It’s been cool to see my ScienceBlogs sisters Sandy, Shelley, and Tara represent in our little nerd-off. I’m inclined to say this offers at least some evidence that women can get as geeky as the geekiest men. Sadly, there seem still to be many people — including people selling stuff — who just can’t wrap their heads around that idea.
The most recent commercial monstrosity demonstrating the belief that females have a fundamentally different relationship to technology than males is the “Digi Makeover”, descibed in horrifying detail by Kyso Kiasen at Punkassblog. The short version: it uses a tablet computer/digital camera combination to interface with your TV and VCR (!!) for the purposes of virtually trying on make-up. Just think, our foremothers used to have to rig their TRS-80s (or worse, properly order all those damned punch cards) just to see if they looked good in coral lipstick!
A display case at The Tech, which I visited with my children on Labor Day, posed the question of whether high-tech toys marketed to girls might reinforce gender stereotypes. I’m going to have to go with, “Yes.”
But if people have it in their heads that girls aren’t “into” building their own computers, writing their own computer programs, using the chemistry set to blow up their own card tables in the basement, and what have you, well, they look at the composition of the population doing science and say, “More men than women? It just goes to show women are more interested in doing Other Things.”
Which makes it easier to discount the possibility that seriously hostile workplaces, or scientific cultures where women are expected to just deal with being treated like outsiders, or lower wages due to actual discrimination might be playing any kind of role in keeping anyone out of the sciences.
It’s gotta be that girls just don’t care for science, right? ‘Cause if they loved it enough, they’d put up with all sorts of other crap — some of it directed at them simply because they’re female — to keep doing science.
In pondering my own nerd upbringing, I’ve been thinking about what elementary school was like for me compared to what my kids are getting now. From kindergarten on, my kids have been getting what they call “computer class”. Essentially, this consists of playing “educational” computer games once a week for maybe 30 minutes at a pop. I suppose the point is to make sure all the kids get comfortable using a keyboard, mouse, printer, and so on, whether they have access to a computer at home or not. But these kids learn pretty quickly. If “computer class” stays in the realm of playing games on computers rather than, say, programming games for computers, there’s going to be at least one geek mom on the phone asking what we can do about this.
When I was in third grade, I and a handful of my classmates started learning to write computer programs. We wrote them in BASIC for the Teacher’s PET. It was cool. “Computer class”, back then, couldn’t have been a bunch of kids playing already-written educational games because there were hardly any such games available to play. The whole point of getting your hands on a computer (as opposed to just a video game) was that you could program it to do what you wanted to do.
For me, that meant writing a blackjack program where the computer had to play by the house rules according to Hoyle’s and the human player had all the options that would be available to a player in a casino. I had to work out the “shuffle” of the deck, program in the logic of the rules, and work out the rendering of the cards (face-down and face-up) on that little monchrome screen. It felt like real thinking, and I really enjoyed it.
In some sense, the fact that computers were not so darned prevalent back then probably made a positive difference for the kids who got their hands on them. You had much more hands-on experience with the development end of things out of sheer necessity. But it’s not like kids today don’t want to know how to program their own games, or build their own circuits (or Rube Goldberg devices). If we made that as normal a part of their education as learning how to write essays or how to set up and solve word-problems, little kids could get their geek on without needing to deal with social ostracization. (And, if you put it in the schools, maybe we overcome some of the socioeconomic divide related to who has a computer — or a geeky parent — at home.)
The little kids I know have a lot less respect for the sanctity of gender stereotypes than do older people. Get ’em young, and give every child the opportunity to embrace his or her inner nerd!
(Also, check out this Cocktail Party Physics post on how girls are lost to geekdom, and about the Feminist Press call for book proposals to lure them back.)
I’m inclined to say this offers at least some evidence that women can get as geeky as the geekiest men. Sadly, there seem still to be many people — including people selling stuff — who just can’t wrap their heads around that idea.
Those people should get out more.
At pretty much any form of Geek Gathering I’ve been to, you can find uber-top-geeks of any gender. Be it a science fiction convention, the American Astronomical Society meeting, some sort of computer thing, or whatever, there are extreme geeks of all stripes.
I will say that I’m always a bit distressed to see photos of meetings of the Linux kernel developers. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a woman in any of those photos, and those photos have several times 10^1 people in it. It makes Physics look good in comparison, which is kinda sad….
