women in tech
I’ve looked through a few of these o’reilly posts on women in tech. I appreciated this (short) one.
So What? by Shelley Powers
I’ve looked through a few of these o’reilly posts on women in tech. I appreciated this (short) one.
So What? by Shelley Powers
March 26th, 2008 at 2:14 am
Today i had a conversation with a female undergraduate geomatics student. She does open source mapping and geo modeling and is the only woman i know doing so. She is also the only woman working at one of Canada’s most important open source mapping shops. She is writing her honours paper on open source mapping & the related geek culture and it was interesting that the the topic of gender does not appear and that it had not occurred to her that this might be important. Which is of course fine, however once i asked her if she had run into any other women in her research and at work, she realized there were none, then she began to wonder.
It seems for most I guess technology is a-political and gender neutral - a valueless black box!
March 26th, 2008 at 11:50 am
When I wrote about the gendered culture of ile sans fil and community WiFi, I was told that what I was writing about was risky, that I was being “brave” for talking about gender issues. And as Mike probably remembers better than I want to, I got some offensive criticism. The whole experience was very revealing as I hadn’t expected writing about gender and technology to be so emotionally charged . . . .like Tracey’s colleague, I had originally stayed away from all mention of gender in my work. Is this because we want to keep the black box closed? Because it is safer to say “so what”? The alternative is acknowledging that the whole culture of technical production and technical expertise is gendered, and this takes much more work to change than just to get more women to be computer scientists or geo modellers.
March 26th, 2008 at 3:28 pm
Some interesting papers about women in open source/free software:
-Flosspol gender Integrated Report of Findings and Policy Recommendations
-Yuwei Lin talk on ‘Embodying Hacker Culture in Women-friendly Free Software Groups’ as well as “A Techno-feminist perspective on the Free/Libre Open Source Software Development”
-Nicolas Auray’s “Sociabilité informatique et différences sexuelle
I think gender issues are always emotionally charged. For everybody, men and women (and hybrid). I think one way to overcome the resistance is to threat with dignity the attachment that (male) programmers have with code. What this means, is to first threat seriously the statement that code as a “beauty” and instead of starting by negating it. And then to investigate how this beauty is gendered and articulated with other politics of difference.
March 26th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
I’m glad you wrote “one way” instead of “the way”. I would be concerned with putting the emphasis and duty on those being marginalized instead of arguing for the people within the practice to create and support change, both for reasons of justice and for desires to create better technologies.
and I just read through the Yuwei Lin paper (techno feminist). Pretty freakin weak paper. Makes me want to go read through the rest of these…
From the Policy Recommendations (second link) I have a problem with
“Our recommendations are developed in line with the F/LOSS value system and social dynamics. This means that rather than telling the F/LOSS participants what they should change in order to increase the share of women in this field our approach focuses on the measures that can be undertaken by the European Commission (and / or other governmental institutions) to support the community and its members to integrate more female participants. Only activities that are accepted within the community of F/LOSS participants (male and female) will prove effective in their potential to change the current situation.”
I don’t think it gets any better in the rest of the abstract.
I understand this, I just don’t accept it. There is and should be a role for rejection and condemnation in all of this, and it should be done by people within and with out the communities that practice floss.
I think point 3.8 is the only one I think gets to it. Too bad it doesn’t appear in the abstract.
“3.8 Encourage individuals in leadership positions to recognise that people are being actively put off, not just failing to choose to participate, and that this has a long term cost to F/LOSS development.
F/LOSS puts a great deal of emphasis on charismatic leadership. These leaders therefore also must bear some of the responsibility for the culture they have helped create and shape. Sometimes male members do vocally support women in their attempts to counter sexist talk and the constant stream of sexual attention, either by becoming involved in online exchanges or helping to explain to other men appropriate ways to react to women’s presence. With so few women this support is necessary, as lone voices are easily dismissed as over-sensitive or censorious. Such support, however, would be far more credible and effective if it were to come from well-known people in leadership roles. Discourse about gender focuses far too much on female disinterest, often legitimating sexist and inflammatory talk as just part of ‘banter’. There are also discourses about the hostility that too often greets F/LOSS women, but the leadership could use their pulpit power to help the community recognise the cost of this ‘banter’ in terms of labour and potential software improvements. Currently, much of the leadership is unaware that there is a serious problem, and the discussion about the ways in which the cultural tone they contributed to affects women has not yet taken place. We suspect that the ‘gender is nothing to do with my personal actions’ problem sometimes extends to the leadership as well. This is an immensely challenging issue, as it is likely to raise hackles and accusations of divisiveness. Nevertheless, we feel that any lasting solution must have the support of those in leadership roles.
Again, the notion that talk should be monitored or regulated is easily de-legitimised as ‘political correctness’. We feel that a plausible course of action is not to attempt to silence people, but for the leadership to make them aware of the cost they are incurring on the long-term success of F/LOSS. The articles that already exist on the subject indeed take this tactic.
