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Wired News : Building the Digital Systerhood
From Wired News, available online at:
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,34175,00.html
Building the Digital Systerhood
by Lakshmi Chaudhry
3:00 a.m. 15.Feb.2000 PST
Dr. Anita Borg -- president and founding director of the Institute for
Women and Technology, housed in the Xerox Company's Palo Alto Research
Center -- is the founder of Systers, one of the oldest electronic
networks for women in computer science.
Move on up with Women in Tech
Read more Technology news
See also: Women Geeks Honor Their Own
Borg is also fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and a
member of the Board of Directors of the Computing Research
Association. Wired News spoke with her about the trials and
tribulations of being a woman geek.
Wired News: Is it true that the number of women in computer science is
actually declining?
Anita Borg: There is a drop in percentage of women getting bachelor
degrees in computer science and engineering. If you look at any
engineering field, it's quite low. If you take the average over all of
engineering, 11 percent are women engineers. There was a significant
increase in women going into engineering since Title IX [the 1972
federal law mandating equitable treatment of women and men in
federally funded institutions], but it's leveled off in the last
five years.
WN: One of the views of these declining numbers could be that girls
and women are just not interested in math and the sciences. How do you
respond to that?
Borg: I think that's a fairly spurious argument because the whole
question of why we are not interested in [math and the
sciences] is a really significant one. We're clearly doing
something wrong.
WN: So what do we do wrong and how do we get it right?
Borg: There is no silver bullet. First, we have to decide we care.
There is great tearing out of hair over the IT workforce shortage.
Nobody is willing to take seriously the fact that if women have been
pursuing technical careers at the same rate as men since 1984, then
there would be no shortage.
We have great programs out there for girls and women, but they are too
small, they are under-funded. All these people and companies with gobs
of money ought to be putting their money where their mouth is.
WN: What specific barriers discourage women from entering these
fields?
Borg: It's not that they are not interested. It's that the interest is
either driven out of them or never allowed to blossom. There's a great
little book called Does Jane Compute? that every parent and teacher
should read. It shows how very easily girls wind up getting less
experience on computers than boys do.
Boys are wilder and more aggressive. So when there is computer time
available, they will push the girls off. If teachers and parents don't
do something about that, the girls won't fight back.
So by the time you get to high school, you've gone through the last 10
years not getting as much exposure as boys. Even if you haven't lost
interest, you feel like you are behind. Now would you choose that
field, if you really wanted to succeed?
The other piece is the image of people who go into this field. The
image is "geeks, gadgets, and greed." It's people who you don't want
to be like.
WN: There are women in technology who make arguments, for instance,
that the Internet is uniquely suited to women because it favors
interactivity. And in the same breath, they also say that technology
is gender-neutral. Can we have it both ways?
Borg: The statement "technology is gender-neutral" lumps together a
couple of different things. The fact is that it is gender-neutral in
that anybody can do it. But I don't believe it is gender-neutral in
the sense that men and women would necessarily build it in exactly the
same way.
Every thing we build or create reflects who we are and where we came
from. When you're building a product, there are decisions that have
nothing to do with rationality. They have to do with a particular
person's passion that this is the right thing to do.
And women bring different experiences, so they open up more options.
Ideally, you would have men and women coming from different ethnic and
social backgrounds. Then you would get a really rich collection of
ideas.
To the extent that all the people who create this stuff think alike
and hire people who think like them, they are in a kind of box. What
you need is people who look at the problem differently. I don't
believe that we are willing to admit that there is tremendous value in
that diversity.
WN: Many technology companies favor an adversarial working style,
which is based on values of competitiveness. Is this one of the
barriers that women face in these workplaces?
Borg: In many research labs and beyond, the accepted model for
deciding whether someone has a good idea is their ability to do battle
and defend it. The way you play with an idea is to attack, attack,
attack. And if the person is left standing at the end if it, then
their idea must have been good. Now I think that's simply a bad
filter.
Using one's willingness and ability to do intellectual battle to
decide whether you're smart, or whether your idea is good is
completely analogous. It works really well for people who like to
fight and it tells you absolutely nothing about anybody else.
I'm not arguing any biological determinism, but women are socialized
not to engage in battle. Now we all learn how. What it means is that
anybody who didn't rise to learning how to fight, even if she didn't
like it, even if it didn't feel natural may well just [opt
out]. We're losing the brilliance and creativity of people who
like to interact in a different way. We're missing a bunch of men,
too.
WN: What specific problems do women engineers face? And how does a
network like Systers help?
Borg: Part of the problem is just isolation. Until we get a lot more
women in it's harder to know if you're crazy or not. At this point, I
think that a lot of the stuff is very, very subtle. A lot of the
really exaggerated sexism has gone away. What we do is to share
strategies for dealing with some of the more subtle issues.
Lots of people have talked about the tendency to be both too visible
and invisible. You're very visible because you're different. So if you
say something there's a feeling you damn well better be right, because
they will remember it. On the other hand, there are times when you
don't get heard. People click better with people who are like them.
They understand them better. We haven't learned as a culture how to
hear diverse perspectives.
WN: What about the future? Are you optimistic?
Borg: I'm actually quite frightened. The history of women's progress
is not a straight line. And I'm not just talking about the last
century. I'm talking about the last 2,000 years. There are waves of
progress that last hundreds of years. And then there are horrible
dips. So I don't see that there is anything inevitable about continued
progress. It's something that comes from vigilance and hard work.
We are at a point where everything is changing incredibly rapidly.
Technology is a huge driver of that change. We have lots of choices
about how it gets created and how it gets used. Women have to be there
helping make that choice, or we will just get left out.
We can't just feel like "Well, we're on the roller-coaster. Just hang
on!" That's a really foolish attitude. Because the roller-coaster will
go down eventually.
Related Wired Links:
A Woman's Venture in Philanthropy
1.Feb.2000
Springboard for Women's Biz
27.Jan.2000
Opening Doors for Women in Tech
27.Jan.2000
CCC Women Were Odd Men Out
30.Dec.1999
The Making of a Girl Techie
11.Aug.1999
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