As someone who’s worked with computers all my life (did *my* first programming in grade 3 on a TRS-80 and an Apple IIe, so we’re in about the same time frame), I have to say that I question your analysis. True, children aren’t taught to program the way that we used to be on the old machines, but there’s probably a good reason for that. Computers have been subject to the same sort of specialization that every other field that I can think of has undergone, the only difference is that it has undergone it much more recently. You programmed a nice little blackjack game in your youth, but your competition wasn’t all that much more sophisticated in those days; kids today would have to compare their efforts against the Halos of the industry, which require millions of dollars and thousands of person-hours to create, on machines that are many orders of magnitude more complicated than they used to be. No longer can you teach them enough skills to create a reasonably competitive program in a few hours.
I agree that kids should have computer skills, but I wonder if we need to be teaching them programming at an early age. Elementary school education, for example, is meant largely – as I understand it – to provide children with an academic base for future learning, not to include specialized skills that may or may not be releant to their future life (leaving aside arguments of “well, I never used long division again!” for the moment). Programming is increasingly become a very specialized skill set that not many people will have the ability or desire to acquire, just as everyone is not going to become a research physicist, an evolutionary biologist, a civil engineer, or an auto mechanic. Perhaps we should do what we do with these other specializations: teach them the basics, and provide pathways to explore them further if they should so desire. Computer clubs, yes; programming in the core curricula…maybe not.
(Just as a note, I’m not commenting on any gender imbalances or anything else that you refer to in the article; I’m willing to accept the rest of your thesis at face value).
Winawer wrote:
To my mind, the point isn’t to get little kids programming at a professional level, though. Think of all the high-quality childrens books out there, yet kids take delight in writing their own stories and drawing their own pictures. The delight in creating, and in knowing how things work, can far surpass the delight of consuming the slick product someone else has made.
Again, I think what I have in mind is programming as a species of thinking, creating, and problem-solving. Given that it ties in well to the abstract sorts of thinking involved in math (even lowly Algebra I) and that using computer languages may give kids some insights into how we manage to communicate (or miscommunicate) in natural languages, I’m inclined to think there are reasonable ways to work very rudimentary computer programing (with “student” languages like BASIC or Pascal) into existing curricula.
Really, I see this as just groundwork for making reasonably educated people — like learning algebra, or American history, or a foreign language. The value doesn’t lie in some guarantee that you’re ever going to use those particular bits of knowledge again, but rather in the fact that they help you learn different ways to learn.
After all, I’m neither a computer programmer nor a professional blackjack player.
I remember the PET’s in elementary school, but by junior high it was the fraud that “computer class” was playing the “educational” software. I got chewed out when I had the nerve to complain that it was not a computer class.
Outside of the gender issues, it’s a shame that we reduce so much of the world of children’s activities to passive activity instead of creative efforts. What I fear the loss of is things that develop problem solving skills and thought processes, like the chemistry set, the Radio-Shack electronics kit, or some basic programming. I think we are in danger of raising a passive generation.
Just to let you know, Janet, kids still program blackjack games at school. Except I did mine on a graphing calculator during calculus back in high school, because I found calculus interminably boring.
“Computer clubs, yes; programming in the core curricula…maybe not.”
I think that one of the best reasons for including a class like programming is that it’s one of the few types of classes that you can “play around” until you find a solution. In science classes, all the labs have detailed protocols that you have to follow exactly. In math, you learn “such and such a problem requires such and such a formula.” And the humanities aren’t really “play around” type fields.
But the truth is, no matter what you wind up doing as an adult, you’re more often going to be faced with problems with multiple solutions. And going directly to the “correct” way of solving the problem may not be an option. You actually learn a great deal simply by playing around: things like why your initial solution did not work, additional tools to solve later problems, how to think about new solutions, and most of all that playing around is actually far more fun. So I think that programming could still be a useful class even if it goes back to 1980s era BASIC, simply as a means of problem solving that you don’t get in other disciplines.
Oh, my goodness!I feel so much better about my chronic “nerd envy syndrome” and inability to make any significant progress toward nerdhood and nerdvana.It’s all my smaller head size, fewer neurons and lower IQ as revealed by the results of this latest Canadian study.What a relief!Polly
“Again, I think what I have in mind is programming as a species of thinking, creating, and problem-solving.”
