I reproduce this email, written in response to this CavLec post, with permission from its writer. At her request, I have changed her name where she references it, and elided or omitted parts that could be personally identifying. I have also added a few paragraph breaks for readability. I have not otherwise changed her words.
You don’t know me at all, but a friend pointed me at your “What some folks can do, if they choose” post, and it’s important to me. I’m a youngish woman (about to turn 27) in computers. I’m actually in the third generation of my family to program professionally: my grandmother was one of the first… programmers, back when it was a low status (and thus female) technician-type job. It’s clearly better for me than it was for her, or for my mother. I don’t have to fight to overturn an official policy that women will get less pension than men. It’s not assumed that I’ll go to a business meeting in a strip club.
Instead, there are subtle things. Every interviewer comments on my gender. Some coworkers have opened meetings with “Gentleman… and Mary”. More than once. I’ve had an interviewer ask me if I were married and if I had or planned to have kids. (Illegal, but not something I had sufficient energy/interest to pursue.)
I’m relatively butch-presenting, and I’m fairly sure that that’s helped me, that being [tall], stocky, and low-voiced has made me more acceptable to those around me. I know that not all of my gender presentation is natural — some of it is from early and extensive exposure to Golden Age science fiction, where men fixed machines and piloted rocket ships, and women came out of gumball machines…
Strangers will always have shallow gender-based conversations with me in professional settings. I will always end up in small talk conversations that boil down to “So you’re a woman, then. There are so few women in this field.” from people who aren’t interested in doing anything to fix that themselves.
My husband is more extroverted and more well-known in a subfield I’m interested in, so I’ve gotten one or two comments implying I was at user groups for his sake, not for mine. I get to wonder how many similar comments don’t make it past the internal censors of more diplomatic people.
The Kathy Sierra thing also hit me hard. I was deeply interested in user interfaces and human-computer interaction at the end of college. The career she’s being driven out of is one that I once would have considered a dream job. She’s not being driven out of it because her ideas are bad, or because technology has shifted faster than she can keep up, but because she dared to be a public woman. I find that both abstractly depressing and deeply personally terrifying.
I’ve been trying to speak up about things that bother me. It’s depressing when, by and large, the result is shocked incomprehension. A few of my male friends get it, but an alarming number really don’t think there’s anything wrong with having the entire poker-game conversation be about how having sex with a penis-having person means you’re more worthless than pond scum. These weren’t cloistered men who hadn’t seen female people since they were in diapers — all but one of them were married to women. One of them now has a seven-month-old daughter, and still makes prison anal rape jokes over family dinners, except when I ask him to stop. One of them is my husband.
I’m doing my best to remember that hard work and persistence often do make things better, as generations roll by. Right now there are few technical women, and pretty much all of them (without false modesty) are the cream of the crop. There aren’t female equivalents to the good-enough-but-nothing-special men. I’m still a dancing bear as much as I am a kick-ass debugger, a process-improver, someone who can offhandedly make a temporary backup system that works. In my head, the latter qualities should be far more relevant to my employability than my being a Mary instead of a Timothy, even though all of them are on my resume. If I can’t have a world like that for myself, it’s comforting to think that maybe I can help build one for baby Kathy and baby Lillian, and for all the other kids that I don’t know.
One of the definitions of privilege is that those who have [x]-privilege have the choice of ignoring [x]. I’m white; I can ignore race, or read about it, or become an activist, as it suits me. I can change my decision from day to day. I can stop thinking about race if other stuff becomes more important to me. I will never be allowed to stop thinking about gender.
I’m sorry that this meandered so much. Thank you for writing the essay. Thank you for setting out, clearly and concisely, something that can be done. Thank you for pointing out the amount of effort that it takes to pit yourself against “just a joke”s and “just talk”. Thank you for telling me that it’s not trivial meaningless oversensitivity, and that it’s not all in my head.
Another thing that every techie regardless of gender can do is let women in tech tell their stories in their own words, and then listen to them. There really isn’t any excuse for “shocked incomprehension.” I’ve heard many such stories, because I am perceived as a sympathetic ear. Funny thing is, people think I’m angry on my own behalf, but on the whole I’ve had it pretty easy. The stories I’ve heard, though!
And the stories I’ve read. For more on women like “Mary”’s grandmother and the early history of computing, let me recommend the article “When Computers Were Women” by Jennifer S. Light (Technology and Culture 40:3, pp. 455–483). Project MUSE has it, so if your institution has a subscription, you’re golden.
My thanks and admiration to my correspondent for her sincerity, her eloquence, and her courage.
