Among the hotter topics on my Twitter feed yesterday was discrimination in the computer industry: how there really isn’t any at all against women, but there’s a whole heap of it against older people. Or, as Sharon Fisher puts it, Older Men Discriminated Against, But Women Just Suck.
To be fair, the two articles, though both published just Saturday in Techcrunch, were by two different people. Still, it’s no surprise that the one on women, Michael Arrington’s “Too Few Women In Tech? Stop Blaming The Men,” drew such a firestorm from women and some men that Arrington tweeted yesterday
thinking I’ll delete the women in tech rant and just replace it with “I care. We need to do more.” That’ll be far less painful.
The comment thread that follows Arrington’s article illustrates the problem discussing this issue, as a woman in tech. The first comment reads
Less women undertake degrees in quantitative disciplines than men. This is due to brain function. Men and women are not equal, nor is one sex better than the other. It just is the way it is.
There’s no one to blame, which is why people are upset with this topic. Blame must always be placed.
and then, when a woman engineer protests this absolute pronouncement that all differences between female and male participation are due to the inherent fact that our female brains just don’t get numbers, men pile on her and other women, making sweeping statements about the wrongness and harmfulness of feminism, which has turned into this awful, angry ideology. The original commenter, who apparently hasn’t heard of Larry Summers and had no idea any women engineers would feel their bottom line was affected by spreading stereotypes that women Just Don’t Get Math, gets all wounded and complains that he “said nothing even close to controversial in my first post.” Because scientific opinion is apparently absolutely uniform as to how far gender differences are biologically driven and how far culturally driven, and the most obviously biological of the lot, surely, is gender differences in quantitative disciplines, which aren’t influenced by cultural stereotypes one bit. (FWIW, one commenter does give a much more plausible hypothesis of how brain differences could be in play here – one that doesn’t oblige you to ignore a huge chunk of the evidence on gender differences – “My thought is that though there are likely differences in brain function, that these differences are amplified by at least an order of magnitude by social expectation.”)
I blog under my own name. I know that any prospective employer can (and probably will) Google me. So, I’ll get all the standard disclaimers out of the way right now. Yes, I mostly like and get along with men. I had a father who encouraged me from a young age in math and science, I have a husband who supports my career, lots of my friends are men, and I’ve had plenty of male bosses and coworkers who have respected me. It’s possible that I’m now making less money and getting less professional recognition than I would have, in my field, if I’d made exactly the same decisions and been male, but I don’t usually stay up nights worrying about it. My ex-boss, who occasionally still reads my blog, can vouch that I’m not cohttp://notfrisco2.com/leones/wp-admin/post-new.phpnstantly in people’s face with my feminism on the job.
That said, give me a break. Arrington’s article bears little resemblance to reality in the computer industry.
Success in Silicon Valley, most would agree, is more merit driven than almost any other place in the world. It doesn’t matter how old you are, what sex you are, what politics you support or what color you are. If your idea rocks and you can execute, you can change the world and/or get really, stinking rich.
I’ve run into a lot of male computer nerds who believe this, and I understand why they might. Everyone wants to believe that the field where he’s gotten recognition runs on pure merit, and all you have to do to win is be the one to build a better mousetrap. It may be even more appealing to believe this if you’re a male nerd, and found, in the computer world, a place that recognized your merit far more readily than the jock driven world of high school. But the reality is that there’s no place in the world where “It doesn’t matter how old you are, what sex you are, what politics you support or what color you are.” Not here in the land of the free and the brave, where we actually have rather less social mobility than some countries in Europe. Not in the old Communist bloc, which had its own not necessarily merit based elites. But also not in Silicon Valley.
Part of the problem in perception is that the interaction between merit and other advantages is complex. Look, I went to Stanford. And, like everyone else I know of who went to Stanford, I damn well wouldn’t have gotten in if I hadn’t been smart and studious, very possibly (the heck with false modesty) smarter and more studious than you, dead reader. And it’s also true that the chance to go to Stanford and other name brand schools isn’t equally open to everyone who’s equally smart and studious. At the same time, only a few of us who went there have such clearly cushy beginnings that you can say we were born on third base. As it is with prestige college degrees, so it also is with cool computer jobs.
Now, Arrington in fact does have a bit of a point, here:
The problem isn’t that Silicon Valley is keeping women down, or not doing enough to encourage female entrepreneurs. The opposite is true. No, the problem is that not enough women want to become entrepreneurs….
A. There’s a fascinating company, Zivity, it’s a venture-funded, adult photography community — yes, they put up pictures of naked women online — it was co-founded and is run by a woman, Cyan Banister. She wrote me in response to a post about women who are entrepreneurs, saying, basically, though these are not her exact words, women [stink] as entrepreneurs a lot of the time because they are nurturing and not risk-taking enough by nature. She also said when men roll the dice and take risks, that society doesn’t punish them at all, and it’s in their nature to take stupid risks….
