equality

Women at XTech 2008

Jeni — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 21:20:46 +0100

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.

Anyway, I was just browsing through the schedule and it struck me how few women they were speaking. Looking at the speaker list, out of the 64 speakers, just three are women. Three! That’s not even 5%!

Looking back at last year, it was a little better, at nine out of 94, which is getting towards 10%. It wasn’t much better at XML 2007, where nine of the 82 speakers (11%) were female. At Extreme 2007, eight of the 60 speakers (13%) were women.

I wonder whether there are a low proportion of women attending these conferences generally, or whether women attend in higher proportions but don’t submit papers, or whether they submit papers but a smaller proportion are accepted.

Anyway, if you’re a woman who’s going to XTech 2008 and you want to get together to talk about kittens, drop me a line.

Girls and computers: just three things

Jeni — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 23:04:08 +0100

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.)

Unconscious assumptions based on gender

Jeni — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 17:15:35 +0100

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.

Here’s an example:

Angela decides to provide information related to the meter as part of her work on the ontology. She configures her web server to return an HTTP 303 response code when the URI for the meter (http://www.example.com/ontology/meter) is dereferenced. She arranges for the URI returned with the HTTP 303 response (http://www.example.com/ontology/related/meter) to refer to an information resource that can provide multiple, equivalent representations via content negotiation. In particular she arranges for representations in HTML and RDF to be available to requests that specify the appropriate content type.

Mentally changing “Angela” to “Bob” completely changed how I interpreted the story. Suddenly someone I’d assumed to be incompetent, tentatively making changes while unsure of their outcome, I now assumed to competent, assertively making changes to meet a requirement. I’ve probably primed you enough that you don’t have the same experience as you read the example above, but you might try changing the protagonist’s gender next time you read a similar example, just to see.

I should also point out, in mitigation, that assumptions about people in stories are affected by all sorts of things, particularly people-you-have-known-called-X. Mentally changing “Angela” to “Eve”, for example, has the same kind of effect as changing it to “Bob”.

Anyway, kudos to the TAG for including in their documents stories with competent female protagonists.

Programming robots the feminine way?

Jeni — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 22:26:29 +0100

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

It’s a bit of a stretch, but these two classes of projects seem like they might be associated with masculine and feminine approaches to dealing with children. There was a great Child of Our Time episode a couple of years ago where parents helped their children draw a house on an Etch A Sketch. The fathers basically took over the controls — “turn yours… keep going… stop” — whereas the mothers let the child do it while uttering general words of encouragement. Both approaches are absolutely necessary for a child to learn how to do it on their own: they can’t know what to do unless they’re told, and they can’t learn to do it themselves unless they’re given space to try.

So I wonder whether programming in a directive way is more attractive to masculine people and programming in a facilitative way is more attractive to feminine people. Of course it’s kind of hard to simply encourage a computer to do something, but I certainly find it more engaging to see how little I need to tell a robot to do in order to get interesting behaviour. My favourite robot projects were creating ones that would locate and hide in the darkest part of a room (through a combination of random and goal-oriented movement), and setting up two kits to “sing” with each other (each responding to the others’ song in a feedback loop). In other words, simple programs that elicit complex behaviour simply by being used in a complex environment. (XSLT programming can be like this as well: the art of creating complex XSL-FO/HTML from complex XML with as little intervention as possible.)

Actually, I don’t think that simply programming robots would be any more attractive to women than other kinds of programming. What matters, I think, is whether there’s a real task to achieve. So getting a robot to do something useful, like vacuuming or tidying away toys, would be attractive. But equally so would designing a diary application, or a community website. Programming in the abstract isn’t exciting, but being able to do something with a program is. (And surely it can’t just be women who feel like that?)

Do we need more women in computing?

Jeni — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 22:45:47 +0100

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 agree completely that there shouldn’t be an assumption that we need to have an equal number of men and women in any job field. I think it’s very likely that, if culture is taken out of the equation, there will still be a lower proportion of women in computing than men. But if you look at history, the proportion has been higher in the past, and similarly, the proportion varies by country, with a number of countries having higher proportions than the UK (or US). So it seems unlikely that culture has been taken out of the equation.

What I was discussing was not the low proportion of women in computing in absolute terms, but the likelihood that some women are put off entering computing for cultural reasons, rather than due to a free, unbiased choice.

In his post Maybe the Women are Right, David Megginson also suggests that the status quo is nothing to worry about:

These postings all assume that we need to do something to pull more women into coding. Why? Do we think there are there lots of women would be happy coding, but aren’t smart enough or motivated enough to choose the right careers for themselves, or are too timid to deal with any barriers unless someone comes along and dismantles them first?

If I’m a smart, motivated and brave female student, equally attracted by and able in medicine and in computing, which profession am I going to enter? The one where women make up more than 50% of the intake, or the one where they make up 25% of the intake? The one where I know women can succeed and be recognised, ‘cos I see them on TV all the time, or the one in the industry where all the big players seem to be men? The one where, when I visit the campus, I get welcomed by a bunch of female students, or the one where I get ignored by a bunch of guys?

