Unraveling the Masculinization of Technology
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Ruby Conference 20184 / 66
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:01
Thank you for this post-lunch slot.
00:22
I hope you enjoyed it. So I'm Audrey, and I am going to be giving a talk titled The Unraveling the Masculinization of Technology. I'm going to talk about gender technology and meaningful change. And in the program it says that we're going to learn about the gendered history of computing and explore how we can write a new narrative.
00:41
And that's only sort of true, but I'll explain. So, hello, my pronouns are she and her. I publish a thing called The Recompiler. It's a feminist hacker journal. We also have a book called The Responsible Communications Style Guide. And I'm also a Ruby programmer, and I would love to talk to you about my favorite Ruby project later.
01:03
So this was supposed to be an update of a talk I gave a couple of years ago at AlterConf. And back then, in 2016, I started off with the idea that we could observe that technology and programming are frequently considered to be male or masculine. There are a lot of things that reinforce that for us,
01:20
from job ads to the speaker lineups at conferences, company team pages, and so on. And this has obvious effects, that gendering of technology has obvious effects, like allowing men to find it easier to get interviews and jobs, be paid more, promoted more often. And that also leads to men being able
01:40
to invest in new companies and bring more people like them into the industry. And once I've established that, I can show you that the field of computing was created by women in the 1940s and 50s, still heavily dependent on female labor through the 1960s. But in the 1970s and 80s, the computing industry redefined itself in order to become more masculine.
02:03
Some people benefited from this quite a bit, and others went along for the ride. To give you a visual example, we went from this, the original women who programmed the ENIAC, and they're programmers here with these cables, not just assistants or technicians,
02:23
to the two Steve's who founded Apple, working on their early ideas at the Homebrew Computer Club. How this change happened is in a somehow, because we have research we can use to explain how the industry developed between 1946 and 1978.
02:41
As the computing industry grew, companies created hiring processes and cultures that made certain kinds of masculinity the default and I'll have some references on this at the end. This cartoon is from a ECM conference paper. The cartoon says, programmers are crazy about puzzles,
03:00
tend to like research applications and risk-taking, and don't like people. This puzzle-loving, risk-taking persona of who makes a good programmer wasn't the only option to consider, even in the 1960s. This is an article from a popular women's magazine. The quote says,
03:20
it's just like planning a dinner, explains Dr. Grace Hopper, now a staff scientist in systems programming for UNIVAC. She helped develop the first electronic digital computer, the ENIAC, in 1946. You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so it's ready when you need it. Programming requires patience and the ability to handle detail.
03:40
Women are naturals at computer programming. Collectively, we're paying more attention to gender diversity than we were five years ago, or even two. Companies now routinely monitor their own stats.
04:03
This is, for example, Facebook's most recent diversity report, where it says women in technical roles rose from 15% to 22% over the last five years. Google's most recent report states that the 2018 global workforce composition by gender
04:22
is 21.4% female. And Portland, where I live, a group of 21 companies put together their own tech diversity pledge and agreed to share their aggregate data. Their numbers are pretty similar. There's a little bit of improvement between 2016 and 2018.
04:43
But, I don't know, I'm just not that enthusiastic about companies expending all of this effort on diversity to maintain the status quo. Are you? We could at least aim a little higher. For the modern computing industry, the peak of women's employment in technical roles
05:00
as measured by the US Bureau of Labor was 36% in 1991. And that's a generation ago, so many developers may not be aware of it. I'm sick of talking about diversity. I'm sick of trying to convince people they should care. I'm sick of discussing the central idea that felt novel to me in 2016
05:22
when I wrote the first version of this talk, which is that there is a financial and professional benefit to limiting who can participate in our industry. Programmers are better paid and receive more respect when programming is hard and the qualifications are strict. Not talking about it doesn't make
05:41
the problem go away, unfortunately. This is a satirical diversity in tech report by Sarah Cooper, who also has a book called How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men's Feelings. The report says, perspectives on diversity. 84% believe diversity has been solved.
