Jeni's Musings

It’s XTech 2008 next week. I’ll be there to talk about the work we at TSO have been doing with OPSI to add semantic information to the London Gazette using RDFa. It’s really interesting and timely work on all sorts of levels; you can read the abstract of the talk to get a taster and of course it’ll be published afterwards.

One: My article in the Women in Technology series came out about a month ago. It was actually inspired by this comment on the post I wrote a while ago on women in computing, which asked about encouraging your daughters to take up computing. I found it easier to write about that than my own experiences, which have been rather mundane.

Two: Read OMG Girlz Don’t Exist on teh Intarweb!!!!. It’d be hilarious if it weren’t so dreadful.

Three: We’ve been looking at possible infant (ages 4-7) schools for our eldest. The two nearest both have interactive whiteboards in all the classrooms and regular IT lessons. In one school, the children are taught how to touch type; this at an age when they can hardly read and write. When I was in school, touch typing was on typewriters, for the girls who aspired to be secretaries. (I Mavis Beacon‘d myself during my year out of university; it’s the most frequently used skill I have next to the ability to read.)

I was reading the Draft TAG Finding on Dereferencing HTTP URIs the other day. It has a load of “Stories” in it: examples that illustrate the technical points of the document. In general, examples fall into three categories:

• examples that illustrate an expert doing the right thing
• examples that illustrate a beginner doing the right thing
• examples that illustrate a beginner doing the wrong thing (and being corrected)

What I realised as I read the stories in this document was that the gender of the protagonist of the story changed how I read them. In particular, when the protagonist was female (as in the stories in this Finding), I assumed that they were a beginner, and probably doing something wrong.

I recently filled in a questionnaire that asked about the use of robots in teaching programming. (You can win a robot!) Some of the questions seemed to be particularly about attracting women into the field; I guess the thinking is that programming something that does something in the real world is more engaging (particularly for women?) than doing artificial exercises in linked list manipulation. Or something.

I like programming robots as much as the next geek, and am the proud owner of two regular Lego Mindstorms kits as well as a less complex, but more evil, Dark Side Developers Kit. Thinking around this, it struck me that there are two classes of projects you can do with robots:

• a directive program, where you tell the robot exactly what to do (go forward for 5 seconds, turn, forward for 2 seconds etc.)
• a facilitative program, where you define the feedback between sensors and motors, then just let the robot go

Woah, so Tim took me seriously about linking to women’s blog posts from his own, and suddenly I get readership! Edd phrases what I was trying to say better than I did myself:

As Jeni brings her article to a close, it’s with some shock and shame that I get the punchline loud and clear: “this isn’t about you.”

It’s about empathy, inclusivity and selflessness. Human qualities that are unrestricted to either gender.

But I wanted to address some of the comments that question whether we should really care about this. For example:

Why we need to have an equal number of men and women in every job field known to man is beyond me. Women freely choose not to be programmers. That is manifestly not a problem, and certainly not a problem that needs fixing. I try to respect peoples decisions about what they do with their lives, so I for one vow to do absolutly [sic] nothing about this.

I’ve been thinking about the low proportion of women in computing since reading Tim Bray’s post about the lack of women at RailsConf:

Geeks, you know, they’re admittedly obsessive about computers, but once you get past that they’re on average a pretty eclectic, amusing, and warm-hearted bunch. And in recent years I haven’t met a single one who wasn’t upset about the missing gender. If a booming female Voice From On High spoke out, saying, “Do this and we’ll rejoin your profession”, well I bet a lot of us would do whatever it was. But failing that, in the meantime the problem isn’t getting better.