cranktastic:

I AM SPECIALIZED WOMEN (by specialized411)

Full disclosure: I work for Specialized.

Additional full disclosure: I believe bikes RULE! I don’t care what you you ride. More women on bikes, please! 

Extra bonus round full full disclosure just to make it a trilogy: But of course I would prefer it if you rode a Specialized. :) 

“You can’t buy happiness, but you can buy a bike.  And that’s pretty close.” Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go ride my bike.

[…] the idea of the ‘gift-that-girls-don’t-have’ is likely to be a key part of what’s keeping them from pursuing those careers [in math and science]

Carol Dweck in Girls and Math: Busting the Stereotype

Some interesting commentary in the article. I can say, from my perspective as a women in a STEM field, that I have asked myself the question of whether I would affirm a stereotype if I were to chose a different path for myself after having completed advanced degrees in engineering. 

Source: mindshift.kqed.org

Once during an Etape my wife and I climbed the Aubisque and the crowd lining the road to cheer for the husbands or brothers or friends became frenzied at seeing a woman pass so many men and began closing in on us, scrambling at us and screaming, ‘Salut, femme! Allez, madame! Courage [drawn out and pronounced in two distinct syllables, cour-ahge]! Femme! Allez Femme! Bon something something femme!’

Bill Strickland

I love the idea of riding along some day and having spectators cheer like that. Also, it sounds like a new catchphrase for our women’s cycling team.

Source: bicycling.com

Many were delighted at the prospect of change. Hoopdriver, the “counterjumper” hero of H G Wells’s 1896 comic novel The Wheels of Chance, is out for a ride on his day off when he meets a young lady cycling along “wearing a patent costume with button-up skirts, and mounted on a diamond-frame safety with Dunlops, and a loofah-covered saddle”.

He is so awestruck by her that he falls off his Ordinary. “Rational dress,” he says, “didn’t look a bit unwomanly… How fine she had looked, flushed with the exertion of riding, breathing a little fast, but elastic and active! Talk about your ladylike, homekeeping girls with complexions like cold veal!”

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Source: telegraph.co.uk

Women of the Space Shuttle Era: (left to right) Peggy Whitson, NASA’s Chief Astronaut and U.S. record holder for total time spent in space; Anna Fisher, the fourth U.S. woman and first mother in space; Pam Melroy, second female pilot and shuttle commander; Eileen Collins, first female pilot and shuttle commander; Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger, an educator astronaut and the shuttle’s final rookie astronaut; and Mae Jemison, the first African-American woman in space. (From Shuttlenauts photo essay) #
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Women of the Space Shuttle Era: (left to right) Peggy Whitson, NASA’s Chief Astronaut and U.S. record holder for total time spent in space; Anna Fisher, the fourth U.S. woman and first mother in space; Pam Melroy, second female pilot and shuttle commander; Eileen Collins, first female pilot and shuttle commander; Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger, an educator astronaut and the shuttle’s final rookie astronaut; and Mae Jemison, the first African-American woman in space. (From Shuttlenauts photo essay) #

Source: airspacemag.com

For the first time in history, four women are in orbit around the earth at once. Pictured clockwise from the lower left are NASA astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson, Expedition 23 flight engineer; NASA astronaut Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Naoko Yamazaki and NASA astronaut Stephanie Wilson, all STS-131 mission specialists. #
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For the first time in history, four women are in orbit around the earth at once. Pictured clockwise from the lower left are NASA astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson, Expedition 23 flight engineer; NASA astronaut Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Naoko Yamazaki and NASA astronaut Stephanie Wilson, all STS-131 mission specialists. #