It is well worth noting too that it is not just women being put off. For instance we found anecdotal evidence that suggests, participants from countries where adversarial talk is frowned upon also leave the movement quite rapidly. “
March 26th, 2008 at 11:21 pm
Why do you have a problem with :
“Our recommendations are developed in line with the F/LOSS value system and social dynamics. This means that rather than telling the F/LOSS participants what they should change in order to increase the share of women in this field our approach focuses on the measures that can be undertaken by the European Commission (and / or other governmental institutions) to support the community and its members to integrate more female participants.”
I might be too modernist here, but i do think that a privileged way to transform technological culture is to make policies that favor the integration of women in technological production.
Sharing the beauty of code (FLOSS value system), not negating it :-)
—-
Ah yeah, another interesting article is the one Christina wrote for our collective book L’action communautaire québécoise à l’ère du numérique. Here is the abstract:
Chapitre 9 : La transformation des rapports de genre dans les groupes associatifs. Christina Haralanova
Les transformations, provoquées par l’arrivée de nouvelles technologies de l’information et de la communication (TIC) depuis les dix dernières années ont affecté les perceptions et les pratiques sociales en permettant de nouvelles occasions à ceux qui y ont accès. Les femmes, qui sont majoritaires dans les groupes communautaires, sont davantage affectées par ces changements. Elles sont confrontées à des obstacles significatifs pour l’appropriation des TIC dans l’ère numérique, considérée comme étant «dominée par les hommes». Les stéréotypes patriarcaux, projetés par les processus de mondialisation, reformulent des rôles de prise de décision quant à l’accès, au contenu et au contrôle. Ce chapitre cherche à déterminer les principaux défis qu’auront à surmonter les femmes et des organisations de femmes pour maintenir et améliorer leur rôle dans une société de l’information, en affirmant leur droit de communiquer et en participant pleinement au développement des TIC. Nous analyserons la situation de communautés de femmes au Québec afin de cerner le contexte spécifique de leurs actions et leurs principales préoccupations, ainsi que l’émergence d’un nouveau mouvement de femmes à l’ère numérique, les «militantes du code». En conclusion, nous explorerons des directions possibles pour palier la fracture numérique, tel que l’accès à l’éducation, la création de contenu, la participation au mouvement des Logiciels Libres, ainsi que la participation égale aux processus de prise de décision.
(note: il y aura bientôt un lancement officiel de ce livre)
March 27th, 2008 at 3:57 am
Stéphane implementing a policy from above and an active engaged and conscious doing from below/within are very different. Ideally there would be both but i believe deeper and more sustainable change comes from the latter.
I see the beauty in code (from a distance), I also see beauty in many of the paintings and other artifacts at the museum and the books i read, this does not negate the fact that 95% are mostly written/done by men. All my professors are male, my colleagues are men, my coaches are male, the political leaders in my riding are all men except for municipal, and the people i do ogWiFi with are all men. I have been to geomatics conferences, industry association workshops or meetings and I have been the only woman - once in a room with 250 men! Most of the data enthusiasts and scientists I know are men, my geomatics and remote sensing classes had 3 women in a class of 30, the other two are now doing geomatics marketing work. It is also interesting, that if you look at the field of human computer interaction (HCI), or human factors work, or human oriented technology work, then you see women. Their discipline is primarily found in psychology departments and not in engineering. I was glad to read about Carnegie Melon in the Powers paper as it is one of the great HCI universities and one that really promotes cross disciplinary research and it is where technologies such as ALICE were built and are being tested.
I see the beauty, however, there is a systemic issue of knowledge production and generation that is very male centric that needs to be acknowledged.
I even discovered recently in myself that my academic approach to writing and what i chose to write about is very male, and each time I write about topics that are very important to me, I feel as if I have to meet a particular male standard of knowledge generation, I have to hide something, talk a certain way, have a certain posture, an unbiased know it all professional air or else i am not reflecting what is expected of me. It is subtle but so ever present and there is that tinge of fear that if it is done any other way it will not be taken seriously. I never see or hear of this discomfort from my male colleagues and friends as they feel at home.
sorry for all the text michael!
March 27th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
I think it’s interesting the way this discussion is developing around the question of who is responsible for making change. That’s one thought. It appears that there is a common consensus that some change would be good in the way that gender/politics/technology are happening at present.
I just finished a seminar on Ursula Franklin, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin) Ruth Schwartz Cohen, Judy Wajcman, Marilyn Waring (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_Waring) and a variety of other feminist scholars of media and technology. All the pieces I covered did not deal with issues of code or “hard technology” per se, but instead talked about the domestic technology of homes and families.
It was a really interesting presentation to put together because as a person more concerned with hard technology I had always been a bit dismissive of all the feminist scholarship about women and their housework habits. Turns out those papers contained more and better analysis about gender, technology and social life than I could have initially imagined.