(R)Amen! As a programmer myself, I’d also like to add that even a fairly basic exposure to computer programming can mean a whole lot, in terms of getting a sense for just how computers work (and sometimes don’t 😉 ).
Seeing the difference between a bozo-sort and a quick-sort, shows how “minor” implementation details can make the difference between a usable program and an unusable one. Trying excessively large sorts demonstrates that the computer may be fast, but not “infinitely” fast. The experience of debugging your own programs, yields a healthy skepticism about the “infallibility” of computers, and a sense of “what could go wrong”. “Classroom pranks” show what can be made to go wrong. Dealing with the occasional hard disk crash (et al) teaches why backups are important, and so on. All these concepts are important for life in our modern society, and there’s far too few people who understand them.
While I’m 100% with you on the need for the scientific community to be more welcoming to women, I think it cannot and will not happen as long as we insist on setting ourselves apart, even in self-congratulatory “We Can Do It Too!” tones. We are not girl geeks, or grrrls, or Frag Dolls or what have you. We’re scientists, technicians, programmers, chemists or even gamers, without qualifiers and without apologies.
If we don’t want our contribution to be affected by our gender, we need to stop making such a huge freaking deal out of it and focus on the parts that make us geeks in the first place.
…many people — including people selling stuff — who just can’t wrap their heads around that idea
A month or two back NYTimes had an article [or maybe it was CNET they share stories] reporting that marketers are aware that women now drop as much money on high tech gadgets [blackberries, phones that double as TVs, MP3 players] as men…not quite the same thing as wanting to have long BS conversations braggin about the capabilities your new toys possess but nonetheless, another increment of sameness [I won’t use the word equality so carelessly] for distaff tech staff.
Oh Freyja, this is just hopelessly naive, or stupid, or both.
We aren’t the ones who get to decide whether or not our contributions are affected by our gender. That gets decided for us, by society, by the patriarchy. If we were in charge of that, don’t you think it would have gone away by now? Duh.
It would seem, on the surface, that the strategy of gender neutrality is attractive and desirable. But in actuality, embracing the notion of gender neutrality – not paying attention to gender, pretending that “we’re all equal already” and “we don’t favor one gender over the other, everybody’s equal here” and “all that matters is the quality of someone’s work” results in a disadvantage for women in an educational or workplace setting where gender bias is already in operation. That would be, say, the entire United States of America.
This has been conclusively shown in a study by Eisenhart and Finkel, Women’s Science: Learning and Succeeding From the Margins. As Eisenhart and Finkel note,
The solution to gender bias is to pay more, not less, attention to gender. I would suggest that you, and others, spend some time on Virginia Valian’s website. Read the synopsis of her Why So Slow? book. Explore the resources on the Gender Equity Project site, and look at the Tutorials for Change: Gender Schemas and Science Careers.
Not making a fuss about gender is a luxury we simply cannot afford. Not if we ever want to achieve gender equity.
Regarding the approach of gender neutrality, I have to agree with Zuska. Ignoring the problem won’t make it go away. But I actually have to argue that there’s value to gender divisions. Just as long as they don’t mean what the stereotypes and the collective unconscious often seem to think they mean: that men do men stuff and women do women stuff. I think it’s important to teach kids to take pride in their gender — even while getting their geek on. 😉 They’re starting to stop expecting black and white people to suddenly be colorblind; it’s time we stopped expecting people to suddenly notice that (for instance) we have breasts. The thing is to recognize that we are equally valuable and equally worthy of the opportunity to prove ourselves — although we are not, and never will be, the same. We’ll still have the babies; that alone means we can’t completely ignore our gender. I don’t want my gender ignored; I’m pregnant right now, and I’m sure as heck glad my manager (bless his soul) is planning ahead for my maternity leave. What we need is for a majority of people to regard the sexes as equally *valuable* and equally *human*.
Regarding computer classes, I have to agree with the original post that it is important for kids to learn the basics of computer programming. Not because they will someday become software engineers, but because it teaches them valuable skills in logic. And, curiously enough, it also teaches clarity of thought. It seems easy enough to say “tell me the last three letters of the sixth word in this sentence”, but it takes a bit more thought to get a computer to actually do that. It gives a person more respect for the processes of thought that go on unconsciously every time we answer a seemingly simple question like that.
I really like the blackjack program example. That would be a great exercise for a beginning programmer.