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Feministe Feedback: Good Websites for Young Geeky Girls

Jill

Feministe Feedback

A really great question from a feminist-minded dad:

I’m a concerned dad with a question that I’m hoping other Feministe readers might be able to help with.

I’ve got a daughter who’s about to turn eight. She’s loves and is very good math and science, and proudly describes herself as a “junior geek”. My wife and I want to encourage her to keep doing that. But as we all know, there’s a huge amount of pressure for girls to not do that sort of thing – both active pressure, in the form of people telling her that “Girls don’t do that”, and passive pressure, in the form of every toy, every book, every website that’s geared towards sciency kids has a strong “boy” bias.

She’s been getting very interested in doing things online. But in the online time we let her have, she’s mostly going to places like “americangirl.com”. When I asked her why she doesn’t go to some other sites, her answer was that “they’re for boys. ”

Are there any good sites on the web for young geeky girls, that encourage them in things like math, science, and technology?

Suggestions? Ideas?

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27 thoughts on Feministe Feedback: Good Websites for Young Geeky Girls

  1. Darn – I was sure “She’s Such a Geek” had a website that might be appropriate here, but a quickie google isn’t finding it and I’m at work where I don’t have my bookmarks handy.

    Did she say why she thinks they’re for boys?

  3. Oh wait! Here’s something called Girls Go Tech. That might help.

    I admit, I am a walking stereotype – science is not my thing, so I’m not sure if this is what’s appropriate.

  6. I know this isn’t quite the answer to your question but do you ever go on sites together? When I was growing up, I did a lot of “for boys” things with my parents (like fixing cars or computer games or playing with my chemistry set). I never thought about it as being something I shouldn’t do because my parents were there with me.

    (PS. I’m a computer science graduate student and I work at an aerospace engineering firm so it does work 🙂

  8. Hmm, that’s a tough one. I got a bioeng masters and am pretty geeky, but i also grew up pre-internet. This is an organization I volunteered for at one time: http://girlstart.com/
    and my job was to teach girls html to make their own websites (older girls got to do cooler stuff like build robots, etc.)
    I don’t know where you live, but I also found this: http://www.badgirlscience.org/
    I’ll see if I can scrounge up any others.

  9. I’m the dad who asked the question.

    I don’t tend to go on websites with her. I hate having someone looking over my shoulder when I’m working on my computer, and she’s picked that up from me. I don’t feel like forcing her to have me hanging over her. So I try to be available if she wants me, and to have suggestions for things that I can show her. (For example, I got her hooked on Scratch for a while, which is a wonderful programming toy/game for kids.)

    The reason that she thinks the sites are for boys is partly because the pictures you see on the sites are pretty much *only* boys. When there’s a girl in a picture on the site, she’s always *watching*, not doing.

    Off the computer, I try to do a lot of sciency stuff with her – but with her in control. So for example, for her first grade science fair, I asked her what she wanted to know more about. She wanted to know why gemstones sparkle. So we ordered a bunch of styrofoam balls, and built molecular models of the crystals, and talked about how the crystal cleavages form edges that reflect.

  14. Female marine biologist here. I second InnerBrat’s suggestion above for quasi-gender-neutral museum sites. Here’s some suggestions with a huge biology/ocean bias.
    – Ology, from the American Museum of Natural History, has tons of activities and is a nice gender-neutral purple and green. :>)
    – The Monterey Bay Aquarium has tons of animal info and their Science Careers section features several women.
    – Dive and Discover: Expeditions to the Seafloor from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Cool critters and technology (like robotic submarines), and profiles of female scientists.

  15. I don’t know of any good sites for her, but when she gets older, you should find out if her school has a Science Olympiad team. I was on my school’s team for three years and I still help out with it. We were self-proclaimed and very proud geeks!

  16. Here are a bunch of sites:

    Smart Girls Rock! is an online community for girls into math, science and general geekydom.

    BrainCake is the web site of The Girls, Math & Science Partnership.