One thing that I really learned was what Franklin means by “technology as practice” which I always thought I understood but didn’t. It’s like technology is not in the tools or the knowledge, it’s in the choices we make about how we organize our lives ( that’s a shite bastardization of the concept but I don’t want to write too much).
I think many arguments about gender/tech still end up being about technology in it’s more traditional definition: as something that involves 1 and 0’s and maybe also an “interface” or a “language” apart from our ordinary interactions. and how to get women to care more about the 1’s and 0’s and whether or not that caring can be engendered from within or needs some sort of state sponsorship. I think it’s a bit disingenious to look at it this way because it still reifies that fact that the 1’s an 0’s constitute technology more than any other process humans use for extracting value and techne from the earth and each other.
For me, I have decided when I think about technology I am going to think more in terms of how I perform technology. Taking my cue fro these ladies: http://www.myspace.com/womenwithkitchenappliances I am going to look at technology not as a job or a knowledge or a set of tools, but as a public assertion of a kind of way of understanding the world.
Then maybe i will start to understand better why Mike does improv dance as a way of publicly asserting a different mode of understanding. Also it means that probably yes, the responsibility for change mostly does come from within, but it’s not a matter of adding more women or subtracting more men, but of changing the assumptions we have about what constitutes technology.
phewf, done now.
March 27th, 2008 at 9:52 pm
Hey Steph.
I’m not 100% sure of my response, and I don’t want to look like I’m bible thumping (sometime these medium help create that perception) - but what that excerpt makes me think of is replacing the word “FLOSS” with any other old boys club. I just finished one book about civil rights in the US and am starting another and after 4+ years with ISF I’m not struck by the differences between male technology groups and other male-dominated groups. I’m struck by the similarities. So I think change should be talked about partially as justice and countering privilege, not only as soliciting and encouraging diversity. Appreciating the beauty of what they and we (I’m part of that community) speaks to me like telling women or black people to first appreciate that the men’s club has something really meaningful at stake. I’m sure that it’s true - I just don’t think that respecting it is necessarily the best way to promote change. Removing technologists from their throne is probably in order and for me is one of the points of having women in tech - because I have the hope that more women will take a different attitude that the “use what I have created” attituded especially prevalent in FLOSS (because they don’t have to be as user-focused).
March 27th, 2008 at 10:01 pm
Just approved Mir’s comment now.
“For me, I have decided when I think about technology I am going to think more in terms of how I perform technology.”
i dig it. :-)
March 28th, 2008 at 3:05 am
Mir I really liked your comment! At the moment my doing, thinking and performing at this moment in the world of science, geomatics and 0s-1s, infrastructure work, academia and architectural technology, is occupied territorially by so many boyz. The terrain is rough with tons of topography, difficult to interpolate my reference points. I am never sure if it is my womyness, my reflection &/or reprojecting of maleness &/or resistance or meme-ing of that way of doing, or really just moi that is different. The environments that I am in, and this physical container I occupy that others see and react to that is way smaller and femaler relative to the other bodies all around seems to be causing me, others confusion - as these bigger containers not only occupy greater Cartesian space in my part of the world, they also occupy much larger social spaces and knowledge spaces. So it is not just the number of boyz and girlz it is the mode of thought and the assumption that that is the way and it is hard to manoeuvre when they look ahead and see only their own above your head - in real and metaphorical terms!
March 28th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
Michael, can you explain more how you relates “floss”, “civic right in the US” and “male-dominated groups”. I think it is important, but i am not sure i understand what you mean exactly.
Tracey, what i am saying, is that to transform the “mode of toughts” so it is more friendly to women, you need to integrate more women and implement concrete programs so it happens. This not just my own argument, it is Wajman’s technofeminism argument (which is the theorical basis of the “flosspol gender report” presented above):
“Every aspect of our lives is touched by sociotechnical systems, and unless women are in the engine-rooms of technological production, we cannot get our hands on the levers of power” (Wacjman, technofeminism, 2004, p. 111).
March 28th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
Sorry: Wajcman
March 28th, 2008 at 8:01 pm
hey steph. What I was trying to say is that after 4-6 (depends how I count) years in and observing the FLOSS world I find it a distraction to concentrate on the differences between its marginalization and discrimination and the marginalization and discrimination practiced by other groups. It’s true that there are differences because of the technical domain, but I don’t think that they amount to that much when compared to simple, straightforward sexism. Its for that reason I was comparing it to other “classic” struggles against discrimination like the civil rights battle in the US. I believe that confrontation is an important part of a strategy to deal with sexism in FLOSS, as opposed to something that could be construed as legitimating the exclusion of others.
Also, I think it’s funny how this discrimination happens more in floss than in other IT areas. I think part of the reason is that the discrimination isn’t forced to confront a market reality which would make visible the problems of operating a chummy boys-only club.