Tiburon documentarian’s film explores the tech field’s gender gap
How does early digital literacy stack up in Tiburon?
Editor’s note: This story originally published in The Ark on May 27, 2015. It earned second place for Coverage of Education in the California Newspaper Publishers Association’s 2015 Better Newspapers Contest.
By HANNAH BEAUSANG
hbeausang@thearknewspaper.com
Careers in the ever-evolving tech field are lucrative and desirable — loaded with potential to dream up the “next big thing” that could change the world. So why does recent data show that only 26 percent of computer science careers are held by women, with even gloomier statistics for women in minority groups?
Tiburon-based filmmaker Robin Hauser Reynolds has spent the past two years deconstructing that very quandary, crafting the full-length documentary “Code: Debugging the Gender Gap,” which breaks down why the cutting-edge field is cutting a significant demographic out of the equation. The film debuted at New York-based Tribeca Film Festival, then made its way to Arkansas for the Bentonville Film Festival. Along the way, it’s whipped up media attention from the likes of Forbes, The New Yorker and The Atlantic, with U.N. and New York City Hall employees requesting private screenings.
Reynolds, reached by phone, says she’s still on the road with co-producer Staci Hartman and plans to continue promoting the film internationally for the foreseeable future.
A cause close to home
Reynolds, who also co-produced the award-winning documentary “Running for Jim,” started exploring the concept after her academically adept daughter told her she was dropping her computer science major at Colgate University in New York. She’d told her mother she doubted her abilities, felt isolated in the male-dominated class and thought that she was ultimately failing — though it turned out she was getting a B.
About the same time, news media was bolstering the importance of jumping on board the computer science field, and at least getting a basic education in coding while in college, Reynolds says.
For “Code,” Reynolds tapped successful women — and men — from tech giants such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest to get their insights. Efforts to fund the film raised more than $86,000 in a month using the crowdfunding site Indigogo.
“It’s not an easy question to answer,” Reynolds says. “The power of a stereotype is strong and difficult to change.”
However, one doesn’t have to look far to note the phenomenon of women feeling isolated in the computer science network: Sona Dolasia of Strawberry, a sophomore at Tamalpais High School in Mill Valley, says she’s felt the same pressure.
Last year, she says she was the only girl in an engineering class of 30 boys; she’s also been one of two girls in a male-dominated robotics club.
She acknowledges it hasn’t always been easy.
“I think at the beginning, you doubt yourself,” Dolasia says. “Like, ‘Do I fit in here? Is this completely wrong?’ But I pushed myself to do more so I could show them I was better — so that I could prove myself.”
Dolasia has done just that: She’s won a national science prize and founded the Tamalpais High School Robotics Club, as well as “Reaching Out With Robotics,” a volunteer outreach project that teaches Marin City youth about robotics while establishing mentors. She also volunteers with the Belvedere-Tiburon Library’s coding club, CoderDojo, and recently won a $500 grant to fund a robotics workshop at the library.
Thinking outside the box
In Reynolds’ documentary, she highlights that computer science can transcend the tech mold and lead to creative careers, such as in animation, graphic design, fashion or robotics.
Reynolds says that computer science should be accessible to everyone and features groups such as Black Girls Code and Code for Progress, which take a grassroots approach to getting women and minorities geared up for tech careers.
Through direct industry examples, “Code” points to the need for diversity in the tech industry — from glitchy airbags designed specifically for men to male-developed voice tracking that didn’t pick up women’s voices, to a vulgar and degrading smartphone app that was the first presentation at the 2013 TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, developed by what’s come to be known as “brogrammers.”
Reynolds says that lack of diversity at the inception phase of apps creates a limited market.
“If we want to try to create apps that serve a broader breadth of society, we need socioeconomic diversity — more gender and ethnic diversity at a designing and a coding level,” she says.
However, that acute lack of diversity in the field hasn’t always been an issue, and “Code” shows that historically, women were at the helm of technological development.
Women written out of history
Ada Lovelace, a 19th-century English mathematician and writer, was among the female pioneers in the field, later followed by computer scientist and U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, who is renowned for the groundbreaking development of the COBOL computer program language
Since then, women have effectively been blotted out of history, Reynolds says, with the stereotypical image of a coder being a “nerdy” or “geeky” young man who’s glued to the computer screen.
The number of women in computer sciences peaked between 1980 and 1985, with women making up nearly 35 percent of the field, according to data from the National Science Foundation.
White House data show that by 2020, there will be 1.4 million jobs in the computer science field, and only 400,000 computer science graduates with the employable skillset.
In 2012, only 18 percent of computer science undergraduate degrees were awarded to women, according to the National Center for Women in Technology. In 1985, 37 percent of computer science undergrads were women.
