Activism topics; a brainstorm

What follows is a growing list of examples and new ideas for activism projects for WS 525.

• Hold a best practice conference: how to educate boys and girls equaly in the sciences
• The Gender Chip Project models the outcome of the course; an activism project. Though we do not see a plan, budget, etc, we do see the product and services, which include the movie, online clips, educational materials, ideas for use, and outside resources.
• Another model; see delicious:
• Gender Equity for Mathematics and Science, A Conference of the Woodrow Wilson. Woodrow Wilson Leadership Program for Teachers
• Will the one laptop per child initiative ensure that girls around the world have equal access to the computers?
• Check children’s book order selections…do the selections incorporate scientific books that highlight women or mostly men? Campaign to scholastic and others to advocate they improve their book content and selections.
• Survey age and/or gender-targeted companies to see how they promote products/services to girls vs boys or women vs men. Do these companies/products/services need improvement? Campaign to them.
• Survey children’s clubs. Do scouts and other organizations promote the use of technology equally in boys and girls groups? If not, what are the differences? What improvements do you recommend? Campain to them.
• How do computers or other technology seem gendered? What factors desiried/designed by women have been incorporated already? What areas could be incorporated? What is holding up the change? What recommendations do you have for improvements? Campaign to developers to make changes.
• Get published in magazines/journals where men’s work dominates.
  • Make Magazine has numerous projects submitted by men. Any by women?
  • Wired mostly discusses men’s inventions, yet many writers for the magazine are women.
  • What is the ratio of women writers to men writers on wikipedia? Other technology journals?
• Build relationships were there aren’t any yet.
  • Girl scouts works with SWE
  • Odessy program
  • NASA
  • OMSI
  • State Education initiatives
  • Homeschool resources
  • users groups
• Parks and Rec camps for
  • house building
  • mechanical engineering, welding
  • auto mainenence
  • computer repair
  • computer software and web development
  • chemistry and microscopy
  • space and astronomy
• Check on the one laptop per child options in different countries.
  • How have their plans addressed gender considerations in different male-dominated countries?
  • What is Oprah doing to support this in her new school in Africa?
• Products for boys and girls
  • Why do marketers still separate their products?
  • Who’s designing boy/girl centric products
  • Who are the major producers of projects for boys and girls and what kinds of gender policies do they have?
• Which schools have the lowest percentage of girls going into technology programs?
  • What programs can we put in place to change their status?

Starting the day with research

For the past 4 months or so, I’ve started my day be capturing articles about women succeeding in technology fields…award winners, innovators, writers, activists, etc. I add these resources to delicious/GenderTechnology for several reasons:

• My students in WS 320 and WS 525 Gender and Technology can easily begin their own research.
  • I say easily because some online research tools take some training and I think this social tagging site takes almost no training. Glancing and searching with Delicious is a visual activity versus a purely cognitive activity like typing a word into a search box (you already know what you want rather than what catches your fancy).
• I can track for myself what I was interested in when I found the resource.
• Students and other scholars can contribute to the now 379 list of articles related to our topic.

The result of this work will reveal itself over time, but for the moment my vision of its future is a meta catalog of all gender and technology resources. I welcome your bigger visions of its future.