An open letter to women in technology

"I realised that those six young women in my university class, who had managed to make their way into a lecture theatre filled with other hopeful engineers, were probably the most remarkable of all of us. The guys had it easy: we were actively encouraged by society into these pursuits, and nobody blinked an eye when we walked into that lecture theatre."

This sort of generalization is totally fallacious and completely ignores the fact that various groups of men too, (for example, those belonging to certain minority groups) are also seen as outsiders in technology. This pervasive attitude of "oh yeah, you're a guy, you probably have it very easy" can be extremely damaging towards their development and self-esteem.

[Anecdotally, during college in the US, the women I knew in engineering were there because they liked it, and so were the men. I don't recall anyone expressing surprise that there were women in the class, it was more surprise that there were so few of them. So I would actually argue that the reform needs to happen mainly outside the classroom -- in society as a whole.]

If you want to be inclusive in tech, (which is a good thing), be completely inclusive -- men, women, and transgender people of all communities are welcome. Some of them have had it easy, others have had it hard. This can be due to a variety of socio-economic factors. Telling one group "you are special and remarkable" and saying that "the others had it easy" are over-simplifying the situation and trivialising the problems faced by other groups.

> Almost instantly, society began to bombard her with images and objects

As we abandon religion, we always seem to replace it with another omnipotent entity. Government, society, media... The problem with those is that we also like to believe that they can be influenced and their power used for our ends -- finally, a god who listens.

And so while everyone pays lip service to science and evolution, actual belief in an uncaring universe shaped by mutation and death remains as rare as it ever was.

Honestly, society's gender roles are a result of our biology and not just dogmatic stereotyping. The truth is that women are biologically more interested in social occupations. It comes down to the way humans evolved and the attributes which make a good mother. Men are biologically more interested in thing based occupations which is why there are so many men in science and technology.

Note the behavioral effects of autism which is known to be the result of an extreme male brain (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12039606). The ratio of women born with autism is 1 to every 4 men. By simply measuring traits that indicate the levels of testosterone during gestation they can even accurately predict SAT scores (http://www.livescience.com/7290-finger-length-predicts-sat-p...). There was an interesting Norwegian documentary which covered this topic pretty well (http://youtu.be/AZoRihmI1Ug).

"Women in tech" is a gender problem, and I think that there should be some separation. Nothing negative of course. For example - we could praise then them for their bravery (fact).

Yes, thankfully it will also make it easier for many underprivileged male and female children to participate in tech and be recognized for their efforts.

An important thing to note here is that "I had it easy" is a different story from "all of us guys had it easy". How easy you had it is a general consequence of your socioeconomic background, among which gender is a factor. Do you know for a fact that the guy on the other side of the class who worked three other jobs to put himself through the CS program also had an extremely smooth path through college because he was male?