It’s Oscar time. Time for the best- and worst-dressed lists, the endless media coverage, the analysis, the predictions and the recognition of great storytellers and their cohorts. And the vast majority of them are white and male.
My mother is a structural engineer; my dad is a computer scientist. When I entered Stanford, I was sure I was going to be techie. I didn’t know what I wanted to major in (although science seemed like a good bet), so I started off my freshman year with all of the introductory math and science classes I could take. Now, five years later, I’ve ended up with a degree in…sociology.
Perhaps even more remarkable than the record-breaking enrollment in CS 106A last quarter was the percentage of those 594 students who were female.
Gender parity, if only in the introductory class, is encouraging news for a department that is overwhelmingly male.
As I weave in and out of visitors looking bemusedly about and my fellow students searching for this and that amenity, it finally strikes me that I’ve never once purchased my own Stanford apparel. In truth, I’ve tried many times and continually block out the horrific embarrassment of attempting to “try on” anything in the arm-pinching, boob-strangling, tummy-itching women’s section.
After putting a man on the moon, curing polio and inventing TiVo, science has finally taken on one of the big problems: a lack of… Continue Reading »
So what does it mean to be an ideal 21st century American woman?
Given all the resources available to Stanford women, what exactly should we aspire to be?