There are a couple of obvious problems with this line of argument – that he’s started an article talking about why there aren’t more women in tech, and then somehow shifted ground to the narrower field of people in tech who are entrepreneurs, that he’s making this a finger pointing game of don’t blame men, blame women for not trying. But there’s a point buried in here that’s valid, and that’s the fact that a lot of the difference between the jobs men and women take, whether it’s who goes into tech or who gambles on starting a company, starts way earlier in life than when people actually in the tech field get to judge us. “She also said when men roll the dice and take risks, that society doesn’t punish them at all” is something that we learn in childhood, and, no, it’s not men’s fault, nor yet women’s fault either; we all both participate in, and are shaped by, social conditioning.
So, let me return to the matter of merit, and let me make an example of one guy I knew at Stanford, and, since in this particular instance I have nothing bad to say about him, and little to say that isn’t already easy for anyone to find out, I’ll name him. His name is Joel Bion. For a while, at Stanford, we hung in the same crowd, a crowd centered around the computer center. Now he’s Senior Vice President of Research and Advanced Development at Cisco Systems. I’ve long since lost touch with him, of course, but I still think I know enough to make an example of him.
At the time that Joel and I and others were sharing late nights at the computer center (the better to get good time slots on those old mainframes, as these were the days when almost no one owned any sort of personal computer – Sandy Lerner and Len Bosack, who would later found Cisco, were doing well to have their own computer terminal at home), reporters used to occasionally descend on the place, to interview us and tell the world breathless stories about what socially inept computer addicts we were. I dodged such interviews – who, I figured, wants to be known to the world as socially inept and unable to function away from a computer – but a lot of my friends let themselves be interviewed, Joel among them. Here’s one of those computer “hacker” stories (these were the days when “hacker” still meant someone who was really good with computers, and not simply someone who breaks into computers).
Joel Bion, a sophomore at Stanford, explains how he got hooked: “I’ve been working with computers since I was eight. I grew up in Minnesota and I didn’t have many friends. I wasn’t into sports and couldn’t participate in gym class because I had asthma. Then I found a computer terminal at school. I bought some books and taught myself. Pretty soon I was spending a few hours on it every day. Then I was there during vacations. Sure, I lost some friends, but when I first started I was so fascinated. Here was a field I could really feel superior in. I had a giant program, and I kept adding and adding to it. And I could use the computer to talk to people all over the state. I thought that was great social interaction. But, of course, it wasn’t, because I never came into face-to-face contact.”
Joel managed to break his addiction after a few years and is now a peer counselor at Stanford. But his lack of interpersonal relationships during the hacker period is common and this problem has led Stanford psychologist Dr. Philip Zimbardo to take a closer look at the hacker phenomenon.
I think the “managed to break his addiction after a few years” part of this has to be the reporter’s interpretation of Joel, and not his own. I met Joel after his sophomore year, and he was, not a guy who had “managed to break his addiction” to computers, but a guy who was as dedicated (and skilled) a hacker as ever, but, like a lot of nerds who grow older, had reached the point in his life where he knew plenty of people in real life who could appreciate him as the nerd he was. That’s not breaking an addiction; it’s part of the normal process of growing up. But what I want to draw out here is not the friendless, asthmatic boy the article says he once was (maybe played up a bit, since this is, after all, an article in the then popular “computer nerds are obsessive social losers” genre), but the line “I’ve been working with computers since I was eight.” Joel would have been eight in, what, maybe 1969? How many people do you know who had access to computers at the age of eight, back in 1969?
In any merit driven world, a guy like the Joel I once knew ought to thrive in his career; as a student, he was sharp, enthusiastic about his chosen field, and conscientious in applying himself to his classes. He had the skills and the good work ethic, and I would bet that he’s deserved and earned every one of his promotions at Cisco. He also had (besides young access to computers at a time when that kind of access was rare), if I remember right, a private prep school education, he certainly had an elite college education, and he had a bit of luck in the fact that he was a good friend, when he was at Stanford, with Sandy Lerner and Len Bosack, who would later go on to fly so high when they founded Cisco. A Silicon Valley merit driven success story, where the guy who can deliver and whose idea rocks rises to the top? Or a story of the ways in which things other than merit influence who gets rare? Like most real life success stories, it’s a bit of both.
I say these things with no resentment, because I had similar advantages. I may not have gone to a private prep school, but I went to a public high school that’s the equal of private prep schools, one that, to quote Wikipedia, “was ranked #46 nationally in the 2008 US News & World Report rankings of “America’s Best High Schools,” and #7 among those with open enrollment.” And I, too, went to Stanford. I even also had more exposure to computers at a young age than many of my generation.
