Category: Professional

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Researchers who study social movements call situations like these “free spaces” — small-scale meetings where reformers can gather and ready themselves for collective action without being observed by members of the dominant group. Free spaces often play a critical role in facilitating social change.

This is in the context of two groups of hospital interns/residents, one of which was able to make a significant change in their work environment, and “free space” meetings were the key ingredient. But of course there’s a point I want to come back and make about things I’ve written on earlier. No time for it at the moment, but I wanted to get this down before I forgot/took the book back to the library.

In part based on feedback from the Squirrel, I’m giving this topic one more try. The goal is to be shorter, more thoughtful, and not quite so pissed off.⁽¹⁾ I’m also going to diverge from my usual style of parenthetical comments in favor of footnotes.

Savants are neither necessary nor sufficient.

The starting assumption is that a certain kind of personality, which may be more common among straight men^(2,3), is a better programmer.⁽⁴⁾

That isn’t necessarily so. The Harvey Mudd study that Nicole cites is pretty clear: in an academic setting, grades increased after they “stop[ped] selecting for the socially-challenged-uber-nerd” in the student body.

My personal opinion: quality software comes from an understanding of its use and users. The idealized savant, which is similar to Nicole’s “code cowboy,” is not good at understanding those who are different from him. So by definition he’s not able to create the best quality software.⁽⁵⁾

Underrepresentation is real, and free will is an illusion.

The claim that there are as many women⁽⁶⁾ programmers as there should be is the one that ran me off the rails last time, because it runs so completely counter both to what I’ve read, and to what I’ve seen around me.⁽⁷⁾

People are influenced by culture broadly, and directly by individuals as they grow up, go through school, and enter the workforce. Men are steered away from nursing or elementary education⁽⁸⁾; women are steered away from construction or programming, regardless of the skills or interests of those individuals.

Even within a professional field, women are steered, consciously or not, away from the high-prestige jobs and towards the lower-prestiges ones. My female dentist⁽⁹⁾ has mentioned being directly discouraged from becoming a dentist, and instead encouraged to stick to being a hygienist.

It is no insult to my nurse when I consider that in a different world she might have become a doctor, because no one is making career choices free of outside influence.

It doesn’t matter if the computer knows I’m a girl.

I’m just going to quote Andrea, because I think she says it most clearly and pithily.

fundamentally, my computer may not be able to tell that I’m a girl. But I don’t work for computers, and computers don’t arrange conferences (tweet #1)

The Man, apparently, can tell that I’m a girl. (tweet #2)

And that’s the part that matters.

Footnotes!

1. There’s a part of me that’s irritated at being told that I’m too angry. It hits a nerve, that familiar complaint against women who are assertive. But I’m letting that go in the interests of trying to write something with more clarity. And yeah, I was really angry.
2. There have always been people who have said that women or people of color just don’t have the brains for [X], whatever [X] happens to be, up to and including going to school at all.
3. Child-bearing, as separate from mental capability, got a special mention earlier; the Swedish example shows that providing the right incentives and resources can change the gender balance of child-rearing outside of what’s biologically necessary.
4. The follow-on assumption: programmers can stand in for all of IT. I’ll leave that one alone.
5. Wild generalization: the most savant of the savants seem to congregate around some of the open-source projects that have the least traction. GIMP in particular strikes me as a project without sufficient understanding of its potential users.
6. I’m restricting this to gender at the moment, although I think this argument about the reality of underrepresentation can be broadly generalized to other historically disadvantaged groups.
7. In fact, it goes counter to actual research. MIT found actual, tangible, discrimination, which led to decreased satisfaction among women researchers/professors.
8. Again, I swear I remember reading that teaching (and/or librarianship) lost prestige as the percentage of women increased. Can anybody help?
9. My dentist is freaking awesome. Also, my doctor and the cats’ vet are both women. Not coincidence on the part of the doctor, but sheer random luck as far as the dentist and the vet.

I like Joe Clark’s writing, most of the time. He’s smart and funny, if often brutal, and I have immense respect for his acerbic writing on accessibility, web and otherwise. But his latest blog post strikes me as almost entirely wrong. I rarely write directly on the women & technology discussions — on that topic, I link to others and participate in the Ada Lovelace Day writing, and that’s about it. But this just got me fired up to the point where I had to write something. To pick it apart a bit at a time:

“First of all, it can’t be simultaneously true that women and men are equally suited to “technology” jobs and also that women have specific immutable characteristics that need to be catered to.”