In a January 2014 diversity report from Google, the company reported that women make up only 17 percent of the tech-related workforce, with 1 percent black employees, 2 percent Hispanic and 34 percent Asian. Figures are similarly white and male across other big names in tech, including Facebook, Yahoo and LinkedIn.
There are a number of possibilities from where the lack of diversity stems, including cultural stereotypes, self-fulfilling negative prophesies, sexual harassment, feeling like an outsider and gender stereotypes introduced through parenting, Reynolds says.
She says the key to breaking that is to declaw the computer science field early by intertwining it into public school curriculum and establishing a diverse set of mentors.
“Ultimately that’s our goal: to change the way women and people of color see themselves in tech,” she says. “We need to change the way educators are teaching, inspire change in startup culture to be less misogynistic — we need to approach it from a variety of angles.”
Tech in local classrooms
The Reed Union School District, which serves Belvedere, Tiburon and East Corte Madera, has already made strides to incorporate tech into its classrooms, according to district Superintendent Steve Herzog.
The district introduced laptops to some classrooms as part of the “Millennial Laptop Program” in the 2005–2006 academic year. A report released in 2010 illustrated that the introduction of technology was a success — with teachers from Del Mar Middle School and Bel Aire Elementary School reporting that they’d used the technology in their lessons, and that pupils seemed eager to work with the computers.
Now the district uses about 2,000 combined MacBook and MacBook Air laptops alongside iPads to enhance classroom activities, Herzog says.
In a December 2014 survey of 98 staff and teachers, 90 percent of teachers said they believed that technology in class can increase the learning environment, while 84 percent of the 781 Bel Aire and Del Mar students surveyed agreed.
Herzog says coding classes are offered as an extracurricular, but the district is looking for ways to make coding a “formalized” part of curricula for select grades in the upcoming school year. Schools also offer robotics programs and opportunities to create live TV segments.
He says students have a natural interest in working with digital tools, and the district attempts to encourage that and foster related skills in the classroom.
“There’s a comfort level and there’s a high interest,” he says. “Any time a kid is interested and motived, there’s a market.”
The district previously utilized a tech plan that spanned from 2010–2013, with an update on the horizon spearheaded by newly hired Superintendent Nancy Lynch, who will take the reins from Herzog after his June retirement.
Kids in coding
Other officials on the peninsula, including Belvedere-Tiburon Library Web services and Reference Librarian Ivan Silva, are joining the movement to boost children’s interest in programming — and their access to collaborative spaces.
Silva founded the Tiburon CoderDojo, the community program for kids aged 7–17 to play, socialize and build their coding skills.
The Belvedere-Tiburon Library club is the North Bay’s only CoderDojo — a global network of more than 600 free, volunteer-led community programming workshops dedicated to teaching youth to code and create Web-based applications.
The crew of about 20 local coders and four volunteers, including Strawberry’s Dolasia, are part of a movement reaching across all corners of the globe, with dojos from Burundi to Nova Scotia, and Argentina to Russia.
With the help of Dolasia, Silva is looking to create a girls-only code club, certified through the nonprofit organization Girls Who Code.
He says the dojo has a hard time retaining girls, and he wants to give them a chance to bond in their own space.
“What we are seeing is that we can’t keep girls coming back because they are not comfortable with staying with a group of boys,” he says. “It’s important (to learn coding) even if they’re not going into a tech field or becoming programers or developers — it’s where the economy is going. We see it as (part) of the digital literacy they need to have.”
Mill Valley-based software designer Douglass Tarr agrees. He created the for-profit Code Club in 2013 after parents on his fourth-grade son’s soccer team asked him to teach a group of a dozen kids to code.
Since then, the club has expanded to have three locations in Mill Valley, Greenbrae and San Francisco. He’s also created a “girls only” component, which he says has seen great success; it was spurred partially by his desire to create a space for his daughter to feel comfortable.
“If you want to encourage girls to get involved, you need to create a space for them and encourage them,” he says. “They need to be able to socialize and see that it fits into their lives.”
He says coding and tech careers have been on something of a pedestal in the past, but teaching kids early and incorporating it into daily their lives is a good way to encourage diversity.
“Anyone should be able to learn to code,” he says. “I do think of it as a literacy, and it’s a great way to connect with other people.”
Reynolds encourages locals to get on board with the movement, even if it’s in a small way.
“I think that all of us as parents can look at our unconscious biases and how we raise our kids,” she says, pointing out that parents can make an effort to encourage their daughters to explore science, math and computer sciences. “Gender bias is blatant and it’s unconscious.”
Reporter Hannah Beausang covers the city of Belvedere, as well as crime, courts and public safety issues on the Tiburon Peninsula. Reach her at 415–944–4627 and on Twitter at @hannahbeausang.