06:01
16% are minorities. But you know, not everything is terrible. RailsBridge has had a huge impact on the diversity of new Ruby programmers. Companies are much more diverse in their entry-level hiring than they were a decade ago. At the same time, there's still a lot of trash.
06:21
You may have seen this news story a couple of weeks ago. It says, when Google covers up harassment and passes the trash, it contributes to an environment where people don't feel safe reporting misconduct, said Liz Fong-Jones, a Google engineer for more than a decade and an activist on workplace issues. They suspect that nothing will happen, or worse,
06:42
that the men will be paid and the women will be pushed aside. So I'm gonna talk about what we do next.
07:04
Almost all of the statistics I've been citing focus on women and men, binary categories. The Portland Tech Diversity Pledge has a third category, non-conforming, but I don't think that's actually a gender, and I would feel pretty gross about making somebody check that box.
07:22
If we're going to start to improve gender diversity in tech, we have to do more than count the number of women in a certain job category or start more women in tech groups. We need to make room for the diversity of who people really are. For example, just as a starting point, gender is complex. There's more than two options.
07:40
People can be non-binary or NB, genderqueer, genderfluid, femme, or masculine. It's not always what you're assigned at birth. Some of us are cisgender and some are transgender. Gender is sometimes fixed and sometimes changing, and it's not always safe to talk about, which is another way that surveys and statistics don't necessarily give us the full information.
08:06
I want to read you this illustration by a fellow Rubyist about women in tech events. It says, when I ask if I'm welcome at their events, some groups say things like, well, I guess you can come, but it's not really meant for non-women.
08:21
And other groups say things like, yes, we want to support all non-men, women and non-binary people. Every time a woman says that first one to me, it makes me want to start a group for non-binary people, so I can say, well, it's not really meant for men or women. That's a spiteful reason to do it, but not a bad idea, and I agree.
08:44
To go a little further, even our best intentioned efforts make some of us feel like an afterthought. And it's okay if you don't know all of these terms that I have here, but they're a good place for you to start learning more. So this is to reflect some conversations I've had. When we say women and non-binary people are welcome,
09:02
what people might hear is white women are welcome, or non-binary people are fine as long as they're AFAB, that's assigned female at birth. Or they might hear, do transmasculine non-binary people even exist? And you, trans men, and none of those things
09:21
make people feel welcome. When we only talk about gender, we erase so many other kinds of identities and experiences. It's like we're saying, let this group get ahead, and you'll have your turn. How many generations would that take?
09:40
We need to work on centering things like race, disability, sexuality, socioeconomic background, and immigration status.
10:07
The most striking thing about that Google diversity report isn't the total gender breakdown, but what happens when we also look at race. You know who's really underrepresented? Black women, native women, Latinx folks,
10:20
and other non-white, non-Asian groups. The news report that I saw talking about this says black women make up only 1.2% of Google's workforce, compared with 1.8% for black men. And just in case you think I'm only picking on Google,
10:42
here's Apple's most recent diversity report. White people are still about half of all technical employees, and I think we can consider their 23% female tech worker group just average. The inequity between white and black women in tech
11:00
sticks with me, because there's a long history of white women telling everyone else to wait their turn. If we go back to the first feminist movement in the United States that focused on women's suffrage or right to vote, we find several incidents that stand out, including a 1913 parade where some of the organizers won the black women's delegations to march at the very back, after the men.
11:25
The last thing I want to say about these areas of identity and discrimination is that each of us is more than a single trait. As a friend commented, to ignore that feels like you're building a D&D character and you have to add one quirk. It reinforces the idea that programmers are supposed to be a certain way,
11:41
and the single variation rule is just a way of adding a little bit of flavor text. Next, I want to talk about collective action.
12:05
On November 1st, at 1110 a.m., in every office with a participating office, Google employees walked off the job in protest of the company's handling of sexual harassment and discrimination. About 20,000 people participated.