Sure it can. Some characteristics that may need accommodations are not related to one’s actual skill in programming. But more to the point, some of those common gendered characteristics are in no way immutable; they’re cultural. Assertiveness, which is something that Nicole wrote about, and others have written about previously, appears to be much less of an innate characteristic, and something that is deliberately groomed by our culture, and groomed out of women, both subtly and overtly. (Did he read a different Pink Brain, Blue Brain than I did?) And hey, it doesn’t have anything to do with programming skill, either!

“Some of those savants have exactly the qualities needed to program computers – actually caring about programming computers, for one, and a willingness to expend virtually unlimited time on the abstractions implicit in computer programming.”

Are these really the best or only qualities needed to program computers? (“Expend virtually unlimited time”? Really? Is that at all a good thing for anybody?) Does one really need to be a savant to have them? From Nicole’s post: “When Harvey Mudd changed their CS program admission criteria to accept a broader range of people, and stop selecting for the socially-challenged-uber-nerd[s], they found that everyone’s grades improved. It benefits everyone to have a diverse group of people in our field.”

And none of this is related to whether, even if it were true that being out on that extreme end of skill were desirable, that the resulting culture should be so aggressively macho. Nicole’s comparison chart of cowboy-coders vs good developers is a handy reference to the problem with hiring “savants.”

“Child-rearing isn’t discussed.”

Hmmmm: “Recognize the need for work-life balance. Most women still have primary responsibility for children and home. Women need to be equals at home first, but perhaps companies can make it easier for them to get access to awesome childcare and flex time.”

I also seem to remember several of the commenters mentioning the specific issue of child care and conventions. Also, this is a problem for women with careers in every field, at least outside of Scandinavia. (See article about Sweden from the NYT. Changes in policy can in fact make for changes in culture.)

“Hostile work environments are real” vs ““Underrepresentation” is an insulting concept.” and “there are exactly as many people who choose an occupation as there should be”

(This is where my reaction ran off the rails.) Fuck you. No, seriously. Fuck you. My mother was so excited to get her first job after going back to school when I was a teenager, and it was RUINED because of the misogynist assholes that she worked with. She left a male-dominated workplace — as in, she was the only woman on the production floor — and retreated (?) to a woman-dominated field. Admittedly, she’s damn good at her current job, but I can’t imagine that she wouldn’t have been good at that one, too.

She was driven out of that occupation, because life was already hard enough as a widow with three kids and two mortgages without having to deal with that kind of bullshit. Her spirits were crushed day after day, until she was giddy with relief to be quitting THE WEEK BEFORE CHRISTMAS. (It brings me to the edge of tears remembering that time. Mom worked HARD to get where she was, and those fuckers ruined it. She didn’t talk much about it, because that’s who she is, but us kids definitely knew the score.)

Women become underrepresented when they get forced out of a profession, either being headed off at the pass during their education (“even the best women in a CS program are far more likely to drop out than the worst guys”), being told by the culture that they wouldn’t possibly want to do that, or by blatant harassment.

And actually, having worked in a college with dental hygiene, nursing and early education programs, there IS concern about the underrepresentation of men in those training programs. One problem is that “women’s work” in general pays for crap compared to “men’s work,” so men don’t care so much about it. (IIRC, there’s a well-documented history of pay declining in fields where women enter in force, so that it becomes a self-reinforcing loop. Librarianship comes to mind, though I don’t have references, ironically enough.)

Sure, two more (three more?) blog posts won’t do anything, but there are things that will. The culture of a profession is that: a culture, and cultures can in fact change. For one thing, sufficiently hostile work environments are illegal in the United States, and quite possibly more people could be filing lawsuits. (Sometimes I wish mom had fought back about her hostile work environment, but it was 1990 (?), and she was exhausted.) Or, people could listen to what women like Nicole are saying and take them seriously. I’m also trying to remember which college (the same MIT study that Nicole mentions? Harvey Mudd?) that took some very specific steps, and they were able to change the culture and gender balance there. This is not brand new, nor is it rocket science.

“That’s what you’re really saying when you make the claim that women are “underrepresented”: That women haven’t made the right choices and that men need to be displaced.”

No, that’s not at all what I’m really saying. The tl;dr version of “what I’m really saying” would read: “Men and women need to be able to pursue the careers that are most fitting to their talents and interests. They aren’t always able to do so now.” I believe that sincerely.

