Why we need to rethink “Women in Tech”
thedailymuse.com
thedailymuse.com
Put another way, we lament that there are not enough women in tech, not enough women ceos, not enough women in <insert high prestige white collar work>, but I can't personally recall seeing a great deal of frustration over the lack of women in trash pickup, construction, boxing and prison populations.
(full disclosure, I do think it's a bug that more women aren't in tech, but I thought I'd play devil's advocate for a moment..my technical cofounder is a woman).
It's hard not to feel that tech is missing out on something by not having more women, we just don't know what we're missing. I would bet money if more women were in games, we'd have had the social game revolution a good 3 years earlier at least. As someone else mentioned, working with women creates a more pleasant and balanced place. Sometimes it's nice to hear about how the new baby is doing, or have someone to gossip with. Interactions you don't tend to get with men. I bet that helps with creativity too.
What I largely disagree with is how we go react to it: very large doses of affirmative action at both the industry and college level. Not only does it just feel like we're throwing money at women who would have done it anyway, it's a rather discriminatory set of policies on top. The message is that females are the weaker tech sex, which in turn breeds things like imposter syndrome. However, I won't pretend that the locker room antics that is college Computer Science courses isn't intimidating.
The problem is lower down. IIRC, there's research that says girls of 12-13 entertain the idea of going into science or engineering, but something happens in middle school age where that interest gets beaten out of them, and by high school it's all over. You've lost them. We give grants and jobs to those that had the resolve to go through it, but have nothing to say to those 14 year old girls that are wondering why they thought they'd make iOS apps at all. That's who we should be targeting.
Which is, coincidentally enough, when most girls hit puberty IIRC.
One thing to point out is that historically women have had different economic priorities than men, and usually still do. In the Wild West for example, for a long time, there were 50 men to one woman, roughly the same gender ratio as in the early days of the internet and in open source software engineering today. When we see these long pervasive questions, it's worth asking why. Certainly gender roles have changed enough since the early 19th century that this can't be the only factor, or have they?
At least in Western history, women have historically (and continue to today) looked for more security than adventure, and therefore tended to be very under-represented in cutting-edge fields and immature industries, while moving in later as things begin to stabilize. Women have historically run safe industries involving commodities everyone needs (thread, yarn, cloth), and take fewer risks.
So my take here is that the start-up culture itself goes counter to what most women generally want: a stable supply of income structured in a way which is friendly to raising a family. This is a bug, as you say. But it cannot be solved with a little outreach or so forth because if more women wanted to be involved at these early stages of startups, they would be.
A better approach IMO is to look at how something like open source software consulting and development can fit into a more integrated lifestyle where work and family life are no longer separate. This brings women into tech but on terms that are more in line with current career trends of career choices that women not only are making today but have in the past. This means focusing on economic opportunities which are conducive to this sort of integrated lifestyle and worrying less about CEO's of hot startups.
I am also going to make a claim that may seem even more controversial: I am willing to bet that women are more likely to be self-employed than men, and that there may be a lot more women in tech, self-employed, than we know. We may simply be measuring wrong.
nothing is because of gender. Everything is because of social organization. No matter how much your logical brain wants to see otherwise.
Gender, unlike biological sex, is a social construct. So quite frankly what you say isn't at odds with what I am saying. This being said, there are obvious factors in how differently situated men and women are with regard to reproduction, and because reproduction is a fundamental aspect of human life, this cascades fundamentally into other areas as well. How it cascades is dependent on social organization, as you point out.
So the question I think we should be asking is how we build a society which gives more people what they really need without asking for soul-destroying tradeoffs. For my money I want to see fewer mega-corporations, and more family-run home businesses, and despite the current gender disparity, I think open source provides an opportunity here.
The goal however most certainly should not be to tell women what they should want and that if they don't want to be CEO of some hot startup because the long working hours, lack of pay security, etc do not appeal to them, that there is something wrong with them. The goal should be to create an economy where people can contribute how they want and stop obsessing about why other people make the choices that they do.
I actually see modernist feminism as a response specifically to the fact that the industrial revolution largely completed an economic trend that had been going on since the late Middle Ages, which was the displacement of women economically and the taking over of these industries by men. Women, deprived of their historical economic place in Western society, had to find a new economic place, and the need for this was the catalyst for women's suffrage, the women entering the factories and schools, and the like.
This lead to an extremely male-normal society, though, and it has meant that women are still suffering for that. The genders cannot be equal where one is normal and the other not. Note that Robbie Davis-Floyd documents in her (excellent) book "Birth as an American Rite of Passage" that in medical textbooks (at least in the early 90's when she was writing this one) that male figures were overrepresented among diagrams of healthy anatomy, while female figures were overrepresented among diagrams of disease.