12:21
That's a little over a fifth of the entire global workforce. In my time working in tech, I have never seen anything like this. As a community organizer, getting even 10% of employees deciding to participate in an action would be amazing and impactful.
12:41
Companies, I mean, the offices around the world. I just loved seeing these photos. And the organizers had a set of demands. They asked for an end to forced arbitration in cases of sexual harassment and discrimination, a commitment to end pay and opportunity inequality,
13:02
a publicly disclosed sexual harassment transparency report, a clear, uniform, globally inclusive process for reporting sexual misconduct, and for Google to promote the chief diversity officer to answer directly to the CEO and appoint an employee representative to the board.
13:23
And Google responded. They're changing their process for handling harassment and assault. But the organizers had some feedback for them. They said, the response ignored several of the core demands, like elevating the diversity officer and employee representation on the board,
13:42
and troublingly erased those focused on racism, discrimination, and the structural inequity built into the modern day Jim Crow class system that separates full-time employees from contract workers.
14:08
Other companies are listening. Airbnb and eBay also announced that they're updating their policies. And the primary focus is on ending mandatory arbitration and forced confidentiality for employees
14:22
who report harassment. It's a start, but companies are choosing to update a small set of policies rather than uproot the entire system. Organizing is a process. It doesn't have to be global, and it doesn't have to be dramatic.
14:41
Working together in solidarity is how we create change. The process can look something like, you listen. You get out there and you talk to people and you listen. You ask questions. You find the first thing that you can agree to do together. Could be a small thing. Could be a meeting, a blog post,
15:04
just a statement even. You build on your success, and I recommend you don't do it on Facebook for privacy and safety reasons. We often wait for someone to step up and guide us, but leadership is a skill we can develop.
15:23
We can ask, who's going to take action? Who are we following? Who does the work? Because if we think it's bosses, they don't share our interests. And if we leave it to marginalized people, centering them does not mean making them do all the work.
15:42
So why not you? We don't always talk about money as a part of this, but money will buy a lot of things. It pays for lunch when we have meetings. It lets us create strike funds for hourly workers who can't just walk out, and so many more things.
16:01
And programmers with fancy tech salaries can do a lot for people whose income is much more precarious. Ultimately, things don't change because we want them to. They change because we're working together, building alliances, sharing our resources,
16:23
listening to our most marginalized community members, and taking action. We have power when we work together.
16:41
And tech workers in particular have power because we have something companies want. Software is a part of everything we do now, and you can't create software without software developers. And that labor is your lever. You can look at things like, can you walk out for a day, call in sick,
17:01
work to the rule that's follow the guidelines to the letter to ridiculous extent? You can say, well, do I have Twitter followers, people that might listen to me? And what's going to happen if I refuse to finish my code reviews or merge my latest changes? Maybe you're giving a conference talk?
17:22
And what's the impact if you quit? Because sometimes the most impactful thing that we can do is just to refuse to participate. This isn't something that you have to learn on your own. There are organizations already out there organizing tech workers, and they would be happy
17:42
to help you plan the next step. And the last thing I'm gonna ask you is just to get rid of the coding interview quizzes. These questions really are just there to make some people feel smarter than others. And we've been following something that people came up with in the 1960s
18:01
to thin the candidate pool, not because they were getting better programmers as a result. Maybe we don't host that many dinner parties these days, but I think you're gonna find other great ways to ask people how they solve problems, make a plan, organize information, and communicate.
18:20
Thank you, that's what I have. I know I'm ahead of schedule, but I'm gonna stick around for a while. I would love to come down up front and have a conversation about this. If you want to do more reading about those particulars
18:40
of the history of computing employment and the gendered aspects of it, here's some books that really have a lot of detail on that. And I also recommend that you pick up a copy of the Responsible Communication Style Guide, because it's gonna help you a lot with the terminology. Thanks.