There SHOULD be more men as nurses or elementary school teachers. I had great male teachers in 4th and 5th grade; I think they were a important balance to the dearth of men in my home life in those years. And similarly, there SHOULD be more women writing software, coding websites, or yes, even being construction workers. And yes, women in the past HAVE tried to make inroads into some of those dirty/dangerous professions, and faced much worse than anything software doodz have dished out. See Nicole’s comment on working as a carpenter…and my mother wasn’t trying to get a job as a programmer!

“I doubt the sincerity and intellectual honesty of men who claim to be upset over this issue.”

Really? REALLY?! You don’t think they’ve ever seen someone they loved get crushed by gender discrimination? Just that they’re trying to prove their sensitivity? (What, so they can get laid? Stereotype much?)

“Proponents of women in technology insistently maintain their cause is just, implying no other cause is.”

Wanting to see more women working in technology does not mean that I don’t think there shouldn’t ALSO be more people with disabilities (some of whom may even be women!) or gay men or ethnic minorities or [fill in the blank] working in technology.

This isn’t a contest. It’s an effort to ensure that a profession that has a huge impact on the rest of society is open to all of society, that there really is a free choice. Because saying that there’s a free choice now, without looking at the context, is BULLSHIT.

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This post wasn’t hard to write, but it was tough to edit and difficult to decide whether to publish, for a lot of reasons. (Special thanks to kitchenMage for reading an earlier draft, encouraging me to post what I’d written, and finding the URL of the NYT article on family leave in Sweden. Thanks also to C for letting me bounce some of this off of him, and for being even more foul-mouthed in his reaction than I was.)

Note: if you haven’t commented here before, your comment will be held for moderation, and it may take me a bit to get to it. And if things get too nasty, I’m entirely willing to close comments. This is my website. You’ve got something to say that I find totally offensive? Then as the MeFites say, GYOB.

I read Ben Henick’s most recent post, and got to the paragraph below and was stopped dead in my tracks by this sentence:

“The numbers and symbols are just an orthography; the language, meanwhile, is not one of science, but of solving problems, of learning how to break progress toward an objective into steps, of learning how to document your work without resenting the tedium, of learning how to recognize patterns and in so doing save time.”

Initially I tried to formulate my response to it as a tweet. Uh, no. Instead, 1000+ words rambling through my life with math….

I was good with math as a kid, if sometimes a little wonky with arithmetic. Hilariously, I once got a 17% on a quiz in 7th grade pre-algebra…as the teacher noted, I did all the formulas right, but all the arithmetic wrong.

In 9th grade, I tested (?) into a special 2-year math program that was held at a local private school with students from all over town. A couple of times a week I went there after school for a tiny math class: only six students. (Two were friends from my regular high school; another was a boy I’d had a crush on in junior high.) It was a difficult class, but fascinating and creative, with a teacher who pushed us to think better, to find patterns, all that stuff in Ben’s quote.

That was the second time I used computers in school, by the way, the first being a half-semester programing TRS-80s. We moved from our regular classroom to the private school’s computer lab for an exercise involving graphing shapes based on equations. I remember yelling at the computer a lot; I was a … high-spirited 14-year-old. But getting it to work: that was f’ing amazing.

Much the same way that getting my name to scroll diagonally on the TRS-80 had been amazing, come to think of it. There’s a little corner of my brain that jumps for joy when I do something to a computer and it works the way I wanted it to.

There weren’t enough students for the second year; at least one of the students had moved, for one thing. I think all of my other classmates went back to their school math programs, but I made up my mind to skip a year so I could come back.

I skipped math for a year in part to avoid what I’d been told were some pretty bad math teachers. In junior high I had one math teacher I loved (she of the 17%) and one that I hated. And instinctively, I think, I knew that whether I was going to persevere in math was going to depend a great deal on the quality of teaching.

In English (and to a lesser degree subjects like history), it didn’t matter so much, curiously enough. Not that I would have said so at the time, but that’s what it looks like in retrospect. After all, I already loved reading and writing, felt like I was good at them, and most of the time was reading above grade level. (That probably gave me a bit of a chip on my shoulder when I didn’t like the teacher, but usually I was capable of doing the assignments regardless, it was just a matter of whether I was going to make the effort.)

In math, on the other hand, you were always moving into something (almost) entirely new. A bad teacher could put a serious dent into being able to really understand and thrill in those new concepts, being able to connect them to previous learning, and so on.

In any case, I went back for year two, which was more of the same but with a larger class,* then came back to my own high school senior year for AP calculus.

