading? Dancing? How about sports engineering?" Because you know, girls: the geeks really are inheriting the earth.

Article from Newsweek

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Reacción de Catherine Price en blog Broadsheet

Geeks gone wild

This week's Newsweek has an article that's got me all confused. Titled "Revenge of the Nerdette," it's about the Nerd Girls, a group of young female engineering students from Tufts University who are among a growing subset of American women "challenging the notion of what a geek should look like, either by intentionally sexing up their tech personals, or by simply finding no disconnect between their geeky pursuits and more traditionally girly interests such as fashion, makeup and high heels."

The article includes a video highlighting some of the Nerd Girls' recent projects, including building a solar-powered race car and answering e-mails with engineering questions from around the country, including a request to help build a solar-powered lighthouse. (These shots are spliced between other scenes where they're posing for modeling shoots.) They then invite other "nerd girls" from around the country to join their Facebook and MySpace pages.

So why am I confused about how to react? After all, I'm one of the countless girls who got turned off by science in ninth grade, when miserably boring biology and physics classes made me decide that there was nothing interesting in the entire field. (I'd rather take French, of course -- they have chocolate croissants.) I was, obviously, wrong about the whole "science isn't interesting" thing -- these days, it's one of my favorite subjects to write about. Would I have gotten interested in science earlier if I'd had role models telling me that science was cool and, as the Nerd Girls stress, applicable to situations outside the classroom? Maybe. In that sense, the Nerd Girls are definitely a step in the right direction.

My confusion, though, stems from the fact that the Nerd Girls video makes it seem like sexual appeal is a necessary component to being part of their group. The cool thing is not just being interested in subjects like engineering; it's being interested in engineering and being physically hot. Because, I mean, anyone would expect a dorky-looking girl in thick glasses and a librarian's chain (me in middle school) to be interested in science, right? It's the hot girl, the cheerleader, who surprises you when it turns out she spends her spare time designing race cars.

I think what the Nerd Girls are doing is a good thing overall. It is extremely refreshing to see a group of young women capitalizing on their intelligence and, in doing so, potentially convincing other young women that it's cool to flaunt your brain in addition to your body. And perhaps the Nerd Girls aren't as all about their sexuality as the video makes it seem. I certainly hope that's the case -- ideally, we'd convey to young women that they shouldn't be afraid to be into science even if they aren't holding down part-time modeling gigs, and that there's more than one definition of what it means to be "hot."

Also, not to rain on the solar-powered parade, but it makes me nervous to see the Nerd Girls place so much emphasis on playing up sexuality when, for many female engineers, sexual harassment is a major factor in driving them out of the field. To quote from Newsweek, "A recent Center for Work-Life Policy study found that 52 percent of women leave [their jobs in science and engineering], with 63 percent saying they experienced workplace harassment and more than half believing they needed to 'act like a man' in order to succeed." Sure, it'd be good to encourage a workplace where you could "act like a woman" (defined, in part, by the height of your heels) and not feel like your job was threatened. But then again, wouldn't it be better to have a workplace where scientists and engineers were allowed to act like scientists and engineers -- and gender and sexuality were, as much as is possible, left out of the picture?

I know that Broadsheet's got a bunch of science-y women in its readership -- what do you all think?

-- Catherine Price

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Veanse también programa de televisión de las Nerd Girls para construir un coche con paneles solares

"Nerd Girls" TV Program Challenges Stereotypes BY AMANDA DAVIS

In the midst of reality TV shows featuring dancers, models, and singers trying to make it in show business, IEEE.tv is now showing a pilot of a reality show about a team of female engineering students trying to build a solar car. The group from Tufts University in Medford, Mass., called Nerd Girls, attracted the interest of producer Kristina Johnson, whose California-based production company filmed the project last summer.

This video is the pilot episode of the “Nerd Girls” reality series, which will feature female engineering students from several colleges collaborating to work on a number of projects, including developing renewable energy systems and assistive technology for the disabled.

THE DRAWING BOARD The 9-minute film shows a group of 16 Nerd Girls—mostly seniors majoring in computer science, mechanical engineering, and related fields—as they began working last June to fix up an old solar-powered racecar that was built and raced in the 1990s by students at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. The car has been reconstructed by previous Nerd Girl teams, but it lacked the performance needed to compete in a race.

Under the direction of IEEE Fellow and Tufts engineering professor Karen Panetta, the group did online research and worked with professional engineers to figure out how to improve the car. In the film, Panetta points out some of the car’s design flaws, like the awkward placement of the controls and the lack of visibility from the driver’s seat.

Students were able to work in their areas of expertise and put their skills to the test. IEEE Member and computer science major Lauren Jones worked on coding for a programmable gate array—the computer inside the dashboard that displays information about the car’s speed and any mechanical problems that may arise.

“Who doesn’t want to work on a solar car as an undergrad?” Jones says in the video. “It’s always a good conversation starter, especially at job interviews.”

The car is equipped with solar cells that harness the sun’s energy and charge the batteries that power the car. The team decided to place batteries on either side of the car so that if one failed, the other would provide backup power. Mechanical engineering major Laura Sullivan used a computer-aided design program to illustrate where to install the batteries. Joanne Rucker, a mechanical engineering major, helped design a motor that would run at about 3500 rpm and also allow the car to run at speeds from 95 to 105 kilometers per hour.

That class of Nerd Girls finished building the car last October, and the new class has another car in the works, Panetta says. Although the Nerd Girls were still seniors at the time the video was shot, several of them have already found high-paying jobs at engineering companies.

HOW IT STARTED In 1996 Karen Panetta began an outreach program for Tufts' female engineering students. She says she wanted to form a group of multitalented students to challenge the stereotype that women in engineering are “lacking in social skills and nontechnical interests.”

“There were very few girls in engineering programs when I was in school, but we were all very well rounded, and I couldn’t understand why there were so many stereotypes that girls couldn’t be successful in math, science, and engineering,” Panetta says.

The program was officially dubbed Nerd Girls in 2000. Panetta introduced the program into the curriculum by designing a class in which students—male and female—work closely with industry on various engineering projects.

To watch the video, visit IEEE.tv’s Web site at http://www.ieee.tv.