On being a girl in computer science - a confession

As I'm told, female-only events can work well, because males tend to actively reinforce patriarchy. We are trained to, and often need to be deprogrammed to simply be aware of it. (Just consider our gendered dress codes. Many men would actually consider suicide rather than publicly wear "female" clothes. Most would be kicked out of their workplaces if they showed up in such dress.)

So, it is only logical to consider voluntarily meeting in a space free of such disruptive people. (I'm not talking about the over-the-top Ruby brogrammers I know, whose talks feature sexual images of females who fit a narrow range of appearance. It's more mundane and everyday than that.)

It's obviously not a perfect solution, but males are free to educate themselves and undermine their gender roles. Then we wouldn't need to resort to such measures.

The problem is there isn't anything we can do to change your typical tech gathering/event to not be intimidating or uncomfortable for a large number of girls. It's known that girls are more vocal and proactive in a classroom full of just girls. The intimidation factor is something that cannot be fixed at this level. It's not just a matter of banning certain types of humor.

If you look at the real pioneers of computer science, people like Turing and Babbage, two women jump right off the page: Ada Byron and Grace Hopper. Women belong in CS, because it belongs to them. They were there at the start, just as much as the men.

As a 55-year-old man, I'm pretty sure I've experienced discrimination because of my age. Situations where people couldn't see beyond the wrinkles and gray hair and see the experience and skills. I know the same thing happens to women too, because they are different from the vision of an ideal employee the employer had in mind. I don't think women managers are immune to this either. I've worked in two departments headed by a woman who made all the hiring decisions and the entire team they hired was men. There are definitely barriers.

But I agree with the author that 'women in CS' programs aren't the answer. Success is. Each generation of CS pioneers includes a few more women with passion and intellect like Hopper or Bryon that cannot be ignored, and they will make it a lot easier for equally qualified women in subsequent generations, because when all is said and done, what you can do ultimately beats who you are in this field.

>I liked it because it was hard, and considered hard. >And I didn’t even notice that I was the only female in the >class— a lack of awareness that persisted well into >university.

I took programming classes in high school, and assumed that the hugely skewed gender ratio was just my school being weird. It wasn't until people were surprised/impressed that I was planning to major in CS that I started googling, and discovered that the gender ratio is a thing.

> I simple never fit in with “the girls”. > Because girls don’t do things that I like.

I often feel more uncomfortable at women in CS events than just plain CS ones. Partially, it's because the actual activities are less interesting; I'm there because it's "for women", despite the less interesting/ less technical content. Partially, it's because, after 4 years of CS courses, I feel like I'm in the wrong place when more than 35%-ish of the people in a room are female. Partially, it's because I tend to feel more out of place among women. I don't dress like they do - no makeup, unisex tshirts, more interested in coding than parties - and when I'm in a room full of normal women who happen to do CS, I feel more alone than in a group of CS people. If I'm in the group of people who are supposed to be my minority demographic or whatever, and I feel like I _really_ don't fit in with them, then doesn't that mean I don't fit at all?

I tend to like unpopular/strange pieces of programming (sometimes partially because "it [i]s hard, and considered hard"). I'm used to having different technical interests than the CS/tech people I hang out with. I just feel that a lot more when I'm at a women-in-tech event. Either there's a bigger disconnect or I care more deeply that I don't fit. I view it mostly as a personal insecurity, but I really long for the emotional validation of meeting someone who's female, doesn't care about clothes, and has vaguely similar technical/programming interests. Normal CS groups of sufficient size include people who fit on everything but gender; in my experience, women-in-cs groups provide examples that match only on gender.

People on their couch at home will still laugh at a blatantly racist joke and not think much of it depending on the target.