    Engineer Girl and Engineer Your Life are sites about engineering for girls.

    Inkling Magazine is a fun online science magazine written by women.

    Girl Start is another science site targeted to girls.

    Girls Go Tech is run by the Girl Scouts.

    She might be interested in reading science blogs by women too. She might enjoy, the Science Sisters blog (written by two young women) or the beauty brains (about the science of beauty products). There are many women science bloggers – I have a bunch in the blogroll of my women in science blog, linked to my name, above.

  19. Carolyn has oodles of links for kids organized by topic on her hoagiesgifted site. If you back up a level she also has hot topic lists for reading as well. Her site is for people dealing with gifted kids, but that doesn’t mean all her links are so oriented.
    http://hoagiesgifted.org/links.htm

  20. Brenna:

    Our school system participates in the math and science olympiads, and she’s already doing both. Based on how she did in the science one, and the science fair projects she’s done, she’s also going to be in the Young Inventors program next year. (She didn’t do as well in the math as the science, but that’s because she’s too much like me. She knew how to solve every single problem – but she made little arithmetic mistakes, and got the wrong answer. The hard parts, she’s great at; the easy parts, not so much – they’re too boring.)

  21. Hi Mark,

    I just wanted to speak up as a female engineer (background: undergrad and masters in computer science, previously worked at Google, Microsoft and Apple). To my knowledge, I have faced exactly one incident of direct discrimination, and I have never been told “girls don’t do that.” The sexism I see is really just little comments – people being surprised that I’m an engineer (despite knowing that I work for Google). I have a few more stories here if you care to read them: http://www.seattlepixel.com/2005/10/women-in-computer-science.html.

    So, I guess what I’m saying is to not worry too much about the sexism your daughter will face. Sure, I see sexism every day, but it doesn’t stop me or even affect me that much. Major direct sexism is rare, and the little things are sort of funny. The stuff that goes on behind the scenes, well, who knows.

    My advice is to approach the all-boys websites as “funny” / “silly”, thereby teaching her to see it the same way. In fact, if she can see the humor in it, it might even serve as a motivating factor. If she’s the only girl on these websites (and later on in her science classes), how cool / special / awesome does that make her?

    – Gayle

    PS: Almost 50% of math majors in the US are female. She’ll have lots of female company in math. Science, though, is still dragging…

  23. My masters project is a site aimed at preteen girls to encourage interest in math, science, and engineering. I have not even begun on it yet, just putting ideas together, but I’m now more inspired after reading this post. Girls need science and science needs girls.

  24. You are an awesome dad. Among all the above suggestions, it will be worth checking out the GeekDad blog on Wired, if you don’t already.

    I know I know – there are issues with the gender construction of the language in Wired and with the specifically male bent of the blog title. However, to the author’s credit, I tend to find the content quite gender inclusive (and I believe his ‘geeklets’ are girls and boys). Sometimes the address is male-dominated, but generally geekmoms and dads are welcome:).

    The only way in which the content is gendered male is based on stereotype rather than actual experience. Science, video games and geeky stuff are typically gendered male, and you will see a definite bias in the pictures of people doing or participating in activities, like conventions or ‘making’ competitions, that appear in blog entries. But I think the blog is a useful source of links to sites and stuff you daughter would enjoy. And the blog itself you might enjoy..

    I grew up a sort of geeky girl and I wish my parents would have taken an active interest in exposing me to this kind of stuff. But there you go.

  25. random note to Mark: gemstones also sparkle because of their high refractive index. This means that as they move, your eye moves quickly through the little rainbows they are shooting off in every direction – the quickly changing colors are the sparkle. You need the flat, non-parallel surfaces AND the refractive index to get this effect. Diamonds and zirconium are the winners here, I think.

  26. Pingback: Tuesday Evening Link Round-Up | THE HOT JOINTS

  27. check out howtoons.com, it is so cool, and shows boys and girls how to do really fun science stuff in a fun comic book style format

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