If it were a choice between coding and nothing, then of course the smart, motivated, brave woman is going to choose to code. But given a choice between coding and an equally satisfying career that has a track record of attracting, accepting and promoting women, it’s a no-brainer.

(I’m still digesting David’s post, and may well return to it another time.)

Meanwhile, Len questions whether it matters that there’s a low proportion of women in computing, if they have nothing to offer that men can’t. I’ve been taking it as a given that the field would be enriched by having more women in it, but I can’t offer any proof to back that up, only the feeling that I shouldn’t have to.

How to get women into computing

Jeni — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 22:59:09 +0100

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.

Here are some graphs I managed to find. First, bachelors computer science:

and then masters:

I don’t think that looking at the intake of computer science courses tells the whole story — lots of people get into computing from other disciplines (and I think this is particularly true for markup technologists) — but it’s certainly a significant piece of evidence that the proportion of women in computing is getting lower.

Let’s focus at the cultural causes of this. The big problem at the cultural level is that there’s a vicious cycle at play. As the proportion of women in computing is low, it is perceived as a male discipline, which means that women are less likely to enter it, decreasing the proportion of women still further.

So what can we do as individuals? Well, we can attack at three points in this cycle.

First, we can shift the perception of the proportion of women in computing. We can talk up the proportion of women in computing by including the non-programming aspects of development, such as project management, training, technical writing and user interface design, where I bet (but don’t have statistics to back it up) the proportion is higher. We can boost the profiles of the women who are in computing simply by taking small steps like reading and referencing their blogs. We can make it easier for women to attend conferences by providing or subsidising childcare (heh). We can use the pronoun ‘she’ on occasion when talking about programmers.

Second, we can emphasise the female-friendly aspects of computing. For example, the nature of development means that flexible working practices are much easier to adopt than in some other professions. It’s easy for people in computing to work at home, perfectly possible to work part time and to work on small projects and so on. Also, the speed at which technology moves means that taking time out for children doesn’t necessarily put you at a disadvantage: everyone has to re-train constantly anyway!

Another tack might be to shift the focus onto those aspects of computing that women feel better at, such as communication and teamwork. In other words, make computing about more than hammering away on your own to create the fastest, most succinct code the world has ever seen. Stress working with clients, producing documented and understandable code and sharing knowledge with others. (In fact, several of the practices of Extreme Programming emphasise precisely these aspects of development.)

Third, we can try to reduce the impediments women feel entering a ‘male’ discipline. There are two factors that I can think of here: low self-efficacy and feeling the odd one out.

Self-efficacy is your belief in your ability to do something. Women are more likely to be feminine than men (duh-huh), and the more feminine you are, the less self-efficacy you’re likely to have. What’s more, you have lower self-efficacy for things that don’t fit with your gender role: for example, predominantly masculine people may feel out of their depth when they have to do some knitting, which is culturally associated with women. This is a double-whammy for feminine people (who are predominantly women) in computing: we don’t believe in ourselves anyway, and particularly not when we do something that has a cultural association with men.

Low self-efficacy makes it hard to experiment, because you’re worried that something will go wrong. I think that’s a particular problem in programming, where you have to be prepared to try different approaches to work around bugs or to get better performance. It’s hard to get out of a low self-efficacy state. To do so, you have to achieve something on your own, and that thing can’t be something you think is easy — if you don’t achieve something you set out to do, or if achieve something but get help doing it or it’s something easy, your self-efficacy goes down.

With that in mind, look at how Ruby on Rails is marketed. A big play is made of how easy it is. But if a language or framework is easy then people with low self-efficacy can’t win: if they manage to do something with it then they haven’t really achieved very much because anyone can do it; if they don’t manage to do something with it then they’re complete idiots. I’m not saying that we should advertise languages or frameworks as being hard, because obviously that can put people off as well, but a recognition of the barriers that people might face may, in a strange way, make them more approachable.

This is also an issue for trainers: we need to be able to boost the self-efficacy of the people we train (particularly women) by setting them challenging (but achievable) tasks and not giving them too much help to achieve them.

Finally, we can reduce the feeling of being the odd one out. There’s obviously the option of helping women network with each other, but speaking personally, I don’t feel the odd one out when I’m the only woman in the room: I feel the odd one out when I’m not treated like the other men, namely as an individual with a large set of geeky interests that very probably overlap with yours.

I can see how this is from the other side. On my ‘mothering’ days, it’s very rare for me to encounter a father, but there are odd ones who come to the playgroup or library. I find it very hard to strike up conversation with them. I think it’s partly because of a fear that any friendliness will be misinterpreted as an advance, partly because I worry that we won’t have anything in common, and partly because there are so many women around who are far easier to talk to. It must be incredibly isolating for the homedads.

So I know how hard it is to make someone of the opposite sex feel included but, y’know, you gotta try.

Looking back at the data, it’s interesting that the proportion of female computer science undergraduates has been this low before: the proportion in 2004 was about 25%, which is the same as in the late seventies. The peak of 37% was in 1984. I wonder what happened in the seventies and early eighties that might have made the field more attractive to women, and what changes initiated its decline?