No need to pinkify – Girls get interested in tech because it is interesting

Alright, I'm going to go deeply out of the topic here, but it's necessary in order to give you a full answer, for you to understand my frustration, and for you to understand how fucked up that obligatory subject could really get.

> What country are you from?

Bosnia & Herzegovina.

> I was thinking more so at the level of teaching them how to code fun stuff in Python or JavaScript.

Yup, I am all up for that. I am the first one to applaud and donate to smaller projects that are aiming in that direction.

Meanwhile, the government (on the district level, think: District of Columbia) signs a deal with Microsoft in which Microsoft gives a substantial discount to their education platform, such projects get shoved away, and people are now being taught in other slightly more up-to-date Microsoft-dependent technologies. Of course, none of the licenses are provided to the students themselves to have at home, so piracy is at its peak. In fact, the only cases of prosecution for piracy I've ever heard of inside Bosnia is the prosecution of businesses that can't show Microsoft's licenses when asked for them by the regulators. Once you are being asked for them, you better have the boxes or receipts somewhere in your closet. It doesn't matter if you're using them or not. Good luck convincing the random inspector that your company is not Microsoft-reliant.

In other words, I haven't seen anyone using any non-Microsoft OS before I started messing around with Linux-based operating systems myself when I was 18. To this day, out of all the local people I've ever met personally, I could list on top of my fingers the amount of local people I've seen using non-Microsoft OS (as in Macbooks, the amount of Linux users I've met in person is still 0).

From my time in that middle-school equivalent, I've also went to a IT-specialized high school and an IT-specialized college. Around 90% of all IT-related topics, 90% of them you are simply unable to run on anything not made by Microsoft. The moment I found out I was supposed to start learning server administration exclusively in Microsoft Server was the moment when I quit that college. I've managed to win some smaller fights (like submitting essays in .odt instead of .doc(x) which was listed as "obligatory"), but this was way out of my reach.

So yeah, it's no longer just the ridiculous educational system, it's a ridiculous educational system that's now backed up financially by Microsoft. The only hope of breaking this monopoly is during the negotiations about joining the EU, but realistically, that won't happen any time soon unless something drastic happens.

So yeah, here I am, two years after I've made that decision to quit college, with two years of work experience working with open source exclusively, on a Mozilla-sponsored fellowship, into month four of waiting for the work permit to get the fuck away from this country, writing this comment on HN because I'm technically unemployed if the EU country I'm applying for work permit with doesn't give me a work visa really soon. If it goes well, I will finally break free of the chains possessed by simply being interested in the "wrong thing" in a wrong country. If not, realistically, the best I could do to even have a job in the IT field in my country is to return to Microsoft.

Did you see the iron Man trilogy?

What you said is how I felt about those movies.. each time they produced material that could encourage the next generation

I've been meaning to do a long form on the subject

iM1: science as sexy then "in a cave, with a box of scraps"

iM2: discover a new element

iM3: hack hardware, hack the genome

Well, for computer science, that does seem to be the case. But not for engineering, physical sciences or math. And considering that most people are granted a degree before they enter the workforce, I don't believe it can entirely be the workforce culture that's deterring them. So I guess I would argue that it's just as likely to be how we message technology as how we treat women in the workforce, if not both.

Or it could be that computer science (what most people refer as "tech") came to be dominated by the boy's club videogame/nerd culture from the early 80's, which pushed women out.

It goes back to another topic here on HN: I don't know of any other career so dominated by a culture as SWE/tech.

Everywhere.

Look at how many people in a discussion like this on HN will simply dismiss low representation as "they must just not be interested" or "why should we care about having equal representation?"

Want more?

How about the cultural expectation that little boys will be more interested in computers than little girls. The stereotypes that suggest that all hackers are male or that girls who are interested in computers in middle or high school will be pariahs among other girls and not welcomed by the boys who are interested in computers.

Or the same stereotypes creating the unconscious biases that result in the teacher being more likely to suggest the Asian boy take the math and CS classes while discouraging the black girl, because Bob just seems more math oriented and she thinks Alice will thrive better in social studies. Those same unconscious biases 5 years later resulting in the man's better fitting the hiring manager's expectation of what a good software developer "is like".

The "booth babes" at conferences and the dudes in communities like this who refuse to acknowledge that that's problematic. The guys who assume that a woman at a tech conference is there as a recruiter or someone's girlfriend. The groping at the conference parties, and the defense of men who make crude sexual jokes about women in what should be a professional setting. The utter lack of women on conference panels on any topic other than diversity in tech.

I haven't seen this in a year or two, but suggestions that tech culture change at all to be less sophomoric and more professional used to result in general outrage that boiled down to "you're impinging on my freedom of speech at work" or "they should just grow thicker skin" or "I was bullied in high school, so I should be able to bully other people now"

The vehement dismissal in technical communities (even more so than in non-technical communities) of women's claims of being harassed or intimidated by men. The foul online cultures that result in women being intimidated, harassed, threatened with rape and murder (after being doxxed so that their addresses are public) for the high crime and misdemeanor of breaking up with a dude and then giving a game a harsh review -- followed by the majority (or at least the highly vocal minority) of the community blaming the woman for the whole thing.

A lot of these things stopped happening in the legal profession, at least, because they began to be perceived as legal liabilities. The medical profession opened to women in part because it could be pitched as a caring profession, which made it acceptably feminine.

The freewheeling culture of startups and large but young tech firms results in an environment where "professionalism" is less valued. That has some positive outcomes (hey, we can wear blue jeans to work!) but also some negative ones (a culture that's more personal, clubby, and clique-y, and where there's less pressure to observe boundaries). This summer, we saw some of the fallout from that, and the entertainment industry is currently reaping the harvest of 100 years of a culture without such boundaries.

What do we do about it? A lot of things.

We try to be more conscious of the expectations we set for our kids, male and female, based on their gender. We find and promote more female role models in the industry, and make our children aware of them.

We create, adhere to, and enforce -- and stop protesting the existence of -- codes of conduct for industry events and for employees (and managers/founders). We hold our peers to a standard of professionalism. We provide our employees with training (as most large law firms do annually) on the topics of bias and harassment, and we educate ourselves and them on our legal obligations in those areas.

We take women seriously and have empathy for them when they point out ways in which they're treated unfairly, and we don't knee-jerk defend the behavior of the men accused. We treat the claims of harassment and of innocence with equal skepticism.

And we do not ever accept malicious doxxing or threats of violence; instead of defending, we ostracize anyone who resorts to such tactics to intimidate women who attempt to participate in computing-centric professions, industries, and communities.

That would be a start.