That doesn't mean that there aren't biological differences that don't come into play. But how those differences manifest is very much tied to culture. But culture is not without limits--- it is subject to functional imperatives, both biological and social in nature.
Consider this: marriage, as an institution which centers around procreation and childraising, is more universally recognized in ritual practices than funerals are. There are social imperatives at work even when biological ones are not (certainly there is no biological imperative to get married).
The social imperative there is in fact quite obvious when you start looking at differences between paternity and maternity considerations. Women are mothers if they have given birth. Men are fathers typically if they are recognized by society or the law as such, and this is only loosely tied to biology (even in the US today--- consider that 52% of never-married mothers never apply for child support, often out of a desire not to have further contact with the putative biological father, but in other cultures a child born out of wife-swapping or wife-loaning is always the child of the woman's husband). So a social imperative of managing paternity considerations and providing stable economic units for childraising often are decisive here.
That's a pretty willfully blind stance to take. Have you never studied human biology? Or have you decided that you are simply above the chemicals in your bloodstream?
There is a tendency to see our current social organization as dictated entirely by biology but that can't be right since, say, ancient Sparta or medieval Iceland were very different in important ways.
So we can still work to create a society that works better for us.
I am not convinced that biochemistry determines behavior differences as much as many biologists would like to think. There are cases where it does, of course, but on the whole our bodies are organic systems which learn behaviors based on external stimuli. One important source of that stimuli is culture, which also includes things like language. Physical environment provides another set of stimuli. And just because one thing seems more natural doesn't preclude other societies from doing things differently.
For example Arnold van Gennep, the early Dutch anthropologist, spent a fair bit of space talking about the Todas in India which until reasonably recently practised polyandry. When you start looking at how polyandry was implemented in their culture, you can see clearly what problems they had to solve, and hence why polyandry is generally far more rare than polygyny.
For example, if a woman has multiple husbands, then there is a question as to who is the socially recognized father. The Todas handled this through a series of rituals where the woman could select one of her husbands as the father of her children (regardless of having sexual relations with other of her husbands), and could re-assign that role going forward (i.e. for children born after the ritual, which she could only do while pregnant) if she so chose.
Our biological systems are largely secondary to social inputs, I think. There are imperatives and some of those have biological origins. However, it's way too easy to assign too much responsibility to biology and too little to culture.
Essentially I take issue with the claim that the only way the sexes differ is mechanical.
Nothing? Everything?
Church starts on Friday, I guess.
If one hypothetically wanted to get ladies more journo-points, one would not tell them to improve their coding ability, because the ROI on coding ability in producing journo-points is pretty poor. I don't think most people are really interested in the social justice maximizing allocation of journo-points, though. (n.b. There are a variety of activities which are worth zero or negative geek-points that are worth scads of journo-points which I could use as an example here. I'm self-censoring because I don't want to accuse the folks on those Top X Lists of benefiting from them even though, in aggregate, they certainly benefit from them.)
I would be very careful making inferences from present allocations of journo-points into how we can better incentivize any group of people into seeing that startup-points or geek-points or engineering-points are what they should be optimizing for, if we decide that that is indeed our goal. (On the specific subject of gender, I think that at least part of the discussion should probably be "What kind of points do women at the margin want?" and, if that isn't geek-points, "Should we convince women at the margin to sacrifice what they currently value for geek-points?")
1) "Geek" culture is not heterodox. It's very accepting of fat guys who like faux-Mexican food, and anime; but not so accepting of other non-conformists. Many women are not fat guys who like faux-Mexican food, and anime.
2) Women are encouraged to work hard. Men are encouraged to be talented. This is true of teachers, parents, peers, and managers. Coding is something that requires more talent than hard work (at least, to get started); due to the high barrier of entry.
3) There is some ugly sexism in parts of tech. There is ugly sexism in other career paths (finance, sales); but we can do a lot better.
4) Some women choose to have more personal time, rather than staying up till 3am coding. It's hard to tell if this is really relevant - Patrick McKenzie claims to have run business on 5 hours a week. And no-one here (I hope) think driving code monkeys on 80 hour/week death marches is really a good idea (due to tiredness-induced bugs).
What other sorts of non-conformists find that they are not accepted by the tech world?
In my experience, the tech world is extremely tolerant of wacky political beliefs (anarchist/communist, for example), low status hobbies, all sorts of foreign cultures, gays and other sexual minorities, to name all the groups I can think of.
Also, there are a few studies suggesting women avoid computing because women dislike nonconformists and individualistic culture. This would certainly explain why the corporate world has more women programmers than the startup world.
http://web.archive.org/web/20100106021904/http://scicom.ucsc...
http://web.archive.org/web/20091007234852/http://opensource....
