“I think it is atrocious!!!… Since I am no longer with the company, I’m sure they could care less what I think on the matter. But they have betrayed the essence of what we were trying to do with Merida—give young girls and women a better stronger role model. She’s strong inside and out—she’s not just a simpering pretty face waiting around for romance! She was created to turn that whole ideal on it’s [sic] head! Oh yeah… that’s why I created her… they’re just in it for the money… not the integrity. They don’t care what message they send about women, as long as it makes them a buck.” — Brenda Chapman on Disney’s Merida redesign.

I don’t object to anything she says here… but should Disney being in it for the money, as opposed to the artistic integrity, really come as a surprise? Granted, Merida is Chapman’s baby, so she has every right to be angry. But I’d say the problem is less in Merida specifically than in how Disney presents their princesses in general. Regardless of how they appear in the movies, the “official public image” of the characters are all kind of shiny and generic (a “simpering pretty face”), and Merida is but one part of that.

Though she may be a more important part, because Merida was so different from most other Disney princesses to begin with. What do you think?

(via: Boing Boing)

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Today, on the one hundred and ninety seventh birthday of Ada Lovelace, Charle Babbage’s Enchantress of Numbers, Google commemorates her contributions to computer science with a doodle, and an informative video. Watch it below!

Last month we reported that Royal Society was planning a Wikipedia edit-a-thon in conjunction with Ada Lovelace Day to beef up the pages about female scientists, engineers, and mathematicians unfairly ignored by history. Well on October 19th that edit-a-thon happened, with members of the Royal Society combining their efforts with others working remotely to create or expand approximately 40 Wikipedia entries.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day 2012, a day dedicated to women in STEM fields, in honor of Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer. Lovelace’s life, particularly her childhood and the clashes between her parents, would be a fitting origin for any modern Prometheus, and so I love looking at the way cartoonists have depicted it.

Good news! The number of girls getting interested in STEM fields is increasing! While the number of boys is still greater, more and more teenage girls are considering engineering as a possible career, thanks to a lot of positive messaging. And now, the Intel Foundation has instituted a new “holiday” that will give everyone cause to reach out even more: Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day!

I’d like to think Ada Lovelace would be proud of these two women. Valerie Aurora and Mary Gardiner are the founders of the Ada Initiative, a non-profit organization created to support the participation and work of women in open technology. It was probably a long-time coming, unfortunately it was an instance of unsolicited groping that finally got the ball rolling.

Of course they do. Our favorite part: “You know what we’re too pretty for? Putting up with anti-intellectualism,” a clear reference to JC Penney’s recalled-due-to-backlash t-shirt from this summer. Our sister site Styleite has been outdoing us on the coverage of implicitly anti-intellectual clothing for women and girls, so we’re just going to link to them for evidence. Here’s the low down on JC Penney, Forever 21, Life:Curated, and a bit of a response from the people behind Tetris. (The third link will make sense once you look at the second one, we promise.)

You can find ThinkGeek’s new shirt here, in sizes small to XXL, and here for kids, and here in a women’s classic cut instead of babydoll. Maybe you know someone who it would fit?

(via Jezebel.)

Today, October 7th, marks the 2011 date of Ada Lovelace Day, an occasion of celebrating women role models in science, technology, engineering and mathematics; named after a lady known as the Right Honourable the Countess of Lovelace to the 19th century British peerage, but the Enchantress of Numbers to Charles Babbage, the man who invented the concept of a programmable computer. In a nutshell, Ada Lovelace was the daughter of estranged parents, estranged because her father was notable unstable poet and madman Lord Byron, and in an effort to keep her from ever developing her father’s literary-infused madness, her mother made sure Ada had the kind of tutors who have their own Wikipedia pages, reasoning that she’d math the poetry out of the girl.

And it worked: by the time of her death at thirty-six, Ada had become one of the only people to actually understand what Charles Babbage was getting at with his theoretical computers, to the point where she had actually written an algorithm for the putative analytical engine that would compute Bernoulli numbers.

This week, First Lady Michelle Obama held a press conference at the White House, along with the National Science Foundation, to discuss the creation of its new Career-Life Balance Initiative. It is being aimed at women working in STEM fields — science, technology, engineering, and mathematics — and will tackle the issues faced by those who choose to have families while retaining their careers. Obama said: “If we’re going to out-innovate and out-educate the rest of the world, then we have to open doors to everyone … And that means clearing hurdles for women and girls as they navigate careers in science, technology, engineering and math.”

Since taking the position of president of California’s Harvey Mudd College in 2006, Maria Klawe has earned herself some bragging rights among her peers, specifically this astounding statistic: 42 percent of the college’s computer science majors are female — that is more than triple the number of women pursuing that major since Klawe’s arrival just five years ago. That’s not all she’s accomplished in her short time at Mudd — she was also responsible for expediting changes in the curriculum to keep the school and its students ahead of the programming industry curve. Her success is already making an impact on nearby Silicon Valley, and she also has plans to attract more underrepresented minorities to the field. Oh, and she skateboards around campus. That’s her in the picture above. I’ll bet you’d like to know more about Maria Klawe now, wouldn’t you?