Revenge of the Nerdette

Which may be one reason that many of these tech-friendly women are working their pumps so hard. They're trying to break down stereotypes by being as 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. Turning geek into chic isn't always easy. 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," a now annual pageant that began in 2000 as a spoof of People magazine's "Sexiest Man 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. Still, some women worry that being too sexy could hurt them. At the San Francisco Girl Geek Dinner earlier this year, Leah Culver, 25, the developer of Pownce, a microblogging platform, described the extra efforts she's made to convince potential employers that despite being attractive, she's actually, like, competent. "I used to carry around a copy of my computer-science degree in my purse," she said. The ideal, of course, is having gender be a nonissue, and for a few, it is. "I consider myself a normal girl who happens to like math and science," Sanchez says.

She may not be in the majority now, but if her fellow geek girls have anything to do with it, she will be. Outreach programs such as TechBridge, an after-school workshop for middle- and high-school girls, and MAGIC (More Active Girls In Computing), a national mentoring program for aspiring computer scientists, are among the dozens of programs aimed at getting girls to think about futures in science and technology. The Nerd Girls also conduct weekly outreach: "We try to give them real examples of what engineers do," says Panetta. "You love watching special effects in 'Harry Potter'? That's an engineer. You like the iPhone? An engineer made that. Cheerleading? Dancing? How about sports engineering?" Because you know, girls: the geeks really are inheriting the earth.

© 2008