Here, though, is how my own story played out. When I was around the same age that Joel was getting lost in a computer, my father was giving me math and logic puzzles to challenge me. I can remember going, with all the other IBM families, to an event where the IBM research center displayed all their cool research, and getting to see fiber optics, and a computer that took photos (built out of letters and numbers), and to listen to Dad talk about his research in traffic theory, and experiments with the Lincoln Tunnel.
I was the girl who looked ahead in her math books and learned things before the teacher got to them, the girl who, for fun, played with different tricks to solve equations, the girl who had to be one of the ones to dissect a frog when other girls opted out and found it gross. And so, when I was in junior high, a little behind Joel in getting onto a computer for my first time, but ahead of most of the rest of the world, I was the girl who got picked to be one of a small group of kids – the ones who’d done best at math – who would be allowed to check out a computer. For a few sessions, we each got to use it, and then perhaps something, I don’t know what, happened to that computer, because we stopped being taken to see it. It was, after all, the time when even really good public schools didn’t have computers. I would get my next chance at using a computer in high school; my high school, at the time I went, had a single computer to be shared among all its students.
And I was the girl who, when told she had to pick cooking or sewing instead of metal working (because those were the days when home economics and industrial arts electives still could be segregated by sex, Title IX not yet being sufficiently implemented to sweep all those rules away), insisted on applying for metal working, and showing up for the first metal working class to say that she belonged there, not upstairs in the cooking class (but I did wind up upstairs in that cooking class, after all). And I was the girl who, when given teacher recommendations to take the advanced math and science going into high school, and a guidance counselor who thought it would be too hard for her to take both, argued him down, and said that yes, I did have the smarts to take both, and yes, I was taking both, and he’d better sign off on it. But I was also the girl who dropped out of the high school computer club. And it’s in one sense a classic story for the “don’t blame us, we’re trying to get girls” side of the argument, because I dropped out against the wishes of the school advisor for that club, and despite his efforts to keep me.
I was, to begin with, the only high school girl in the computer club, among a whole bunch of budding boy nerds. I got a book on APL, a few words on how to use computers, and instructions on how to sign onto the one computer at the school. The budding boy nerds managed to get in and grab all the time slots, so I found none left for me. So I decided, the heck with this, and instead headed off to learn Mandarin Chinese from a high school friend from Taiwan; there went the time I would have spent on computers. The teacher running the club noticed my absence, and talked to the boys, and tried to get me on the computer, but it was too late; I was already spending my time on languages (German, Russian, modern Greek, Mandarin Chinese) instead of computers. I then pursued a course of high school study that included being on the advanced track in math and science, that included getting a 5 on the Calculus AP test, but that also included plenty of history and language study, went through Stanford with a psychology major rather than an engineering one, took my first computer class in my junior year, joined the Stanford “hacker” (old meaning of the word, not new meaning) world in earnest in my senior year, and, by the time I graduated, had a BA in psychology with a lot more computer programming courses than the average psych major. (An odd quirk of Stanford’s system allowed me to count all those programming courses toward the “related courses” part of the psychology major requirement – probably it was meant to encourage psych majors planning to go into research to learn to use computers for statistics.) In this, I’m like many women in tech, of my generation; on average, we found our way to an interest in computers a bit later than our male peers (even when otherwise possessed of the same advantages), and wound up with educations more generalist and less specifically technically focused than the men. And, even to have gotten this level of technical background, we were unusual women. The women who got into tech early and thoroughly, as Joel did, were very rare birds indeed.
You could call this my “fault,” but I think it was nobody’s personal “fault,” not mine, not that of the budding boy nerds who were just doing what high school boy nerds do, and not that of the teacher. It was as natural a thing for the only girl in the high school computer club to fade out of the club as it was for the asthmatic, sports hating boy that Joel once was to disappear into a computer. We all respond to our social incentives, and one of the ways we respond is that it’s only a very exceptional teenager who can be kept as the only one of her sex, in a group that’s otherwise made up only of boys. I saw similar things happen, in junior high, to the boys who were interested in the chorus club; a few boys joined, and then dropped out of the overwhelmingly female club, so we were left with our only boy a boy who had been known since grade school for being the one boy in the class to do girly things (and keep doing girly things, no matter how much he was teased for it).
It’s nobody’s individual fault (and there’s not even anything wrong with being the girl who learns Mandarin Chinese instead of APL, any more than there’s anything wrong with being the boy who’d rather use a computer than play sports), but there are ways to change this kind of thing, if you really do want more girls to grow up and pursue scientific or technical careers – exposing girls to women who do these kinds of jobs, mentoring of girls who have an interest in math and science, etc. I believe these things make a difference because they’re already being done, and, sure enough, there are now more women in technical majors at college, including computer science, than there were when I was in college. And there will continue to be more women in tech than in my generation; on this point I’m a grateful and optimistic feminist, more than I’m an angry one. The trends are in place; you couldn’t stop them if you wanted to.
