Category Archives: women

women

five awesome women in science and technology

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In honor of Ada Lovelace Day, and inspired by a challenge to name five awesome women in science and technology in five different countries, I’ll give my answer.

  1. Margaret Livingstone, Harvard Medical School (US).  She gave the keynote talk at UIST 2012 (which I just attended, and it was awesome, and I need to write it up) about art and vision, and gave me quite a lot to think about in terms of how we process visual information.  She is in the process of expanding her book Vision and Art, to be republished next year.
  2. Ada Yonath, Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel).  She won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2009 for her work about ribosomes.  (The previous female Nobel laureate in chemistry was 1964, so she ended quite the dry spell.)
  3. Cheryl Praeger, University of Western Australia.  She’s done some amazing work on group theory and algorithm complexity.
  4. Tebello Nyokong, Rhodes University (South Africa).  She is the first woman from South Africa to have won the L’Oréal-UNESCO award for women in science, for her work on cancer treatments.
  5. Sophia Drossopoulou, Imperial College London (UK).  She might just be my favorite woman doing work in programming languages.
I’m overdue for a write-up of my experience at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, too.  For now, suffice it to say that it was a freakin’ awesome experience to be in a room with 3600 other technical women, and I nearly fell out of my chair when my panel session about influencing without authority filled the room and had to turn people away.  
Nadyne, women

a-conferencing we will go – Grace Hopper and UIST

I got lucky, and get to attend back-to-back conferences this year.  I’m pretty excited about both.

The first is the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, which I just heard has sold out.  3600 of my fellow women in technology will be there.  I’ll be speaking on a panel about how to influence without authority.  I’ll also be working in the VMware booth for recruitment purposes, so if you’re interested in jobs at VMware, come by our booth and I’ll be happy to tell you more about what it’s like to work here.

Then I leave Baltimore and head to Cambridge for UIST 2012.  I’ve been wanting to go for years and years, but it always either conflicted with or was too close to OOPSLA for me to be able to attend.  So I’m totally geeked to be able to attend this year.  I’m just attending UIST, which is a nice change.

If you’re going to be at either of those, feel free to ping me via twitter so that we can meet up for coffee or cocktails.

VMware, women

women connecting women at VMware

This summer, VMware piloted a mentoring program for our female interns: each of our incoming women were offered the opportunity to be paired with a senior woman at the company.

I had my own (female) intern reporting to me, doing awesome research over the course of the 12-week internship.  I also participated in this program, and mentored a design intern.  For me as a mentor, it was a great way to get to meet with someone who I wouldn’t’ve gotten to spend a lot of time with otherwise, and hear about what life is like for woman who is currently working on her CS undergraduate degree.

Over the course of the 12 weeks, we talked about a lot of things, including (but definitely not limited to:

  • what it’s like to do user experience at VMware
  • her work with the women in CS program at her university
  • the different career paths available, and how career paths often take unexpected and awesome twists and turns
  • what it’s like to juggle two professional careers, and the tradeoffs that you have to make along the way
  • opportunities to help out other women understand the value of a CS degree

… and so much more.  I’ve only barely scratched the surface.

It was a really good experience for me.  Answering questions makes you think about things, and hearing the perspective of someone who is new to the field is always a good reminder about what we can do to help new people get established.

The best part about this is, I get to see both of these interns again soon.  They’re both going to be attending the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference this year.  I’ll be part of one of the panel sessions, how to influence without authority and why it is important.  I just noticed that Nikki, my research intern, was featured in the GHC news, writing about her first Grace Hopper Celebration (and wearing a VMware t-shirt, too!).  It’s my first GHC, so I’m excited to be able to participate too.

women

Q&A: is “mansplain” sexist?

4 Comments

In my earlier post about sexism in CS, I used the term “mansplain”.  Sam emailed me about it, saying (in part):

I really enjoyed your recent blog post about sexism in CS. As a man in CS it is good to be reminded of such things and to be both cautious and aware of them. In particular I like your optimism and your examples of how you work to achieve a better situation.

