The Equal Pay App Challenge wants developers to use publicly available data and resources to create innovative, easy-to-use apps that educate users about the pay gap and provide tools to combat it. The apps should improve the accessibility of pay data broken down by gender, race and ethnicity, and provide coaching on early career pay, pay negotiation or career mentorship.

As does any contest, it has rules. One is that you keep your intellectual property rights but you do give the Department of Labor an "irrevocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free license"

There are prizes (what's a contest without prizes?), actually eight of them but they only tell us about one of them "scholarships to attend an eight-week immersive program on digital product innovation and entrepreneurship hosted by General Assembly, a campus for technology, design and entrepreneurship." Ok that one might not be hugely motivational but I'll bet the other prizes are better. Oh wait- it's the government-- forget the bet. But it's a good idea, so you do it and you win, let me know and I'll send you cookies and I won't require an "irrevocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free license."

Posted by Pat at 03:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Thanks to FairerScience friend Rosa Carson for introducing me to Alice Duer Miller (yes wikipedia is back and POPA and SOPA are dead for now-- thanks everyone!)

Anyway back to Alice Duer Miller. In 1916 she published a fabulous series of satirical poems under the title "Are Women People?". (Which along with 38000 other books you can download for free from the wonderful Project Gutenberg.)

Sorry I'm feeling this is a very disjointed post. What I really want to do is introduce you to Alice Duer Miller's poems so like me you can marvel at how, almost 100 years later, current they feel. Here is just a taste:

Father, what is a Legislature?

A representative body elected by the people of the state.

Are women people?

No, my son, criminals, lunatics and women are not people.

Do legislators legislate for nothing?

Oh, no; they are paid a salary.

By whom?

By the people.

Are women people?

Of course, my son, just as much as men are.

Our Idea of Nothing at All

("I am opposed to woman suffrage, but I am not opposed to woman."—Anti-suffrage speech of Mr. Webb of North Carolina.)

O women, have you heard the news
Of charity and grace?
Look, look, how joy and gratitude
Are beaming in my face!
For Mr. Webb is not opposed
To woman in her place!

O Mr. Webb, how kind you are
To let us live at all,
To let us light the kitchen range
And tidy up the hall;
To tolerate the female sex
In spite of Adam's fall.

O girls, suppose that Mr. Webb
Should alter his decree!
Suppose he were opposed to us—
Opposed to you and me.
What would be left for us to do—
Except to cease to be?

But Then Who Cares for Figures

An argument sometimes used against paying women as highly as men for the same work is that women are only temporarily in industry.

Forty-four per cent of the women teachers in the public schools of New York have been more than ten years in the service, while only twenty-six per cent of the men teachers have served as long.

The Bundesrath of Germany has decided to furnish medical and financial assistance to women at the time of childbirth, in order "to alleviate the anxiety of husbands at the front."

How strange this would sound: "The Bundesrath has decided to furnish medical assistance to the wounded at the front, in order to alleviate the anxiety of wives and mothers at home."

When a benefit is suggested for men, the question asked is: "Will it benefit men?"

When a benefit is suggested for women, the question is: "Will it benefit men?"

Ok I really have to stop now-- but there are lots more.

Posted by Pat at 07:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wikipedia is down today and I am back; both of us for the same reason: stopping PIPA and SOPA .

PIPA and SOPA are bills before Congress- PIPA (the Protect IP Act) in the Senate and SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) in the House. My favorite source of information on web censorship and equal access EFF, describes it this way:

As drafted, the legislation would grant the government and private parties unprecedented power to interfere with the Internet's underlying infrastructure. The government would be able to force ISPs and search engines to block users' attempts to reach certain websites' URLs. In response, third parties will woo average users to alternative servers that offer access to the entire Internet (not just the newly censored U.S. version), which will create new computer security vulnerabilities as the Internet grows increasingly balkanized.

It gets worse: the blacklist bills' provisions would give corporations and other private parties new powers to censor foreign websites with court orders that would cut off payment processors and advertisers. Broad immunity provisions (combined with a threat of litigation) would encourage service providers to overblock innocent users or even block websites voluntarily. This gives content companies every incentive to create unofficial blacklists of websites, which service providers would be under pressure to block without regard to the First Amendment.

Service providers would be forced to monitor and police their users' activities as well, threatening the DMCA safe harbors that have been vital to online innovation over the last decade. SOPA gives the government new powers to go after sites that provide information about tools that might be used to bypass the blacklists — even though these are often the same tools used by democratic activists around the world to bypass Internet censorship mechanisms implemented by authoritarian governments like Iran and China.

I'm off to e-mail my representative and senators- hope you will too

Posted by Pat at 11:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I really, really don't want to this post, but based on the title you know I have to say something. So let's start by reading the title-- "tests forced on kids." Really- no kidding. Guess what--tests are forced on so many of us at so many levels-- let me start to make a list- AP, SAT, ACT, GRE, MCAT, LSAT and that is just the beginning- how about the PE, USMLE, bar examinations. CPA tests, medical licensing exams (if you don't what all those letters stand for, feel free to ask).

