16th
Why Gender & Technology is a Hard Thing to Talk About
I’ve been reading Corvida, Louis Gray, Steve Hodson, Stephanie Booth, Stephanie Quilao and a ton of other bloggers and commentors trying to make sense of this tech & gender debate that’s going on.
To me, it’s an interesting and important topic, but when I tried to write out my thoughts and add my own comments, I was totally tongue-tied. I think this is because it’s such a complicated issue.
On one hand, I don’t want women bloggers to be included just because they’re women: “Crap, I need to include some women on this top-blogger list or people are going to complain, and I don’t want to look sexist.”
I want women to be included on top-blogger lists because they provide smart, insightful commentary about technology.
On the other hand, gender matters. Physicality matters. Hormones matter. Women are fundamentally different from men, and that difference matters.
To what degree that difference matters varies greatly.
For instance: keyboards. I’m a very small elf-like woman barely over 5 feet tall.
My fingers are short, and so I get frustrated by the one-size-fits all design of keyboards because sometimes reaching certain keys is harder and creates inefficiencies.
I’ve learned how to customize my keyboard, but that takes time, and I enjoy doing stuff like that.
Not all short-fingered people enjoy the process of figuring techie stuff out, so they just make due, until someone designs a keyboard that’s specifically for smaller people — kids, short women, smaller men — and brings it to this niche’s attention.
That’s why it’s important to include people different from you when you’re coming up with a solution — they’ll bring to light things that you would never think about because it’s not a problem for you, but it is for them.
But when it comes to other techie things, I don’t think gender difference matters much, if at all.
For instance: how long Google takes to process your query.
I don’t think women experience load time different from men. But maybe what does come into play is economic position: load time matters a lot to people using dial-up, maybe someone who can’t afford a broadband connection.
The unfortunate thing that happens when people start acknowledging that difference matters is that we start lumping people together and assuming that all women or all poor people or all white chicks are all the same.
News flash: we’re all different. We have some things in common, but many factors give us completely different experiences and perspectives.
(This is what I hate about traditional marketing. I have advertising clients who say: “I want to reach women 18-24.” And I say: “Wow, that’s a diverse group of people, can you narrow that down so we can more accurately target the ads so we don’t waste your money and people’s attention?”)
Because of issues of gender and class, I’m having a really hard time during this election season. I rarely talk about politics, because like gender, it’s complicated and creates a lot of conflict, but I’m slowly becoming less scared of conflict and speaking up more.
On one hand, I like Hillary Clinton. I think she’s a smart, powerful, sassy woman who isn’t afraid to be called a bitch, and I think the world needs more women like that.
On the other hand, I feel like I identify more with Barack Obama. I came from a working-class family. My grandfather emigrated from Finland to Minnesota when he was five and spent his entire life struggling to make something from nothing.
When was young, I grew up with very few ecomonic privileges even though my parents worked very hard.
My dad was a carpenter, and my mom worked her way up from secretary to director by going to night school, getting her bachelor’s degree, then her master’s degree while raising a family and working full time.
So I have a special place in my heart for people who come from nothing, have no connections, and bust ass to become successful. I think we need more people who have done this in positions of power in our country.
Even though Hillary Clinton busted her ass to become successful, I still see her as an upper-class Wellesley girl who benefitted greatly from her connections (even though as I read her bio in wikipedia, she worked her way across Alaska in 1969 by washing dishes and sliming salmon in a cannery).
So to this day, I’m still split between the candidates, but I’m leaning toward Obama.
Though I’m loath to admit it because it sounds sexist and racist and ageist, I think Obama stands a better chance of changing the world’s perception of America because 1) he’s a man, and 2) he’s not perceived as an old white rich person out of touch with what’s really going on in the world.
I still see the tech world (and the world at large) as essentially a boy’s club run mostly by boys.
Even though there are many women out there totally kicking ass, there still aren’t enough (or enough being recognized and appreciated).
The number of women getting computer science degrees is still falling, and I think that’s probably a problem of perception: many girls still see engineering as uncool, unfun, and run by boys who will make fun of them if they don’t know how many HDMI outputs their LCD has, or some other arcane piece of tech knowledge.
Another problem is that for many women, unless we’re invited, we think we’re not wanted (thanks to Sharon Perl at Google for pointing this out to me).
So my solution is this: women, we need to stop waiting for an invitation.
Just show up, and start talking.