I’m not convinced the use of the word mansplain does much beyond switching the sexism back the other way, however. If I were to write a blogpost and use the word womansplain I am sure I would get at least one nasty email, and it would be justified, as it’s not really appropriate for the message. This is because it would be ascribing certain undesirable traits to women writ large, etc, I’m sure you see where I’m going.

It’s an interesting point, and I’ll admit that I haven’t really decided what I think about it.  I was using “mansplain” as a convenient shorthand for the type of patronizing and condescending explanation that a sexist man is wont to use when speaking to a woman about a technical concept.  Perhaps this is a reflection of what I read, but I felt that the word was well-used enough (and self-descriptive enough, certainly in context) to be clear about exactly the behavior that I was describing.  On the other hand, the only instances that I was able to come up with when searching for “womansplain” were parodies of the former, and only a handful of them at all).  Is it sexist to create a portmanteau with man- at all (some interesting examples here)?  Or is it that the behavior described is one that is itself sexist?

Since I haven’t made up my mind about whether the use of “mansplain” is sexist, I decided to turn to an expert.  David Crystal is a noted linguist and has published many books on the English language and its evolution.  In his blog, he often takes on questions about words and phrases.  I wrote to him to ask:

I’m curious about your opinion of the portmanteau “mansplain”, for which Urban Dictionary has several definitions variously involving a man giving a patronizing and condescending explanation.  Inasmuch as a linguist is comfortable commenting on language being sexist, do you think that this is?  Is there a litmus test of sorts that one might be able to apply?  For example, is the reaction to a simple replacement (eg, “womansplain”) such a test?

I wasn’t really expecting a response, but a few days later, he did write back!  (And I have to tell you that my little geek heart, which much enjoys linguistics and that’s how I came to be familiar with his work and an avid reader of his blog, was all a-flutter when I woke up to that email.)  Here’s what he said:

I think it’s too early to say whether mansplain and womansplain have evolved a sexist status, The definitions on urban dictionary can never be properly interpreted, as no information is given about source and context. There’s a lot of idiosyncrasy and invention. So I think we’re going to have to wait a while to see how usage develops. However, I don’t know what a test for such things might look like. Social attitudes to language aren’t usually capable of being tested in a ‘litmus’ sort of way.

I have to admit that I was hoping for a definitive answer, although I’ve read enough about linguistics to know better.

So, audience, what say you?  Do you think that it’s sexist?

women

another point about sexism in CS

The thing is, I always wince when I get the question about sexism in CS.  While I do generally think that things are better than they were when I started, when the question comes up in a public forum, someone inevitably comes in and attempts to disprove anything that you might say about improvements in the overall environment.

Let’s take a handful of comments from a single anonymous commenter in that thread:

  • “Be careful – don’t hire women.”
  • “this is the trouble that women cause and I therefore try to avoid hiring them for any roles where one requires steady temperament”
  • “If you are making a consumer product, evidently 50% of your market is going to be women and so it would be good to have a proxy customer.”
  • “most women bench less when it comes to intelligence”
  • “There are exceptional women, but on average, they are not the right candidate for a job that requires analytical skills.”
  • “men are typically better informed, more ambitious and more self confident than most women”
  • “the women were uber-stupid”
  • Women have “an overarching lack of understanding and a willing to understand. There is also a lack of self-confidence that they’ll be able to figure it out.”

On one hand, it’s nice to have examples to prove my point that a lot of sexism is grounded in ignorance and immaturity.  On the other hand, it’s disheartening to have so many examples.

This brings up another point about sexism in CS.  It’s not enough for women to be good engineers.  And it’s not enough for men to simply be not sexist.  Both of these are necessary, but they’re not sufficient.  There have to be men who are willing to stand up when they hear other men make sexist statements or engage in sexist behavior and say that it’s wrong and unacceptable.  Thankfully, there have been men who have been commenting in the thread about the misogyny, which does help improve the situation.  It makes it feel like I’m not the only one who’s willing to say that this guy’s comments are sexist and baseless.

