Change the Culture, Change the Future
I’m really lucky; I found my passion as a teen — a very passionate dislike of French. After completing my foreign language requirement in high school, I asked the guidance counselor to help me switch it with a more exciting cooking class. He didn’t think the move would look great on college applications and instead ushered me into Computer Science (CS).
I loved this class so much I took it twice, and for a while I didn’t think much of my start into CS. The class had a humble enrollment with just three students, myself and two boys; and funny enough, we all went on to major in it at Virginia Tech. But that’s where my perspective shifted. It’s where I learned how to be self-conscious.
On my first day in a collegiate CS class, the room was packed. All seats were taken, and the aisles burst with students trying to force-add it to their schedules. The professor, scrutinizing the crowd, welcomed us by saying, “Computers are like car engines, and women just don’t have the mind for it.” I looked around the room, realizing I was completely surrounded by men. Oh, crap.
CS classes weren’t always dominated by men. Through the 70s and early 80s, the rate of women majoring in CS rose at about the same rate as medicine, science, and law — an ascent that peaked at 35% around 1984. Ironically, that year two Steves came along who unforgivingly changed the industry. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak aired a Super Bowl commercial introducing the Apple Macintosh personal computer. Within the next 10 years, the number of women in CS dropped significantly. By the mid-90s, Carnegie Mellon University — the top CS school in the country — was down to 7% of females majoring in the computer science and my alma mater, Virginia Tech, had a mere 15 female students in theirs.
There’s a lot of speculation why this drop happened. Personal computers were marketed to boys. Parents bought personal computers for their sons, instead of their daughters, a new archetype was born: the boy nerd in a dark basement surrounded by empty cans of Jolt. The image was very specific, very male — and it stuck.
So why does this matter? This marketing choice has impacted the industry ever since. Even now, from startups to titans, tech has a reputation of favoring men and excluding women. Not only does this mean females haven’t been part of the fastest growing job sector, but the industry has been poorer for it.
For example, when the airbag was invented in the mid-century it consistently harmed and killed women and children because it was designed and tested based on the average size of the engineers — a team of men. In the growing world of artificial intelligence (AI), where women have some of the lowest representation, Carnegie Mellon found that the machine learning algorithms on Google display lower paying, less prestigious jobs to women in a career search. They also found Microsoft’s Twitter, Chatbot, Tay, which was designed to get smarter through interaction, had quickly devolved into a feed of racists and sexist tweets. (Apparently, the engineers underestimated the dark side of the internet.) Today, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics predicts that by 2020 there will be 1.4 million tech jobs without enough people to fill it. Ultimately, these reportings show a consistent correlation between poor diversity and poor design. They show that in the absence of women and minorities our products are being created by and for white men. They show that without equality we aren’t fulfilling our potential as a tech industry.
But there’s good news: We can help. Reach out to our young girls and get them interested in computers and programming early. Get involved with groups like Girls Who Code, Black Girls Code, Hour of Code, and Google’s Made with Code who expose kids to programming. Look at universities like Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, and Cal Poly who are starting to teach CS in more inclusive ways. Because as we relish in the little victories, like Harvey Mudd’s freshman CS degree program boasting 55% women in 2016 — the national average is still 16%.
If you work in or around the tech industry, odds are you’ve heard folks attribute this low number to the “pipeline problem” — the belief that tech companies struggle with diversity because they can’t find enough talent in minority groups. While that may be one way to examine the hiring process, it doesn’t solve for why women, once in the tech industry, leave it a rate almost twice as high as men. Why? Most women cite exclusion as the primary reason. This means they’re excluded from culture, advancement, opportunities, and growth; and not because companies’ are purposefully sexist (in the way places like Uber, Tesla, and GitHub have been eyed for), but because most places don’t purposefully think about gender and exclusion.
And I get it. Most of us go through our days without thinking about the small exclusionary things we do and how it affects others. Most don’t think about the implication of a 5’2 woman in a weekly stand up with all men (with them quite literally talking over her head). Most don’t think it’s unsafe to have an evening team building event at the bosses’ favorite bar that’s dark, noisy, and crowded. So maybe it’s time to starting thinking about things. Book meeting rooms that can seat everyone and plan an event during the day. Because women aren’t leaving tech because one deep cut. They’re leaving because of a 1,000 small ones.
I have talked to coworkers and friends about these issues. I often see people perk up with pride saying, “I don’t think about gender when assigning work or giving promotions.” But if we don’t stop and think about gender — and how our actions can exclude or include people — we don’t think about it at all. We risk falling back on our culture to make decisions. A culture that assumes computers are like car engines and women just don’t have the mind for it. If we fail to recognize that our culture has conditioned us, then that culture can never change.
So let’s make a change. You can influence where conference room meetings are booked. You can influence where offsite meetings and team building events are planned. You can change the culture. You can change the future.
