From a woman in tech to former nerds: a call for introspection
Gender equality through the lens of the geek culture
There were around 110 students in my class at engineering school. Amongst those, we were six or seven girls. This was quite some years ago and until recently, I naively thought things had moved on. I was wrong. As I participated to an event promoting computer science to teenagers, I got to talk with high school girls. I had a good and a bad surprise. The good: they were all studying computer science as an optional course. The bad: none of them considered tech as a possible career. None. Their answer was automatic, and it was a no. It looked like taking this course was rather their parents’ wishes. Worse than that, what they expressed about their career aspirations made me so sad. It sounded like both complacence and acceptance : they would, of course, rather be taking on literary studies. 16 years old in 2019, and we’re still there.
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What are we so completely missing out on? When we hear how accepting they are of their non-tech future, we all hear “I am not good enough”. We know that girls start to lose confidence in themselves at puberty, perhaps even before, pushed to a perfectionism they can’t ever meet. This is known and addressed in multiple ways. But there’s more. What they’re saying is: “I cannot exist there”. It’s not even about feeling less capable: it’s the impossibility for them to be there, to live their stories. The problem is almost organic. It precedes the ability to project themselves as a scientist even before mentioning the lack of role models.
Their attitude got me to think. Why did I choose such a career? Why am I staying? And the first thing I realized is that others have asked that question before I ever took it seriously. Male coworkers have been asking me: “what the f*** I was doing in computer science”. One of them even said I will have quit tech within 10 years from our conversation (so, apparently, my current career path is over in about 2 years, which statistically wouldn’t be an outlier). As surprising as it sounds, I know it was not meant as a sexist comment. It formalized a visible discrepancy that I could not quite define but also hardly deny. Every time, I replied with what I thought was a joke: “It’s not the computers, stupid. It’s the video games.” Retrospectively, maybe that wasn’t a joke.
I remember this classmate in high school. He made a point of always getting the worst grades in literary classes. To him, it proved that he was a “real scientist”. Of course, it wasn’t his fault. He was a kid. He was told that science was cold logic, facts and figures, so, he followed expectations. Well, by that definition, I am not a “real scientist”. I liked more or less math and physics, I had a weird fascination for ants, but my main interests were always books. As a kid, I spent my time imagining stories when I wasn’t reading them. And at age 14 I discovered video games, fed to me by my eldest brother. I got hooked immediately. It opened worlds and infinite possibilities for stories. The books got real.
The story of women in computing is finally getting known today. Women moved from human-computer jobs to become the very first programmers. Men took over for multiple reasons, such as getting offered scientific gifts on their birthdays: microscopes and computers. Geeky boys have been permitted — encouraged — to create an alternative culture for themselves, the one I surfed to squeeze myself into computer science. Western societies have this belief that power comes from control over nature, that the world should be rationalized through science. At the tip of these processes, our perception of tech condensed into a set of representations, false representations. Women are not frauds. This is.
I discovered a great example of that fraud incidentally, when, last year, I read this article which explains how our verbal skills are much more at play than we think when programming (specifically, learning to code). It was a revelation. I could do an entire presentation on how writing this article felt similar to coding my first Python script. Whether writing or coding, we look up the right terms, we verify our syntax, we patch sentences. Refactoring entire paragraphs can take us the day. Science does not have the monopoly over logic, conciseness or precision. Try to write a story without them and have fun.
This article is one element of a long and complex process that, over time, had an effect on me that I didn’t expect: I felt relief. As if, somehow, what my coworkers told me had crept into my mind and made me second-guess my career choices. Instead, it unlocked a lot of thinking about what else — rather than what more — I could be bringing at work, with a different perspective that I no longer considered a handicap. I questioned the value system before, but I’ve always been told that I did not “get it”. Now I know that this “else” has never been worthless — only wrongly assessed. And I’ve been wondering about those high school girls again. Those false representations are the walls that keep them out. They have better proficiencies than boys in almost everything, but we have them look on their side of the wall. Imagine if there was none. I can.