I do believe that most of these differences have to do with girls and boys, more than with what happens to adult men and women once they’re already in the computer industry. And I haven’t, for the most part, found the computer industry to be all that hard an environment for me, as a woman. Sure, there have been moments. There were the guys at the first company where I worked who insisted on calling me “sweetie” – but they worked on the loading dock, and I had the actual computer job, so I had the last laugh there, didn’t I? There was the customer, on the line when I was working tech support, who wouldn’t believe I knew what I was talking about till I turned him over to a male colleague who repeated the same answer I’d just given, and was accepted as an expert right away. That sort of thing happens, but it’s not most of my life as a computer professional. Most of my work life involves doing good work, and getting respect for that work, from male colleagues, even when I’m the only woman in my work group.
Still, I’ve talked with enough other women in tech to know how the field may lose women, once we’ve gotten there. To begin with, because we women, on average, have taken a more winding route into the field, and gotten our computer background a bit later than our male peers, we’re more likely to start in areas other than development, areas that get less pay and respect than development, and some women at that point bail and go for something else. But that kind of goes back to the difference in socialization between girls and boys, and isn’t the “fault” of people in the field.
What is the “fault” of the computer industry, to the extent that it makes sense to speak of “fault,” is that, for adults as well as for teenagers, it’s still easier for most women to find their environment welcoming if they’re not the only woman in the room. Every so often a complaint will circulate among women in tech. It may be a conference where a presenter decided to liven up his presentation with a few scantily clad women. It may be an article a woman wrote on the web about a technical subject, and, while the men writing articles for that same web magazine get comments on the substance of their articles, the woman gets an onslaught of comments evaluating the photo of her that accompanied the article. Some of these would probably bother me personally more than others (I can sit through the occasional photo of a scantily clad woman, but don’t you ignore my substance, when I’m speaking as a professional, to vote on whether you’d date me). But they add up to the fact that, when you’re one of the few women in a room of men, sometimes what to the all the male nerds is just doing what comes naturally is, in the eyes of all the female nerds, disrespect. And then, in addition, there’s the factor raised in the Seldo.com response to Arrington’s article, that I linked earlier:
And above all your gender matters. Because the ugly truth is that the men of Silicon Valley do not take women in tech seriously by default. I see it every day. If a woman walks into the office, people ask if she’s in HR or marketing or legal or product, or frankly anything other than engineering. And distressingly, most of the time they’re right, because there aren’t many women in tech. And as everyone knows and keeps saying, that’s a vicious circle: the expectation that women don’t get into tech is what keeps them out of it.
A woman I knew who, when I was starting out in my first full time job at SRI, worked as a statistician at Muppet Labs, once told me that she made darn sure to wear only pants to work, because she’d found skirts were an extra ticket to being taken for an administrative assistant. It can be extra work to be recognized for what you are, if what you are is unusual for a woman.
But what about the women who break the mold? One such women was Sandy Lerner, high flying entrepreneur and co-founder of Cisco Systems. People like to quote Emerson: “Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.” In fact, though, the world will beat a path to your door if you build and promote a better mousetrap, and are willing to take the risks to get your mousetrap business going. Sandy Lerner’s a smart woman, but there were many smart women at Stanford (graduate or undergraduate) when she and I were there. Where she’s a rarity is that she’s a smart woman who combined knowledge of computers, a willingness to promote herself, and that openness to risk that makes someone willing to found a company. So she and Len Bosack built that better mousetrap, and the world beat a path to their door. And then Sandy ran into personality clashes with other people in high places at the company she’d helped found, and she and Len left the company, bitter over their experience, but rich. And she went on to found another company in which she marketed her own cosmetic line.
I’ve wondered, sometimes, whether the personality clashes, whatever they may have been, went all the harder because she was a woman. They might have. Women in the business world do face a Catch-22, where they both may have to be pushier than a similarly qualified man to get ahead, and get more grief for being abrasive than similarly abrasive men. But it might be that her being a woman entrepreneur had nothing to do with it; Steve Jobs at one point ran afoul of Apple in ways that sound not unlike Sandy’s clashes with the company she co-founded. What I do know is that, in a world where boys get a more encouragement than girls in all those rare qualities that go into making a Sandy Lerner – from an aptitude for technology to a willingness to take risks – it’s going to be a long time before women who are technical and entrepreneurs are going to be other than rare birds. Just rare birds that should get the same chance to fly as any other bird who makes the grade.