If you’re going to go read the whole comments thread, gird yourself for unsubstantiated rumor and anecdotes without attribution or context from the anonymous commenter.  His comments could constitute a whole course in how to not debate.  However, for each point that he’s raised, I’ve spent some time doing research to see if his points are ones that are borne out by the data.  After all, I am a researcher and thus a data-driven kind of person.  The thread (sorry for the length!) has resulted in me learning some things about the gender gap, so I suppose we can consider that to be a silver lining in this cloud1.

Some of the most interesting things that I’ve found as a result of answering his comments are as follows:

  • Diversity Matters from the University of Michigan – There’s a fair body of work that has been done by researchers at UMich, and it is collected here.  The research therein is about diversity in general, and is not specific to either gender or software engineering.  It’s a good launching point for learning more.
  • “Gender Similarities Characterize Math Performance” and the supporting online material by Hyde et al, which considers the gender gap in math scores.  The supporting online material discusses the differences in SAT scores in particular.

I find the research about the gender gap in STEM2 to be interesting.  The gender gap is real, and there are a lot of reasons behind it.  Sexism is only one of the reasons, but it might just be the one that’s hardest to root out.  In the interim, my original advice to women who are experiencing this sexism in CS stands: find your tribe, find the men who aren’t sexist, and find the courage to get yourself out of a bad situation.  It does get better.  Don’t let someone like an anonymous commenter on the internet keep it from getting better for you.

  1. Not cloud like my employer provides, that is.  The silver lining on my employer’s cloud is that they keep on paying me.  Hell, they’ve even promoted me to Staff. ↩
  2. science, technology, engineering, and math ↩
Q&A, women

Q&A: does the sexism in CS ever get better?

36 Comments

I saw this question on Geek Feminism a couple of weeks ago, and I don’t feel like I’ve come up with an answer that is satisfactory yet.  The question is in parts, so I’ll tackle them one at a time.

If you’re a woman in CS, does it ever get better? If it got better for you, where and how did that happen?

Dan Savage and his husband Terry Miller famously told gay kids who are being bullied that it gets better.  Their video inspired thousands of others to film their own videos, ranging from all sorts of individuals to the San Francisco Giants to President Obama.  If you’ve watched a lot of these videos, you can often boil their message down to a few points:

  • A lot of homophobia is rooted in ignorance and immaturity.
  • When you’re the only LGBT person that you know about, you feel completely alone.
  • When you’re in a situation where you’re surrounded by homophobia, sometimes the only solution is to get the hell out of there.
  • Once you get the hell out of there, you have to find someplace that is accepting of who you are.

I think that there are a lot of parallels to the sexism that exists today in computer science and software engineering.

A lot of sexism in CS is rooted in ignorance and immaturity.  As men start seeing more accomplished women in CS, it gets better.

When you’re the only woman around, you feel alone because you have experiences that aren’t shared by others.  It gets better when you find another woman who is in a similar situation who you can talk to — it lets you know that you’re not alone.

If you find yourself in a situation where you can’t handle the sexism that you’re dealing with, sometimes the only solution is to get the hell out of there.  I know that finding a job isn’t trivial and isn’t something that you do overnight, but then those LGBT kids have to wait until they’re 18 so that they can leave home too.  Polish up your resume and portfolio like they’ve never been polished before, start applying for jobs, and get the hell out.

As you’re looking for a new job, remember that the interview is a two-way street.  A couple of months ago, I wrote a long post about participating in an on-campus interview, and my last point was that you should ask questions about what’s important to you in your position.  If you’re getting the hell out of a job because of the sexism that you’re dealing with, you should have a lot of questions about the team and its culture.  Obviously you’re not going to ask, “so, how many sexist pigs do you work with?”, but there are plenty of questions that you can ask and observations that you can make that will help you understand what the situation there is like.

