aeschright/ame-rubyconf2018.txt

## ame-rubyconf2018.txt
Slides: https://www.slideshare.net/aeschright/unraveling-the-masculinity-of-technology-2018-edition
Today I’m going to be talking about gender, technology, and meaningful change.
In the program it says we’ll “learn about the gendered history of computing and explore how we can write a new narrative of participation.” — and that’s only sort of true, but I’ll explain.
To start off — hello!
This was supposed to be an update of a talk I gave a couple of years ago at AlterConf.
For the version I did back then, in 2016, I started off with the idea that we could observe that technology and programming are frequently considered to be male or masculine.
It’s apparent in job ads, speaker lineups, company team pages, and so on. This has obvious effects, like allowing men to find it easier to get interviews and jobs, be paid more and promoted more often, and that leads to them being able to invest in new companies and bring more people like them into this industry.
And once we establish that, I can show you how the field of computing was created by women in the 1940s and 50s, still heavily depended on us through the 1960s, but in the 1970s and 80s the computing industry redefined itself in order to become more masculine. Some people benefited from this quite a bit! and others went along for the ride.
We went from this, the original women who programmed the ENIAC — (and yes, they’re programmers, not just assistants or technicians) [ENIAC team, 1946]
— to this, the two Steves who founded Apple, working on early ideas at the Homebrew Computer Club. [Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, 1978]
How this change happened isn’t a ‘somehow’, because we have research we can use to explain how the industry developed between 1946 and 1978. As the computing industry grew, companies created hiring processes and cultures that made certain kinds of masculinity the default. I’ll have some references for this at the end.
Proceedings of the Fourth Annual SIGCPR Conference on Computer Personnel Research, ACM, 1966
This puzzle-loving, risk-taking persona of who makes a good programmer wasn’t the only option to consider, even in the 1960s. Here’s an article from a popular women’s magazine.
If you’ve ever interviewed for a programming job, you probably know which idea stuck around.
Collectively, we’re paying more attention to gender diversity than we were five years ago, or even two. Companies now routinely monitor their own stats.
Facebook: over the last five years, women in technical roles rose from 15% to 22%. https://www.facebook.com/careers/diversity-report
Google: the 2018 global workforce composition by gender is 21.4% female. https://diversity.google/annual-report/
In Portland, where I live, a group of 21 companies had their own tech diversity pledge and agreed to share aggregate data. Their numbers are pretty similar. There’s a little bit of improvement between 2016 and 2018. https://techtown2018.herokuapp.com
I don’t know, I’m just not that enthusiastic about companies expending all this effort on diversity — to basically maintain the status quo. Are you?We could at least aim a little higher. For the modern computing industry, the peak of women’s employment in technical roles, as measured by the US Bureau of Labor, was 36% in 1991. And that’s a generation ago, so many developers may not be aware of it.
Source: https://www.ncwit.org/sites/default/files/resources/ncwit_women-in-it_2016-full-report_final-web06012016.pdf
I’m sick of talking about diversity. I’m sick of trying to convince people they should care. I’m even sick of discussing the central idea that felt novel to me when I wrote the first version of this talk in 2016, which is that there is a financial and professional benefit to limiting who can participate in our industry. Programmers are better paid and receive more respect when programming is hard and the qualifications are strict.
Not talking about it doesn’t make the problem go away, unfortunately. This is a satirical “Diversity in Tech Report” by Sarah Cooper, who also has a book called How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men’s Feelings. https://thecooperreview.com/diversity-in-tech-report/
We’ve done some things that worked. RailsBridge has had a huge impact on the diversity of new Ruby programmers, for example. Companies are much more diverse in their entry level hiring than they were a decade ago. railsbridge.org
You may have seen this news story a couple of weeks ago.
“When Google covers up harassment and passes the trash, it contributes to an environment where people don’t feel safe reporting misconduct,” said Liz Fong-Jones, a Google engineer for more than a decade and an activist on workplace issues. “They suspect that nothing will happen or, worse, that the men will be paid and the women will be pushed aside.” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-sexual-harassment-andy-rubin.html?action=click&module=inline&pgtype=Homepage
So now I want to talk about what we do next.
Almost of these statistics I’ve been citing focus on women and men. The Portland Tech Diversity pledge does have a third category, “non-conforming” — but I don’t think that’s actually a gender and I would feel pretty gross about making someone check that box.