This blog post should have been a career advice post, but there was this issue: my path is too specific. I had access to a culture that was not intended for me — one that met my need for words, stories, universes — at the opposite end of all the conceptions we have about tech. My path is an anomaly, as is the path of women who “end up” doing computer science. Unlike boys, girls’ culture is forced upon them. Early on, they witness and replicate aggressive behaviors towards women in power, on TV, at home, at school. They’re told that their looks matter more than their brains. I feel uneasy whenever we laugh at stereotypes of women scientists who do not conform to gender expectations, like Amy in the Big Bang Theory. The show fails blatantly in its depiction of women in STEM. And Amy is lucky to be in a comedy show: she is not facing terrible life challenges because she’s too complicated. What is wrong with women in tech? It is right in front of our eyes.
So, as women with tech roles, we had to look the other way. We climbed the mountain, because for some reason at the time — often thanks to our family — we did not see how big, steep and unfair it was. Some of us say that we’re exaggerating, gender didn’t make a difference for them, it was an easy climb. Then why feel the need to say that so quickly, as if to separate from other women’s experiences? Why do women so often make this half-joke in front of men that they hate each other’s guts? This internalized misogyny is rooted deep in our vulnerability, as we feel the need to normalize and comply with the social demands we’ve received. No matter what we say, we can never fully ignore those demands. We take our distances with our own group so we can show we are not like them — those annoying, emotional and chatty women. I know very well this feeling because I escaped a few ladies’ lunches myself. I regret it today. We can change that attitude. We can speak highly of our coworkers, we can praise the successful women we see around us — especially in front of kids — and we also have to be supportive of one another. Foster sorority, even when in the absence of this shared culture, we struggle to find common goals.
Feminism is indeed multiform. We often get the objection that we can’t even agree on what it means. But the whole point about feminism is that it cannot exist if it is not situated. It is incredibly difficult as women to find these common goals and to build on common values besides what we’re not — (white) men. All we have is our singularity. The gender conversation can only be colored by our life experiences. Doing so we will offend every time until we don’t.
Some of the most delightful offenses come from women in literature. Because fantasy is such a geek reference and a genre that is so often despised, let’s not shy away from one great example: Ursula K Le Guin’s book series Earthsea. In the author’s note, she explains that the thought of making a woman her main character did not even cross her mind when she started her books. The heroic standards back then were too strong. Heroes had to be men, pursuing noble purposes, condescending towards any practicality — including sexuality. Yet, over time, she found ways to fight back. She made sure her mostly white readers would learn only after a certain time in the first book that the hero was dark-skinned. The second book is already centered on a female protagonist though still in a male-dominated setting. The fourth book — almost 20 years after the first, amid 70’s feminism — adopts a strong feminist perspective. Ursula Le Guin’s heroines are not escaping the social conditions of their gender. They are physically subjected to men’s violence, they’re even rather weak. But they possess their own power, in their own way. We can relate to those women much more than we can to most heroes. They have a body, a house and a family. From there on, fans were reading about a widowed farmer’s wife, an old mage who lost his powers and his job, and their disfigured adoptive daughter. About a world where you can speak to dragons but you still have to tend to your goats. About mages who better have their retirement plans ready for when their skills have aged. As expected, some fans felt betrayed.
Challenging the stereotypes in video games has triggered even bigger feelings of betrayal. But something else, and probably not unrelated, is making them fundamentally different from books: technology. AAA games are a means to an end. Imitating reality is just another way to assert power over nature, to show off, to prove a point. I used to love video games way more when they had their flaws. I loved those weird mysteries that surrounded them. When I had no idea what to do, and no walkthrough existed on the internet. When I could not always tell between a glitch and an unfinished story. I laughed my heart out at their self-mockery sometimes. What a world existed there.
Video games have always been a man’s field. But at least we had no choice but to tolerate anomalies in them, to accept that somehow it wasn’t possible to make everything like we wanted. Even the most pompous books leave interpretations open. Video games now rarely do. Their magic recedes as technology grows. Just like in the Earthsea books, as mages chase control over life and death, interest is lost; apathy creeps over the world. Is apathy threatening us too? Whenever we are dismissing words, emotions, individuals, it means we have stopped taking the time. We are not paying attention. I listened to a podcast that describes how difficult it is to create a D&I culture in startups when in “panic mode”, running as fast as possible to success (or failure). When we are in panic mode, we try to eliminate contingencies. But like for video games, the unexpected makes life interesting. Homogeneity is dull, standards are boring. Ursula Le Guin felt compelled to write according to those of her time, so she wouldn’t be marginalized. And as she cites Virginia Woolf, she reminds us of this fact: there is nothing more unexpected than women’s values. We are contingencies.
