I'm exploring the story of the discovery of DNA. Watson, Crick, and Wilkins received the Nobel prize for it, though Rosalind Franklin (a bio) was also responsible for its discovery. She had died of ovarian cancer a few years before the prize was awarded and the prize is not awarded post-humously.

Apparently there is some controversy about the terms in which the story of DNA's discovery has been told. One account is "The Double Helix," responded to by Anne Sayre (Rosalind Franklin and DNA -- admittedly an unoriginal title) that describes the sex discrimination Franklin faced in her lifetime.

Interesting story. I want to learn more about it. I first started exploring it because I was interested in the role of experimentalists as agents of scientific change in the history and philosophy of science.

I should have found this and included it in my thesis.

"Researchers working in this area have argued that much of the early
work concerned with human-computer interaction failed to develop a
critical assessment of the technology that would lead researchers to
study the ways that social context, power relations and social bias may
affect the actual systems that are created.

To counter these difficulties, Suchman and Jordan [16] stress the
importance of demystifying technology and legitimating women's knowledge
in the system development process. They argue that this will require a
dramatic shift in how we view the knowledge and skills that go into
system development. Such a shift must incorporate a sophisticated
understanding of the social world into the system development process."

[[failed to develop a critical assessment of the technology that would
lead researchers to study the ways that social context, power relations
and social bias may affect the actual systems that are created]] - this
is exactly the question I'm interested in!

Found this book on Stanford's Lane Reading Room Digital Humanities Shelf: LB1028.43 B64 2000
David Bolt and Ray Crawford, "Digital Divide"

It has a chapter titled "The Gender Gap." It discusses the case of Fulmore Middle School in Austin, which has grants from Bill Gates to pursue a number of technology and education initiatives.

Specifically, it raises the question of how girls and boys tend to approach computers in the classroom, touching on scarcity of technological resources and girls' withdrawal and subsequently reduced access to computers.

The chapter also touches on increasing efforts (though still too few in number) to create technological domains (games, sites like chickclick.com, after school tech programs) that are empowering, safe spaces for girls to learn. Part of this effort is the "girl" software market. The chapter profiles Nancie S. Martin (Director at Mattel Media-Software for Girls, a division of Mattel Toy Company). Her division has put out "Barbie Fashion Designer" which sold more than 500k copies in its first two months on the market. The success was also met with criticisms (that I myself would and have lodged) that the software supports existing stereotypes and implicitly labels other, more challenging software products as "for boys." Mattell also bought Brenda Laurel's Purple Moon software in 1999. A company called Girl Games (Austin, TX; president Laura Groppe) has created titles such as "Let's Talk About Me."

I don't have time to do analysis on this right now. All in all, I didn't really learn anything new from the chapter but at least it gave me a whole bunch of names of people for my "Barbie Project" (as discussed with Fred Turner, doing a research project on the design process and how gender stereotypes get encoded in software; it actually seems fairly obvious phrased that way, but I bet there would be some interesting fodder to chew on once I got deep into the research process).