<![CDATA[Gawker: valleywag, nerd girls]]> http://tags.gawker.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/gawker.com.png <![CDATA[Gawker: valleywag, nerd girls]]> http://gawker.com/tag/valleywag/nerdgirls http://gawker.com/tag/valleywag/nerdgirls <![CDATA[Meet the Nerd Girls, "working their pumps" for your workplace]]> Women earn 56 percent of all degrees in science and technology, but according to Newsweek, 52 percent of women leave those jobs, with 63 percent saying they experienced workplace harassment, believing they needed to "act like a man." It's one Tufts University's "Nerd Girls," featured in the clip above, are "working their pumps so hard" — to show that women engineers can be girls and geeks. Because the very best way to gender equality is to proclaim that what women want is to "put on lots of makeup, throw on some insanely high stilettos and walk down the street and get attention and be like Hah!"

]]> http://gawker.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5017141&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Pownce cofounder Leah Culver explains how to be beautiful and get taken seriously]]> Think it's hard being a woman in technology? Apparently it's even harder to be an attractive one. That's right, pretty people are rising above the prejudice that unless they look like Steve Wozniak, they can't hack it:

At the San Francisco Girl Geek Dinner earlier this year, Leah Culver, 25, the developer of Pownce, a microblogging platform, described the extra efforts she's made to convince potential employers that despite being attractive, she's actually, like, competent. "I used to carry around a copy of my computer-science degree in my purse," she said.

I feel for Culver. For years, my wild attractiveness meant I had to work twice as hard to be taken seriously. If I was any uglier, I bet I'd be be CEO of Google by now. Instead, I had to live with the shame that I know how to accessorize and dumb down outfits at job interviews to fit in with the developer slobs in their tees, jeans and sneakers. So I just can't wait to be empowered to become even thinner and more vain by the new reality show about the Nerd Girls of Tufts University. Because what could help attractive people conquer stereotypes faster than television? (Photo by Andrew Mager)

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