Should it really be our goal as women, to do like men, wake up at 7.30 am and walk out with our briefcase to work?
The other day, someone pointed out to me that interview of Marguerite Yourcenar where she asks this question. It’s a tough one. Solving the chicken & egg problem of innate and acquired gender-specific behaviors is very difficult. It’s tempting to stop trying and to withdraw from dynamics that only seem to produce more gender imbalance, as if stuck in a closed loop. Surrendering to essentialism is already happening: going back to nature, to the household, to spirituality. And because of this trend, I am afraid there is a real possibility for disaster: yes, tech and women might never work together. It means we have no choice: either we let grey suits with briefcases build a world from which we will have withdrawn, or we change the grey suit for everyone.
Geeks have always formed a peculiar community, carrying a different relationship to the norm, embracing a particular sense of empowerment. Things could have been otherwise. But so far, this community did not resist the friction with what seems today unlimited power of tech over the world. Toxicity arose from that friction, whether in Silicon Valley or here in France. The grey suit often got traded in for a hoodie. Tech nerds have integrated expectations they might not have agreed with in their earlier lives: accepting responsibilities they don’t really want, merging into toxic archetypes of “rockstars” they would have detested, complying with a norm they had only disdain for. Technicality — mixed up with dubious notions of masculinity — gave power to a community that was maybe the least prepared to accept it. With it came nicely wrapped the right to overlook softer skills, to dismiss emotions, to neglect empathy. For a long time, it felt comfortable.
Today we are slowly realizing that it is a poisoned gift. Its price is as great as it is impossible to measure — thus, easily denied. It is the price of our mental well-being, the price of women leaving tech, the price of a world built without them. But this gift can be refused. Dynamics can be reversed. Yes, we have been losing our senses, but we are also the best placed to tell a different story. I believe in this opportunity. We need awareness. We need introspection. We should be much more careful and circumspect about the hubris of the tech “elite”. We need to challenge this common thinking that we have to leave ourselves at the door when we enter the office, that chaos would ensue if we did otherwise. We can put an end to this confounding schizophrenia that makes us believe we can submit to a value system at work and teach another one to our kids at home. This collective awareness should be our job — men and women. Doing it differently. Bringing in the “else”. Accepting contingencies.
There are no bad guys. There is only a lack of sincerity. Sincerity is about winning ourselves back. Sincerity is about uncovering opportunities that have always existed and that we dismissed out of fear. Sincerity comes from introspection. If you are clueless about what to do for gender equality; if you feel uncomfortable with diversity and inclusion because you don’t really know or understand what it’s all about; even if you think it’s not your problem: do that work of introspection and do it for yourself. Whether you’ll be stepping up, down, or aside, to tell your own story is to reconfigure the space for everyone. Let’s go back to being persons. It is the condition, for us and for those high school girls, to exist as women.
Some credits and references:
About gender discrimination in the tech industry (2017): https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/20/the-tech-industrys-gender-discrimination-problem
About empathy in tech, I came across Andrea Goulet’s work as I attended the lbc² conference. Her mission statement: “Empower communicators to code and coders to communicate”. Really worth checking out and I plan on following up more on what she does.
About the story of human computers at NASA, in addition to The Calculating Stars, the movie Hidden Figures is quite enlightening but unfortunately whitewashed (as is, by the way, Ghibli’s adaptation of Earthsea).
About the story of women in computing and addressing gender gaps in the industry, I loved listening to Isabelle Collet (French only), in this podcast: Les Couilles sur la Table #58 “Des ordis, des souris et des hommes” and in this talk with the AdaTechSchool (the French feminist programming school): “Comment rendre l’informatique aux femmes”.
About “looks that matter more than brains”, the work of Mona Chollet — unfortunately only available in French — is absolutely spot-on in Beauté fatale. The first chapter addresses the underestimated trauma caused to society by Western women entering the workforce and the resulting commands to their appearance so they “remain women” — while men may all look the same. This part of her work seems inspired by Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, which I haven’t read yet.
I got a lot of inspiration for this article thanks to the content shared by the Ladies of Code community which I am a quiet member of, as a lady who barely codes. About them: Ladies of Code celebrates and supports women and non-binary coders across Europe via meetups, workshops and hack nights.
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