So in this country we use tests to decide if people are competent. If you don't like it--ok fine-- which tests do you want us to stop giving? The ones that check to see if engineers really know now to build a bridge? The ones that see if our doctors know where our hearts are? The ones that check to see what lawyers, plumbers, electricians even financial ad visors know? Or perhaps the only tests we want to stop giving are those that make us have to admit that we are doing a really bad job educating so many of our poor and minority kids.

As a measurement expert (which well yes I kinda am), when I look at a test, the first thing I want to know is does it measure what is being taught- which is presumably that which we want kids to know (aka content validity). If it does then I don't care how well an old dude with a nice house scores on it. If this is what we think kids need to know then we need to check to see if they know it. And if they don't know it- then darn it we need to make sure that they do learn it. If the test doesn't measure what we think kids need to know, well then we need to change the test..

And you know I'm just going to leave it there because I just saw that author used ideology, politics, hubris, greed, ignorance and the conventional wisdom, all in the same sentence. It's time to stop reading.

Posted by Pat at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Each December 6th, along with many other science blogs, we at FairerScience remember the 14 women engineering students at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, Quebec who were killed because they were women in engineering. It's been 22 years and it is still important to remember. A couple of years ago Alice Pawley posted this tribute

"On December 6, 1989, an armed gunman named Marc Lepine entered an engineering classroom at Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, Quebec. He demanded all 48 men in the class leave the room, lined up all 9 women against a wall, and, shouting "You are all a bunch of [expletive] feminists!", proceeded to shoot them. He went into the hall and shot 18 more people, mostly at random. He finally shot himself.

He had killed 14 women all together, and injured 9 more women and 4 men.

The women who died could have been anyone. They could have been your friends, your mothers, your sisters, your lovers, your daughters, your neighbors, your students, your teachers, maybe even you.

They were killed because they were women."

Remember those who died in the Montreal Massacre:

Genevieve Bergeron, 21, was a 2nd year scholarship student in civil engineering.
Helene Colgan, 23, was in her final year of mechanical engineering and planned to take her master's degree.
Nathalie Croteau, 23, was in her final year of mechanical engineering.
Barbara Daigneault, 22, was in her final year of mechanical engineering and held a teaching assistantship.
Anne-Marie Edward, 21, was a first year student in chemical engineering.
Maud Haviernick, 29, was a 2nd year student in engineering materials, and a graduate in environmental design.
Barbara Maria Klucznik, 31, was a 2nd year engineering student specializing in engineering materials.
Maryse Laganiere, 25, worked in the budget department of the Polytechnique.
Maryse Leclair, 23, was a 4th year student in engineering materials.
Anne-Marie Lemay, 27, was a 4th year student in mechanical engineering.
Sonia Pelletier, 28, was to graduate the next day in mechanical engineering. She was awarded a degree posthumously.
Michele Richard, 21, was a 2nd year student in engineering materials.
Annie St-Arneault, 23, was a mechanical engineering student.
Annie Turcotte, 21, was a first year student in engineering materials.

Please honor the white ribbon as a symbol of the fight against violence against women.

December 7, 1989 my then 12 year old daughter went to her junior high school with the names of those 14 women with an in memoriam pinned to her shirt. I cried when I saw what she was doing-- both for the women and for her courage. Each year I think of my daughter and of those women and so hope that we have the courage to fight to make sure this will never happen again

Posted by Pat at 09:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So remember that post from a couple of days ago? Yes that one about the boys' novelty kits and as our wonderful FairerScience friends pointed out there were stereotipic girls' kits as well. Well guess what-- while the kits (which look really cool) still exist-- Edmond Scientifics is no longer breaking them out by sex stereotypes.

As they explain

We have officially removed the Girls and Boys Novelty Kits categories from our site and replaced them with a single Novelty Science Kits category. Our original intent was not to project gender bias, but to organize our product selection in a way that makes it easy to find specific items. We now realize that decision resulted in a category structure projecting gender bias and defining gender roles. We regret that choice, as it does not reflect our intent or beliefs.

Thanks so much Edmond Scientifics. I'm so glad to have you back as one of the places I can trust to get cool things to get kids I care about more involved in science.

Posted by Pat at 11:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yes folks we’ve set up a website, “Doing Better Evaluations with Underrepresented Groups” (in STEM) for folks to share resources tied to doing, well what the title says. It’s just live but there are already a few resources up at and with your help there will soon be a lot more.

In case you have forgotten Eric Jolly of the Science Museum of Minnesota and I are on a mission. The mission * is to find out as much as we can about how to better design, implement, and assess the quality of evaluations of projects and programs targeting specific under-represented groups. This includes women, people with different types of disabilities, and people from different racial/ethnic groups. We are developing a guide and tip sheets that will be available in print, and even better, in interactive formats. In order to keep this from being a completely overwhelming mission, we are focusing on projects and programs tied to STEM workforce development at the post high school level.

Help us out by uploading resources, research or whatever you think would be useful here. Do it and you will get our thanks, credit, a copy of the final materials, and three of you will be randomly selected to receive multiple dozens of Pat’s famous chocolate chip cookies.

Posted by Pat at 09:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)