Monthly Archives: July 2014

Activism plan – brainstorm

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Mindmap - Activism plan Brainstorm

Ideas for Activism project

  • Write to advertisers questioning the gender stereotypes perpetuated by their product advertisements.
  • Create a social media campaign (facebook, twitter, linkedin etc) where people talk about their observed gender inequity of the day.
  • Create a website that consolidates the stories of women in STEM, current and past, their work and their lives. This can be a resource that schools and colleges use to inspire girls to pursue STEM careers.
  • Build an online portal that connects women in STEM careers with women who are taking STEM majors in college. The portal acts as an online community/forum of women in science where college students can get career advice, mentoring support, inspiration etc.
  • Organize women-only STEM contests and/or workshops at community colleges.
  • Organize networking events where college students get the opportunity to meet with and talk to women in STEM career paths.
  • Campaign to colleges and universities to a) create a hiring plan that will increase the percentage of female faculty in science and engineering tenure track positions, and b) put in place programs that will create an equitable workplace for their female staff.
  • Campaign to colleges and universities to create a program that encourages women in STEM industry career paths who want to switch to academia

Research and Developing the Resource Database

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This week’s goal was to have an outline of the Activism Project ready and start gathering data that will be used to flesh out the details of the project.

The following question will guide the development of the Activism project over the upcoming weeks: What role should higher education institutions play in promoting more women to choose careers in STEM fields?

I will try to keep a global perspective (as opposed to focusing on the American landscape alone) as I gather data. The sociocultural aspects of the gender bias in STEM are a necessary component in formulating strategies that will be most effective in closing the gender gap in a given cultural context.

I did not face any technological challenges in this week’s assignments. Zotero was a very intuitive tool to use, which made the process of data gathering and categorizing very easy. The bigger challenge is in whittling down the vast amount of research data that is available, and creating a coherent argument that will support the Activism Plan.

Getting Started

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This is my first time using WordPress (I use Blogger for my personal blogs), and I found the set up process to be reasonably straightforward. Compared to Blogger, WordPress gives the user more advanced features to control content editing and publishing. Blogger, however, has a much simpler interface, which I find more intuitive to use.

The Links/Blogroll feature has been disabled in the newer (3.5 and higher) versions of WordPress. According to WordPress documentation, the Links Manager needs to be installed as a plugin on the server for it to be available on the client side menu.

Setting up an email signature was also simple. Google has a simple user interface for creating email signatures. I have used it before, so I knew where to find it.

I had not used the Windows Narrator functionality before, but a quick search on the internet got me the Microsoft documentation on this. However, I found it frustrating to use the Narrator, mainly because it would switch to reading out the controls that the mouse pointer was hovering over. I often use Adobe’s “Read out Loud” functionality for PDF files, and like using it.