The daughters who didn’t follow their mothers into tech
During periods of the twentieth century, women made up as much of 50% of the tech workforce. Now that figure stands at 20%. If role models are so important, what happened to the daughters and granddaughters of these women?
I’m the daughter of a programmer who found her way into startups via a circuitous route. My life would be 90% easier if I was a programmer. So why didn’t I follow in my mother’s footsteps, I often ask myself.
Men and women are different. We look different. We have different bits. On some issues, we may see the world differently, behave differently and our genders may be the causal factor behind this.
What’s less clear is the extent to which these differences are the root of any underlying biology.
The reason former Google Engineer James Damore was fired was not because he pointed out gender differences, but the fact that he attributed them to biology.
The former Google staffer’s contentious position: that biological differences make men more suited to engineering and leadership positions in the tech industry than women.
“To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK,” Google’s chief Sundar Pichai said as he announced Damore’s termination.
Mr Damore has many supporters who fear this is a case of political correctness gone mad. But these kinds of claims set us all back. And I imagine it will be some time before geneticists prove decisively there is a ‘programming’ or a ‘leadership gene’ and that men have it more abundantly than women.
If there was a ‘programming gene’, perhaps I would have inherited it from my mother, who was a systems analyst in the seventies and eighties before I was born. I grew up in a family where being in tech was a perfectly normal job for a girl, in fact, half the women in my family were programmers. And I’m sure my dad would be the first to admit that if there is a biological adaptation for programming, it is my mom that has it, and not him.
Nathan Ensmenger, a professor and expert on the history of computing and author of The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise, estimates that about 35% of computer programmers were women in the period between 1955 and 1970. And some estimate as many as 50% of tech jobs in the 1950s were done by women. Female coders effectively took us to the moon: Margaret Hamilton led the lab that developed the Apollo program’s guidance system.
Clearly a sizeable number of the daughters and granddaughters of these early techies didn’t follow in the footsteps of their mothers, despite the improvements to overall educational attainment for women. Maybe I didn’t get the ‘programming’ gene. Or maybe there were other reasons.
When I was making decisions about my future (at the absurdly young age of 16 when we specialize in the UK), it was pre-Facebook and Twitter, before the software revolution. My only experience of techie people (aside from my mum and aunt who’d paused their careers to have families), were men on the TV who were being interviewed in a university lab somewhere.
Whenever I entered the living room to find my mum engrossed in one of these shows, I’d make a disparaging comment about these ‘men with beards’. In fact, calling them ‘men with beards’ was doing them a disservice, they were men with thick lensed glasses and voices that sounded like Kermit the Frog.
Why the hell would I enter that world? The idea of being stuck in a windowless bunker surrounded by computer hardware seemed like a ridiculous career choice for someone like me. These guys looked like they rarely saw daylight. Moreover, my mum was techie and her life didn’t seem particularly exciting or glamorous, she was just running around after me all day.
As far as I was concerned, tech jobs weren’t well remunerated. My own mother’s career had stalled (owing to my arrival) and there were other more glamorous fields like law or media where I would be better compensated and have better prospects.
You may have noticed that the word ‘glamourous’ has popped up twice in the previous two paragraphs. Looking back, it seems preposterous that I would make important life decisions based on glamour considerations. As someone who doesn’t wear high heels, rarely brushes her hair and only gives a passing thought to her outfit when there’s a fancy dress party coming up, you wouldn’t expect me to give a stuff about glamour. But I did. And I’ve often wondered how many 16 year old boys were choosing a career on account of how glamorous it might turn out to be?
But glamour was an embarrassingly high priority for me as a teenage girl. And then by the time I was old enough to realize that going into the tech world actually a good idea (and maybe even quite glamorous), I perceived the barriers to entry to be too high.
Back in my mom’s day, you just needed to be good. Before positive discrimination was necessary, it was a true meritocracy, Ensmenger explains:
‘It was less about knowing the right people and having certain kinds of connections. If you were good at it, then you were good at it, and that was seen as particularly empowering for women.’
Her experience echoes that. As a highly numerate and analytical individual, she was given lots of responsibility in an area that a lot of career-focused men didn’t understand (or want to understand). And she flourished.
Now it’s all changed. Now the world of tech is a high stakes game that lots of men want to be part of. And in high stakes industries like banking and tech, it gets more political. And as it gets more political, women often get sidelined.
I interview hundreds of students because I run a program that sends students abroad to intern for startups. And I see similar patterns emerging among the students that I interview.
Many of the male students I interview will confidently assert their desire to get into tech on their interview and most will have zero technical experience (or limited evidence of aptitude for tech). The female candidates tend to baulk at the thought of being thrown in at the deep end. Their biggest fear is being exposed for not knowing anything. “I don’t want to do anything techie,” they often say,
“Why?” I ask, “because I don’t know anything about tech”.
“That’s how you learn,” I respond.
These circular attitudes and those of Damore’s hold women back. Women will return to the world of tech when it stops seeming like an old boys club. Contrary to some of the guff out there, women are just as rational as the opposite sex. If more women believe that success is possible in a tech career, they will pursue one in greater numbers. And the tech industry (and society at large) will benefit.