I had a good teacher for that one, too. (He was also the basketball coach, and could generally be described as the “whitest guy in Compton” — which is where he commuted from. He was originally from someplace in the upper midwest. I remember when we went back to school after the ’92 riots, he said that his mom had called in a panic, him being the whitest guy in Compton and all.) All that aside, he was a great teacher, if with an entirely different style from the private school math teacher.

But I think I had in my head that trope of math and English being like oil and water, because I was quick to give up math once I hit college. I did well enough on the AP test that I could skip to calc 2, but that was the only math I took the whole four years, and I only took it because I had to take some math class. Now I wish I’d taken statistics.**

That was that for a long time. At some point I stopped thinking of myself as a “math person” because I was a “writing person.” Then I got into this crazy web thing. Whenever I’ve mentioned that my work included some programming, the listener would often say, “Oh, you must be good at math.” (Same as every relative on hearing that I was an English major: “Are you going to be a teacher?” ARGH.) My response has been to shrug: I don’t use that much math on a day to day basis. (although I should track that over a week sometime.)

But I suppose the habits of math stuck with me all along. Break every problem down into the smallest possible chunk to identify what went wrong. And wow: recognizing patterns to save time…I think even when I was an admin assistant that was something that I just naturally fell into.

A few weeks ago I was at the coffee shop and ended up in a weird long conversation with an elderly retired math teacher. He talked about math as seeing patterns, too. One thing I said was that I can’t help seeing typos. Can’t not edit, is how I’ve described it previously. He connected it to that math pattern-finding thing, but I guess I kinda brushed it off, because the connection didn’t hit me until JUST NOW. Now my brain is buzzing, feeling like something about the trajectory of my life makes sense for once, or like I’ve finally stitched together pieces of myself that didn’t seem attached to one another.

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* Weird fact: math class was the same time as our church’s confirmation class. Direct quote from mom: “You can only take this class now. You can get confirmed later.” Or not.

** I looked over C’s shoulder for a good chunk of the stats class he took at UWT. Fascinating stuff. I came away with the conviction that everyone should take statistics, if only to be better at understanding the news.

I’m writing my way through my thoughts about FB…I have always been very ambivalent about it. I have a distaste for and suspicion about “walled gardens” on the internet in general, and nothing that’s happened over the last year or so has done anything to disabuse me of that prejudice.

On the other hand, it’s popular for a reason, and I don’t think that’s just about network effects. I’ve been out here on the web producing content for a while now — over a decade! — and so rather than just go “ew!” and run away, I’m trying to think about the problems that FB solves for many people. In particular, the problems that aren’t currently (well-)solved anywhere else. This is what I’ve got so far:

Tracking conversation: posting information is easy (relatively speaking), and tracking other people’s individual posts is similarly simple (Atom/RSS FTW!). But keeping track of conversations: discussion threads, comments, back & forth exchanges — that’s a more complicated problem across any sort of distributed network. (I’m partial to subscribing to comments by email when that’s an option, oddly enough.) By trying to be all things to all people, FB negates that. You don’t have to “track”; it’s all just there.

Remembering birthdays: events are pretty simple; everybody’s got their own calendar system, and there’s lots of ways to send invitations. Birthdays, on the other hand, are sort of a passive-aggressive event. You (generally) want your friends to know it’s your birthday, but you don’t want to be pushy — or you don’t want to invite everyone you know to whatever celebration you might be having. Personally, I’m finding it nice to know when acquaintances, relatives, and long-lost friends have birthdays. For my really close friends/family, I know their birthdays and have them in my calendar (theoretically). But little reminders of more distance relationships are a pleasant way to be more sociable.

Finding people: I think initially the appeal of finding people — and being findable — through FB is that it didn’t feel like you were waving a sign to the whole internet. There was the possibility of being semi-findable, putting out a sliver of one’s self to be found either within FB or out on the big scary internets, and having control over which pieces were presented. Plus, with FB you don’t have to produce a lot of content to be findable…vs Google, where you’re “fighting” with any famous — or just more verbose — people with similar names.

Wasting time with friends: ok, I hate FB games with the burning fire of 1000 suns. I’m not much for quizzes either. but goofing off is an important part of life, goofing off with friends even more so. And when all your friends are on the internets, and everybody’s at their dumb job 😉 then goofing off in a light-weight way on the internet with your friends is a very good thing.

So the question is (from my POV): how does one recreate these things on the open web? Which things really honestly require something new (ala Diaspora) and which can be (easily) jerry-rigged with existing stuff? How can they be made easier? Ok, so that was three questions. I don’t think I have the answers yet…I’d be very curious to hear anybody else’s ideas.