Also, you realize your points 2) (women work hard, not smart) and 4) (women don't work hard) are contradictory, right?
Those examples don't point to women disliking "nonconformists and individualistic" cultures, they point to women not liking geek male culture. Plush Nintendo-shaped stuffed pillows are just as non-conformist as Star Trek toys, but those UCSC women seemed pretty happy with the environment.
The Lin paper talks about all kinds of different problems (" women within the software industry have to work harder than men in order to get the same respect", etc)
It might just be certain non-conformist cultures women don't like. The point remains - if technology were less accepting of differences, it would probably have more women.
I'm also not sure I agree that nintendo-pillows are as non-conformist as star trek toys - geek-chic has become fairly mainstream. Plenty of hipsters wear mario or pacman t-shirts but very few people of any mainstream subculture wear a borg or lt. data t-shirt.
I disputed the notion that programming required "talent", whatever it means. Learning to program isn't rocket science, but it required a lot of dedication and patience.
Some women choose to have more personal time, rather than staying up till 3am coding.
I thought coding until 3AM in the morning is the definition of personal time for programmers.
I do not know about most programmers but personally I stop coding at 10pm. Any later and I'd be damaging a well balanced sleep pattern and writing sub-standard code.
Instead I think the cause is something similar. Girls historically did not spend a significant amount of their free time on computers. Interestingly enough I think that is changing. Nowadays thanks to facebook both genders spend a vast ammount of time at the keyboard.
Whether that will result in more female programmers I'm not sure. With video games the natural next step is to try and make your own. Facebook does not have this natural migration path towards programming.
The dichotomy between hard work and talent can be a false one. What I'm talking about is teachers rewarding girls for solving easy questions without any fuss, and rewarding boys for solving hard problems. Programming requires hard work and talent, but it's seen as talent by outsiders (i.e. 99% of the people most high-school students know).
While codeacademy and learn-x-the-hard-way may help lower the barrier, learning to code has, historically, been really bloody hard.
I think there are many more girl geeks than folks think. But in some areas, they are very much under-represented. The problem though is that "tech" here is used as a very narrow way. I think if there is a female sysadmin who runs an accounting system for a rice manufacturing plant, that she would be a "woman in tech" as would a self-employed consultant that hacks on open source software and implements it for customers. But the "women in tech" lists are not about women working in tech.... And that's part of the problem.
This was one of the first results I got searching for "how do I learn to program". The other results were Norvig's "it takes 10 years", the University of Phoenix, and a wikihow page recommending SICP.
If you know how to program, it's easy to get into it. If you don't know, you won't know where to start. You'll get tutorials saying "Install Linux, apt-get build essentials; open vi ...."
Once you know how to program (hello world, for loops), you can calculate fibonacci numbers. Wow. Then you need an application. People will think "you're a programmer, so, can you write me a game? Hack the Pentagon? No? LAMO!".
Still, if I was able to fairly easily pick HTML/CSS/JavaScript up and do stuff I found cool in sixth grade, it has to have a pretty low barrier to entry. This is especially true because I never was a hard worker :P
That said, I think starting from SICP instead of outdated JavaScript tutorials would have been more awesome. But maybe more difficult.
And really, all that stuff: Linux, SICP, Emacs (I'm too cool for Vi :)) was easier than it was made out to be. People say Linux is difficult, but I found it about as easy to pick up as Windows and easier that OS X.
After all that rambling, I think I lost my point. All I really have to say is that, in my experience, it's easier than it seems as long as you don't let people intimidate you ("ooh, Linux is difficult" and other nonsense like that).
Next was a simple number guessing game (one screen of code in Perl). Next will be the number guessing game in C.
Really, what helps early on is a teacher. I am able to give him assignments. Ask him to make changes to his code, etc. He is starting to get it but it is a lot of work at first.
Maybe an apprenticeship model would be ideal?
A third of the software engineers and developers out there are women. I am willing to bet though that the numbers in hot tech start-ups are significantly less than that.
And yet, what of the woman who says "I don't want to work this job while I raise my kid? I am going to become a freelance tech writer! (or developer, or whatever)" They don't count in these metrics. Which may also say something about the sexism latent in the metrics.....
BTW, two of the most talented programmers I have ever met in my life were women. One worked in academia, and the other, despite her important achievements, worked at a tech-centric coffee shop as a sysadmin, and later got a job as a developer for a relatively obscure yet stable company.
There are - you probably don't travel in those circles so you don't see the outreach efforts (I work with a lot of union trades and they have outreach programs for those exact areas you listed).