No Really, No Stereotypes
“But stereotypes can be useful!”
(this is a follow-on from “No Stereotypes Please”, which you may want to read first).
I said that I found stereotypes unhelpful. Then an argument was made on Twitter that stereotypes can be useful when we’re deliberately generalising. Because sometimes that’s what we want to do. We want to look at statistics and identify trends.
Yeah, ok, sometimes we do. But I was talking about something specific, which is the paucity of women working in IT, and the desire to increase those numbers. Well then, wouldn’t it be useful to have general info about what women like; what they’re good at, and then use that knowledge to attract more women into the profession?
Nope. I still don’t believe it’s helpful.
The men that work in IT are a minority amongst men. They don’t represent your “typical” man (whatever the hell that is). And there’s no reason to think women would be any different. IT is an attractive profession for a particular kind of person.
And yes, so what’s atypical amongst men is even less typical for women. This is the phemonenon we’re observing, and I’m writing about: Only a tiny handful of women seem to want to work in IT. So, why is that? How do we increase those numbers? Do we want to increase those numbers?
I would argue that the answers to all three of those questions are linked. And none of them are helped by considering stereotypes.
I mentioned it in an earlier post but should have referred to it again in the last one: Women only conform to stereotypes because they have been bred that way. From the moment we are born, men and women are encouraged to think, behave and react in particular ways. We are surrounded by assumptions about what we can / can’t and will / won’t do. One way to shape people is to make assumptions about them. Tell them what you expect of them, and they will often oblige. It’s a technique used all the time by teachers.
(Incidentally, can we all please stop saying things like “Oh well, you’re a boy, of course you can’t find things” to our sons? I do it myself. It’s what’s known as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Stop it.)
So, girls tend to be more caring and less analytical. Boys the other way round. But they only tend in that direction. There are a million things which can change those outcomes. The fact that people like me exist — and I’m not that unusual — proves it is possible for women to enjoy and excel at Technology. And my argument is that by making the assumption from birth onwards that women will not enjoy or be good at things like programming computers, we are actively preventing women from discovering something which could make them happy.
Indeed, there’s an argument to be made that we could get a lot more men into the profession too, if we stopped encouraging ALL children to believe that certain subjects (maths, tech, science) are really hard and boring. I used to be a maths teacher. I know.
If we want to get more women into tech, it won’t help if we look at general trends — or stereotypes — of how we believe the majority of women behave. Partly because that behaviour has already been shaped by stereotypes, and what we’re trying to do is show an alternative. Partly because we’re not aiming to get the majority of women into IT (although, wouldn’t that be lovely? Ha. Oh all right. One step at a time).
The argument was made that even if stereotypes are damaging to individuals, they’re helpful when considering groups. I would argue, not this group. I’m saddened to admit that after 16 years in the industry and a lot of evidence that I’m pretty damn good at what I do, I still have to fight against a little voice that says I’m a girl and that means I’m not good enough. I’ve fought against that voice all my life. When I was the only girl in the A level maths class, I felt like maybe I was in the wrong place. Maybe I wasn’t clever enough.
If I’m still hearing that voice, then so are all those girls out there who love doing puzzles, love numbers, love using their brain in certain ways… but have doubts about whether they’re capable, about whether they’ll ever succeed in competition against men, about whether they’re weirdo freaks for even liking that stuff in the first place. The girls who couldn’t give a toss about whether their hair is straight or their mascara is smudged… no. Sorry. They wish they didn’t give a toss. They don’t want to give a toss. They want to bury their head in a book or solve a crossword, but people keep laughing at their hair or their make up or their stupid taste in clothes, and that distracts them.
When all this talk of Women In Technology has me examining myself constantly for proof of either womanliness or a lack of it, that’s when I say, enough already with the stereotypes.
I want more women in tech because I want to stop facing an assumption that because I’m a woman, I must be an administrator or anything other than a software engineer. I sent an email today to someone I’d never met, inviting them to come and talk tech for my colleagues. I started it with “Hi, I’m Clare, I’m a software developer at LateRooms”… because I knew that if I didn’t, they’d likely assume my role was administrative.
I want more women in tech because, yes, I’d like to stop feeling like a weirdo freak. And yes, ok, I’d like someone to commiserate with about period pains. And I’d like to meet some more of those clever women that I know are out there. And I know there are lots of girls out there who like all the stuff I did when I was a kid, but they don’t have a mum with a maths degree, or a dad who teaches them how to put up shelves and mend bikes, or friends who encourage them to throw the make up in the bin (if they want to — I know they might not want to, and that’s fine) and just be whoever the hell they want to be.
I want children to have people leaping up and down with excitement at them about how fun maths can be, and how it really isn’t about right and wrong and black and white and scores out of ten. I want them to learn about how creative tech can be. I want them to throw the exam papers out the window and be given the opportunity to explore. I want them to see women having fun in tech and think to themselves, “Ooh. I want to do that too.”
I don’t think any of that will happen if we keep chucking stereotypes at each other, and I really wish that my gender was no more important than the colour of my eyes. When I’m coding, when I’m lost in the sheer satisfaction of solving a puzzle, I don’t think to myself “oh yes oh yes, look at me being all womanly and female”. I‘m not being a woman when I’m at work, I’m being a person who loves to code, just like all those other persons who love to code who make my daily life such fun.
People tend to see their gender as a fundamental part of their identity. Despite all my protestations, I can’t deny that it’s an important part of mine. I think we all focus on it too much, but there’s no doubt that we do. We like to be surrounded by people we have things in common with, and that includes gender.
Whether we admit it or not, most humans like to fit in. “You don’t belong here” is a powerful concept.
We look for examples of people who are like us, and doing the things we would like to do. If girls don’t see women doing the things they’re interested in, they’re less likely to believe it is a viable option. The same thing happens with disadvantaged kids who don’t see any people like them doing the thing they want to do, and therefore assume it’s not something they can achieve. I‘d like, yet again, to recommend the book Delusions of Gender, by Cordelia Fine. She writes very eloquently about all of this.
If I give credence to stereotypes in any way at all, it’s for this: Let’s create a new one. “My God, you’re such a typical woman, sitting around writing code all the time, having fun, enjoying yourself.”
It’s a long road and there are no magic bullets, but one small thing I can do is leap up and down saying, “HERE I AM, I’M HAVING A BRILLIANT TIME, LOOK AT ME, YOU CAN DO THIS TOO”.
And that applies to the boys as well as the girls.
