Learned Behavior, the Patriarchy, and C: Response to Paul Ford’s “What is Code?”
I had a rather personal reaction to reading Paul Ford’s article “What is Code?”. As a social sciences major who prides herself chiefly on her ability to crank out great essays by the midnight oil and be pretentious in the third person, I’ve always considered anything remotely STEM-y an other I am naturally repulsed from. I read Fanon over here, my boyfriend codes over there, and never the twain shall meet.
As I found myself not only enjoying but quite clearly understanding , I egoistically thought about how once upon a time three years ago, I could have been a CS major. I realized that this stemmed (heh) from a frustration with a learned behavior many women feel: that they are inherently not cut out to be “good at” concepts, majors and/or careers in STEM. This dawned on me when I read the section on sexism women programmers face (that I wish had been longer), particularly this quote:
The average programmer is moderately diligent, capable of basic mathematics, has a working knowledge of one or more programming languages, and can communicate what he or she is doing to management and his or her peers.
These are definitely skills I possess; moreover they’re ones that I’ve acquired through a History major that considers itself pretty divorced from programming (basic mathematics = occasionally understanding a regression model). What I realized, however, is that not only are the mode of thinking and skill-set needed to code highly transferable, but coding itself is highly applicable (even) to what I do! This is an embarrassing realization to admit to in my senior year of college; but to be honest, I hadn’t really given much consideration to the data structures and thoughtful software development that went into the digital archives of primary source documents I use for much of my research in my major, to give one of many examples. Overall, I found the article to be extremely informative, fun to read, a nudge to resubscribe to CodeAcademy, and possibly a compelling reason to stop listening to so much Oingo Boingo.