If you’ve learned to deal with it, how?

As ever, it depends on the sexism.  Frankly, it also depends on you, too.

Sometimes you simply call ’em on it.  How you do it depends on the situation and your relationship with those involved.

For example, one day, I was working in my office with the door open.  A bunch of male engineers who I know pretty well were standing in the hallway chatting.  One of the guys, who is single, commented that he always felt like he was behind on stuff: keeping his apartment clean, doing laundry, etc.  Somebody said, “oh, you need a wife!” and the rest of the guys agreed vociferously.  I got up, walked to my door, and simply stood there with an eyebrow raised.  The single guy laughed and said that it wasn’t his idea, and the others backpedaled, including a couple who said that they’re also married to women who work in tech and that it’s a lot easier to manage when you’ve got two people to handle everything.  I didn’t say anything, I certainly didn’t call them sexist, and it ended up being a funny anecdote for all of us.

Sometimes you work on it over time, and you build up your credibility so that the sexist behavior fades away.  Credibility goes a long way towards fixing sexism that’s rooted in ignorance.  I’ll admit that I’ve laid the smackdown on someone who tried to mansplain to me that the problem that we were discussing was NP-complete and what that meant.  As if the mansplaining wasn’t obnoxious enough, he was totally wrong about it being NP-complete — in fact, it was only O(n²), and I proved it.  He wouldn’t meet my eyes in the hallway for weeks afterwards, but a few months later, I heard through the grapevine that he had complimented my technical skills in a meeting.

One thing that you always always do when combating sexism is to be the change that you wish to see in the world.  Do not display any sexism yourself.  For example, don’t use your mom (or the more generic soccer mom) as an example of a non-technical user.  I don’t care if your mom really isn’t technical.  It goes without saying that you should avoid other stereotypes, -isms, and -phobias as well.  Don’t display racist behavior, don’t display homophobic behavior.  Your credibility in trying to address sexism is negated when you make a racist comment yourself.

If being ostracized and viewed as gross and weird for being feminist and female “never gets better,” why stay in CS?

I reject that it “never gets better”.  It might not get better in certain situations.  Buy me a cocktail sometime and I’ll tell you about the manager who wanted to know when I planned to get pregnant so that he could include it in his schedule for our next release.  I doubt that he’s ever going to get better.  But you can find situations where it is better, and you embrace them, and you try to make it better for other women too.

Even in a bad situation, one of the reasons that you stay in CS is because you love it.  If you don’t love it, and if it’s a bad situation, you don’t have a good reason to stay.  This isn’t to say that sometimes the sexism just gets overwhelming and you can’t take it anymore, and so you do go off and do something else.  If that’s the decision that you make, that’s valid.  There have been some pretty nasty examples out there.  If I try to put myself in those shoes, I’m not sure if I wouldn’t’ve walked away myself.  But, thankfully, I haven’t been that unlucky with sexism in CS.

I think that it’s incumbent upon technical women to make ourselves available for mentorship.  It’s hard to find a technical woman for a mentor, especially ones who have been in tech for several years.  So for those of us who have, I think that we should help out the younger women who are experiencing a lot of the same things that we did, and hopefully helping to avoid having women drop out of the field because they just can’t take the sexism any longer.  I do this at VMware, mentoring some of the younger women on my team1 and reaching out to them when I think that they could use a hand.  It’s also one of the reasons why I write this Q&A series of blog posts, to exemplify the behavior that I think that a senior technical woman should have.

Ultimately, I think that the way that sexism in CS gets better for us as individual women in CS is to find your tribe.  Find the other women who have walked the same path that you want to walk.  Find the men who aren’t sexist.  Find the courage to get yourself out of a bad situation.  It gets better, and it requires you to help make it get better.

  1. Men aren’t left out. I’m currently mentoring the newest researcher on my team, who is male. ↩