By Roz Young May 19, 2009
Some time ago, I was telling a friend of mine (shout out Heather wherever you are) that it seemed strange that my sister could be studying electrical engineering at University and still be single. There are way more men in engineering than women, especially in the land of LEDs. So I figured she’d be beating the boys off with circuit boards (They use those right? I’m such a smart!). But, as I should have known, they are not exactly the most outgoing of young men and have a tendency to flee in the opposite direction when approached by females of their species. They are enginerds. And as Heather put it so succinctly, “Sure the odds are good, but the goods are odd.” In the end, my sister managed to find her knight in shining transistors and she’s been dating her old lab partner for a few years now.
This week I’ve been thinking about geeks and how the gender split is probably approaching 50:50. Or, it’s a lot closer to even than TV stereotypes might imply. Keep in mind that I’m using Matt and Roz’s more rigorous definition of geek than the lay person might employ. So why do I feel like some of the ladies I’m friends with are still judging me for my fine examples of geekery? For example, our good buddy Ange does not want me to mention in public that she WoWs. She has a high level paladin and is probably sitting in her lab right now, sensing that I’m revealing this embarrassing secret about her to the entire world.
One of my least geeky girlfriends is a criminologist. Toni likes to pretend that she doesn’t have one ounce of geek in her, but she’s a newly anointed Joss Whedon fan. In fact, she watched Firefly episodes for a week straight while on vacation. That kind of compulsive commitment is exactly how geeks are formed. Pretty soon, she’ll be as bad as either Nancy (one’s a grad student with an admirably geeky pedigree and the other is an artist with an affection for comic books and video games). And passing that, she can move right into Natalie territory, where even I am in awe of the geekly radiance reflecting off of her Guitar Hero bass. Recently my fellow French horn enthusiast friend Melissa has been discussing obscure horror movies with Matt. Somewhere along the way, it became more socially acceptable for girls to be geeks.
Some of my interest in this subject stems from our twitter fascination with Felicia Day. Attractive, female, and exceptionally geeky. Those things can go together! (Note to self, make a Venn diagram about this.) It used to be that if you saw a female in a show geared towards something geeky, she was just useless eye candy. Now, women can watch Milla Jovovich kick ass in Resident Evil (a game she loves to play) and hear Scarlett Johansson voice Sailor Moon on Robot Chicken. I heard that Mila Kunis plays WoW. I have this sinking feeling she’s a blood elf paladin though. Bitch.
Yes, the odds are good these days that a woman indulges in an obsessive love of something geeky. If you’re a girl geek, step out of your social leper colony/basement and go shopping. It’s a lot less lonely in the comic book store than it used to be.
