Anne Truitt Zelenka

Finding it hard to get a blog post out with Rick out of town and the kids at each other. Here are some topics I’ve been thinking about:

• Zuska on distrust of statistics coming from a Republican legislator and a women’s studies website. What I’m thinking: statistics don’t lie but sometimes they mumble or speak in a foreign language.
• Steve Martin and Martin Mull on men [via the comments on Shelley’s enigmatic Proofs post]. Let’s see some of you tech guys blow each other kissies!
• From 43Folders, a suggestion to cancel something in your life, thereby freeing up space and attention for something better. I’ve been doing the opposite lately, signing up for new commitments to myself and to others. I did, however, refrain from making New Year’s resolutions.
• I like the Suprglu service that lets you construct a web page from all the different web bits of yourself. I find many Web 2.0 sites redundant—how many to-do lists, photo sharing, tagging, searching, and home page sites do I need?—but this looks useful. I can point people who want to read whatever I write at my suprglu page and they will see every blog essay, every del.icio.us link, every photo I post. Okay. There’s no one who wants to see that, not even my husband. Still, I like to feel like there’s an integrated Anne on the web.
• Zuska again, this time pointing at an engineering diversity kit that includes an interesting nugget: while most programmers are MBTI type ISTJ, a not-insignificant proportion identify as the countertype, ENFP.
• The Boston Globe article titled “In computer science, a growing gender gap: women shunning a field once seen as welcoming.” I’ve started delving into the data from NCES and NSF on men and women earning bachelor’s degrees in CS and came up with a chart, below, that compares percentage change in earned BSCS for African American women, all men, and white women. This, to me, shows one problem with dividing up people along gender lines alone. It also suggests that one group to focus on attracting and retaining in the tech workforce is African American women. Their numbers are small right now but the trend looks powerful. I’d like to investigate what’s happened since 2001, but I so far haven’t found the data broken out by race for that.