REVENGE OF THE NERDETTE

These girls are part of a rising breed of young women who are claiming the nerd label for themselves. Theyhave T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan. The crew includes Cristina Sanchez, a master’s student in biomedical engineering (and a former cheerleader) who can talk for hours about aerodynamics. Caitrin Eaton, a freshman, asked her boyfriend for a soldering iron last Christmas and juniors Courtney Mario and Perry Ross.

These girl geeks far from being social misfits love all things sci-tech. They’ve modeled themselves after icons such as Tina Fey, whose character on 30 Rock is a “Star Wars”-loving, tech-obsessed, glasses-wearing geek, but who’s garnered mainstream appeal and a few fashion-magazine covers. Or on actress Danica McKellar, who coauthored a math theorem, wrote a book for girls called Math Doesn’t Suck and posed in a bikini for Stuff magazine. Or even Ellen Spertus, a professor and research scientist at Google — and the 2001 winner of the Silicon Valley “Sexiest Geek Alive”pageant.

When these gals choose to geek out, they consciously tweak the two chief archetypes of geeks: that they’re unattractive outcasts, and that they’re male. “For a long time, there’s been this stereotype that either you’re ugly and smart or cute and not suited for careers in math, science or engineering,” says Annalee Newitz, the co-editor of She’s Such a Geek!, a 2006 anthology of women writing about math, tech and science. Today’s girl geeks are members of the first generation to have been truly reared on technology who grew up on gender-neutral movies like Hackers and The Matrix, and saw the transformation of Willow on Buffy the Vampire Slayer from awkward geek to smart and sassy sex symbol..

In 2007, girls won both the team and the individual categories of the Siemens Competition for high-school students in math, science and technology for the first time in the competition’s history. A recent Pew Internet & American Life project found that among users 12 to 17, girls dominate the blogosphere and social-networking sites; they’re also beating boys when it comes to creating Web sites of their own. In the past, women either buried their femininity, or simply gave up their techie interests to appear more feminine.

Which may be one reason that many of these tech-friendly women are proud of their sexuality as they are of their geekiness. “Just because I get dressed up Saturday night, that doesn’t mean I won’t do better (than a guy) on a test on Monday,” says Nerd Girl Sanchez.

It took Google’s Spertus, who is 39, years before she could proclaim herself girl and geek in the same breath. But it happened when she won the award for “Sexiest Geek Alive” — Spertus beat out the men in her competition, and at her crowning, she paraded onstage in a corset made out of a circuit board and a high-slit skirt with a slide rule strapped to her leg. Some women worry that being too sexy could hurt them. The ideal, of course, is having gender be a non-issue, and for a few, it is. “I consider myself a normal girl who happens to like math and science,” Sanchez says.
-JESSICA BENNETT and JENNIE YABROFF (Newsweek)