this is totally gonna work…

I’m a big podcast fan. There aren’t many I listen to, but the few I enjoy accompany me and my dog on a near-daily basis. One of my favorites is Geoffrey Grossenbach’s excellent Ruby On Rails Podcast. In particular the last two episodes, about women in computing, really got me thinking about education and technology. If you haven’t had a chance to check them out, they are worth listening to.

RailsConf 2007 had the best female turnout that I’ve observed by far of any conference I’ve attended—and sadly, it was still too little. I’m not talking about having gender diversity for the sake of diversity, but that the field of software is truly missing out on a lot of talented women who have been turned away for one reason or another. Why is this happening?

I believe that it’s a combination of education and culture that has made it this way. The curriculum that has formed around computers in schools is frankly appalling. By the time students leave high school very few have had the stomach to persevere through restricted access to machines, social stigma and bad teaching (no, learning MS Word does not count as computer education).

Culturally, computing reveres the lonely genius who springs some great idea on us. Social interaction through and with computers has always been awkward and fringey, despite the success of things like IM, Twitter or MySpace. Within the so-called “geek-culture”, independence is prized over group interaction. Frankly I think this turns a lot of girls off. The cultural fabric of computing has become so rooted in shielded individuals that it simply doesn’t occur to many girls that getting involved with computing is something they might enjoy. I hold out hope that various agile methods will be adopted more widely with their emphasis on collaboration.

So what can we do? I may get hate-posts for this but I’m not sure there is much we can do for the current high-school aged female population and beyond. Each person (male and female) has acclimated to gender norms in our culture and has enough experience that changing many attitudes would be difficult. I think we have to improve the curriculum, access and social attitudes at a much younger age.

We are obligated to remove the cult of priesthood, masculinity and mystery from computing and put these wonderful tools in front of kids as soon as we can. So here’s my proposal: since the field of computing is so male-dominated right now, fathers who work with computers owe it to their daughters to make extra-sure that they get exposed to computers. This means when you’re working at home on some deathly-important thing and your little girl wants to type on the keyboard you stop what you’re doing and let her type in a word-processor or text editor. This means that you let them play around with and click on things without telling them what to do. This means you don’t scare them out of interacting with it. This means when they ask questions you try to answer them the best way you can.

My four-year-old daughter likes to “type some letters” and “play the drums that I like” on my MacBook. This translates to saying and typing letters into TextMate and playing drums via the keyboard in GarageBand. I never say no. I always haul her up in my lap, close whatever else I’m doing and let her play, explore and ask questions. Yes, this once resulted in crashing the window manager on my Linux box, but that was okay. Just the simple tactile experience of touching the machine is important.

Do I hope she follows in dad’s footsteps? Not necessarily. I only hope that she’s as fortunate as I am to have discovered what I like to do and can make a career out of it. What I certainly don’t want is to have this avenue closed off to her as was the common experience of my wife and most of my female friends. It’s going to take some time and effort to get girls engaged. We (computer nerds) desperately need them if we’re to continue to innovate, learn and grow.

This entry (Permalink) was posted on Wednesday, July 4th, 2007 at 4:59 pm and is filed under Social Commentary, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response , or trackback from your own site.