Woman in Technology
I just got finished reading the blog post Woman in technology, where Nicole Sullivan explains some of the issues she and others have faced in a male-dominated industry. (I’m posting here because comments are disabled for her post).
While I don’t deny that there are problems of discrimination (some of her examples made my stomach turn), I do have problems with a few of her proposed solutions:
Video games are largely made by and for men. We need to be willing to rethink the genre completely, bust things wide open to make video games appeal more to girls.
I think this is backwards (or is, at the very least, a chicken–and–egg problem). People write and design games that they would like to play, so it seems natural that male designers would write games that would appeal to male gamers. Making video games “appeal more to girls” seems condescending to me; that’s like claiming that we need to make video games “appeal more to black people”.
CS education works best for people who already know how to code before they begin. CS teaches the theory behind a practice in which they assume you already have some skill. Women are less likely to already know, because they don’t play video games as much. In addition, code-cowboys among their classmates are likely to judge them harshly for being a beginner. Are psychology majors expected to already know how to psychoanalyze patients before their first semester?
No, psychology majors aren’t expected to already know how to psychoanalyze patients, but they are expected to have some kind of interest in the subject that they are majoring in. If someone wants to major in CS, it’s perfectly reasonable that they already have some idea what’s involved, and to even have done some research on their own beforehand.
Women are less likely to jump up and say “me! me! me!” They are far more likely to wait to be asked to participate. We don’t need women to be different than they are, we just need to invite them in a way that works.
But that devalues the effort of people who put in the work to say, “me! me! me!”. Given two people, of any gender, if one person is willing to work harder than the other to be recognized, don’t they deserve to be recognized? Someone’s getting “invited” because they aren’t willing to put themselves forward to be recognized seems to reward just waiting around to be recognized, instead of making it happen.
Hell, I spent 8 years coding CSS before I ever spoke about it to anyone. The first time I spoke at a conference, John Allsopp contacted me to ask if I would do it. I never would have submitted a proposal. You might say that I should have, but I would counter that I shouldn’t need to act like a dude to get respect.
I find it a little offensive (and pretty sexist) that submitting a proposal is “acting like a dude”. It is not “acting like a chick” to sit back and undervalue your own work. If you have an idea, you develop it; there is nothing inherently masculine or feminine about that. Relying on the chance that someone else will convince you to do something seems like a bad strategy to me.
The main problem with affirmative action is that, despite all of the best intentions, it reinforces, rather than diminishes, the idea that class-X of people are inherently different and therefore need special treatment. That to me, seems to be more a part of the problem and less a part of the solution.
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