Women In Technology - Friday Links - 24/01/2025
Hello everyone,
We hope this mail finds you well, despite the roughness of the times.
On the Bright Side
WIT annual Review
The WIT Annual Review took place yesterday, and we want to thank everyone for participating in the meeting and contributing to the survey.
The review highlighted WIT’s remarkable efforts across various areas (mentoring, outreach, representation, networking).
With a significant increase in entry-level employee statistics, the focus should now shift to sustaining these numbers and ensuring they are also reflected in more senior positions. This underscores the need for this community to support women’s retention. And we hope that the WIT activities will provide that support and encouragement out there!
The plots above were compiled from the CERN personnel statistics 2020-2023 focusing on STEM [1]. More plots for all Professional categories and per Department are available in [2].
The first F1 Female Race Engineer
A S-hero
New Vocabulary: Broligarchs
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/11/broligarchy-elon-musk-trump/680788/
More Masculine Energy?
Zuckerberg, who started his media empire by making a website to rank women’s looks and called his first users “dumb” for trusting him, thinks corporations should celebrate “aggression” more. Corporations, according to Zuck, have been “neutered” and need more “masculine energy”. He then went on to say that while “feminine energy” is good, corporate culture had swung too far that way and should reclaim its masculinity:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/18/mark-zuckerberg-masculine-energy
I’m not entirely sure what the future holds for the tech industry as a blatantly less tolerant leadership comes into focus. But one thing I can say is: If you want to have a more skilled workforce, happier employees, and better productivity, keep the aggression out of the workplace:
Boys’ Physics
The United Nations announced 2025 as the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology (IYQ), reflecting the transformative impact quantum mechanics has had in the past century, and setting the stage for the next wave of quantum innovation.
The moniker “boys’ physics” (Knabenphysik) originally emphasized the youthfulness of the early quantum physics protagonists. Its gender connotation long remained unchallenged..
https://quantum2025.org/iyq-event/beyond-knabenphysik-women-in-the-history-of-quantum-physics/
StackOverflow
The results from Stack Overflow’s Annual Developer Survey
This year, technologies such as JavaScript and PostgreSQL remain most popular, Rust and Markdown remain most admired, Python the most desired, developers are most frustrated by technical debt at work, and they don’t see AI as a threat to their jobs.
Stack Overflow Didn’t Ask How Bad Its Gender Problem Is This Year
https://www.wired.com/story/stack-overflow-gender-problem/
Are LLMs making StackOverflow irrelevant?
To Mark in your Calendars
11th Feb: International Day of Women and Girls in Science
To celebrate the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, physicist Yasmine Amhis and the DoniSSi string quartet invite you to explore the mysteries of time in all its aspects.
De Temps en Temps is an artistic and scientific creation that explores the perception of time in physics and music, including quantum mechanics, featuring the female quartet DoniSSi and live interventions from Yasmine Amhis, Scientific Coordinator of the LHCb experiment at CERN.
https://indico.cern.ch/event/1485636/
11th Feb: Bake a Difference
In celebration of the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, WIT is organizing a bake sale on Tue Feb 11th in R1 at lunchtime. If you want to contribute with a cake, please contact [email protected]
All earnings will go to the Aid4All charitable association led by our colleague Connie Potter: https://www.aidforall.ch/
6th Feb: Ensemble Contre Le Sexisme
https://ensemblecontrelesexisme.org/
30th June: Mentoring
The Info Session about the Mentoring@CERN 2025 edition will take place on 30 January at 17:00 CET online:
https://indico.cern.ch/event/1497017/
Machine Learning School & Workshop
Thematic School on Machine Learning: https://indico.cern.ch/event/1496679/overview
5th ICFA Beam Dynamics Mini-Workshop on Machine Learning for Particle Accelerators: https://indico.cern.ch/event/1382428/
Cheers,
Eva for wit-comms
[1] The plots are compiled from the CERN personnel statistics 2020-2023: https://cds.cern.ch/collection/CERN%20Annual%20Personnel%20Statistics?ln=en
Please note that the Personnel statistics for 2024 are not yet published, so the plots end in 2023. Updated plots will be shared in March when the latest data becomes available.
[2] Female representation per Professional Category and per Department, based on the CERN personnel statistics 2020-2023 [1]: