Violet Blue, a self-described sex educator, wrote a blog post for ZDNet about WWDC. It’s a long rambling post which seems to be comprised of five blog posts that inexplicably got smushed into one. Smushing them into a single post results in a lack of cohesion and not fully explaining anything. Go read it for yourself: WWDC 2011: No innovation from Apple, developer discontent.
One of her points about WWDC seems to be about the gender imbalance there, with a side trek into an anecdote about trolling a couple of guys by playing dumb chick. The anecdote is pretty obnoxious. A guy comes up to her and another woman and asks what they’re doing here. As a conversation opener with a stranger, I don’t see this question as sexist. It’s just “hi, how are you?” They decided to say that they’re models on vacation, instead of the truth of, “I’m a tech blogger and this is my friend who’s a mobile developer”. If you decide to troll someone and they take you at face value, you don’t get to complain about their behavior afterwards.
Mike Lee, a well-known Mac developer, noted that her behavior is not helping actually get women into the field. She played to the stereotype. He’s right, that doesn’t help at all. But he uses her trolling behavior to jump into a rant about “push[ing] someone into something they are not going to enjoy or be any good at.”
For all that I think that Blue’s original blog post was poorly-written, I’m not sure how Lee got there. If we agree that there aren’t enough women in software engineering and we should do something about it, Lee appears to be saying that the only way to do it is to “look the other way at some terrible work because they wanted to make their diversity numbers”. This isn’t the case: if we want to get more women into software engineering, we need to take a thoughtful look at the research that’s been done to date about the gender disparity and decide the best way to move forward.
Frankly, what rankled me the most was this:
I think it’s cliched bullshit that society pushes women away from engineering with the mentality that “math is hard.” Math is hard. Coding is hard. Engineering is hard. That’s why we get paid so well—because the vast majority of people can’t do what we do.
Yes, there was a time when little girls were supposed to play with dolls and wear dresses, but among the families of the modern engineer, that time islong past. Every parent I know wants their kids to grow up to be great scientists and engineers.
You might think that it’s “cliched bullshit”, but there is plenty of current research that disagrees. There’s some fascinating stuff here about how we behave and how we communicate. The best overview of the research can be found in the report Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. Although software engineering isn’t its focus, I think we can safely assume that many of the issues that face women in other engineering fields are also issues for women who are in software engineering. Speaking for myself, as a woman who holds two undergraduate degrees (one in CS, the other in math) and a graduate degree (HCI), and has been gainfully employed in software engineering for several years, the issues that are surfaced in that report match my own experience.
The idea that “every parent I know” wants their kids, regardless of gender, to grow up to be an engineer doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re setting them up for that engineering success. Even with the best of intentions, parents might actually still engage in behaviors that undermine girls’ and women’s participation in engineering fields. This isn’t to denigrate anyone, in fact quite the opposite: it shows how pervasive and subtle some behaviors can be, even by people who want to do the right thing and encourage more women to enter the field. For parents who are interested in learning more about these pervasive and subtle behaviors that impact girls starting from a very early age, I recommend Cinderella Ate My Daughter by Peggy Orenstein1. Told through the lens of Orenstein parenting her own little girl, it covers a lot of research about children, gender roles, and behaviors.
I believe I’ve mentioned Nicky Marone before, but I find her general thesis–that fathers, largely through the manner in which they interact with mothers, can play a significant role in the development of their daughters’ self image–to be a rather compelling thesis, though, admittedly, part of the reason I’ve found it so compelling is that it represents something concrete that I can actually do.
My oldest, Teresa, is, alas, not particularly interested in engineering per se, though she is working her way through one of the more difficult biology programs in the country. I guess I’ll leave the evaluation of my success or failure at this to other people.