If we’re going to improve gender diversity in tech, we have to do more than count the number of women in a certain job category, or start more women in tech groups. We need to make room for the diversity of who people really are. For example — [slide]
I want to read you this illustration by a fellow Rubyist [Jameson Hampton], about women in tech events.
When I ask if I’m welcome at their events, some groups say things like…
“Well I guess you can come but it’s not really meant for non-women” ):
And other groups say things like…
“Yes, we want to support all non-men – women AND nonbinary people!” (:
(Every time a woman says that first one to me, it makes me want to start a group for nonbinary people so I can say, “Well, it’s not really meant for men or women…” That’s a spiteful reason to do it, but it’s not a bad idea!) https://recompilermag.com/issues/issue-8/programming-while-trans/
To go a little further, even the best-intentioned efforts can make some of us feel like an afterthought. It’s ok if you don’t know all of these terms, but they’re a good place for you to start learning more.
When we only talk about gender, we erase so many other kinds of identities and experiences. It’s like we’re saying, let this group get ahead and you’ll have your turn. How many generations would that take? We need to work on centering things like race, disability, sexuality, socioeconomic background, and immigration status.
The most striking thing about that Google diversity report isn’t the total gender breakdown, but what happens when we look at race. You know who’s really under-represented? Black women, Native women, Latinx folks, and other non-white, non-Asian groups.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/06/15/google-diversity-report-black-women-make-up-only-1-2-percent-of-its-u-s-workforce/?utm_term=.e7bf47245f10
Just in case you think I’m only picking on Google, here’s Apple’s most recent diversity report. White people are still about half of all technical employees. I think we can consider their 23% female tech workers just average.
The inequity between white and black women in tech sticks with me, because there’s a long history of white women telling everyone else to wait their turn. If we go back to the first feminist movement in the US, focused on women’s suffrage or ‘right to vote’, we’ll find several incidents that stand out, including a 1913 parade where some of the organizers wanted the black women’s delegations to march at the very back. After the men.
Companies have started to recruit at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), many of which have strong computer science programs. Maybe we’ll see things change another half a percent on the next report!
The last thing I want to say about these areas of identity and discrimination is that each of us is more than a single trait. As a friend commented, to ignore that “feels like you're building a D&D character and you have to add one ‘quirk’.  [It] reinforces the idea that programmers are supposed to be a certain way, and the single-variation rule is just a way of adding a little bit of ‘flavor text.’”
Next I want to talk about collective action.
On November 1st at 11:10am, in every time zone with a participating office, Google employees walked off the job in protest of the company’s handling of sexual harassment and discrimination. About 20,000 people participated. That’s over a fifth of their entire global workforce.
In my time working in tech, I have never seen anything like this. As a community organizer, even 10% of employees deciding to participate would be amazing and impactful. <3
https://www.thecut.com/2018/11/google-walkout-organizers-explain-demands.htmlThe organizers’ demands.
So far, Google has only agreed to part of the demands.
https://www.thecut.com/2018/11/google-walkout-organizers-unsatisfied-with-company-response.html
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-09/where-google-s-reforms-fall-short?srnd=business-of-equality
It’s a start, but companies are choosing to update a small set of policies rather than uproot the entire system.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/daveyalba/tech-companies-end-forced-arbitration-airbnb-ebay
https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2018/11/9/18078664/google-walkout-history-tech-strikes-labor-organizing
Organizing is a process. It doesn’t have to be global and it doesn’t have to be dramatic. Working together in solidarity is how we create change.We often wait for someone to step up and guide us, but leadership is a skill to develop.
Ask — Who’s going to take action? Who are you following? Who does the work? Because if it’s —
- Bosses (don’t share your interests)
- Marginalized people (centering them does not mean making them do all the work)
Why not you?
Money will buy a lot of things. It pays for lunch when we have meetings, creates strike funds for hourly workers who can’t just walk out, and so much more. Programmers with fancy tech salaries — you can do a lot for people whose income is much more precarious.
Ultimately, things don’t change because we want them to. They change because we’re working together, building alliances, sharing our resources, listening to our most marginalized community members, and taking action. We have power when we work together.
As a tech worker, you have power because you have something companies want. Because software is part of everything we do now, and you can’t create software without software developers — that labor is your lever.
You don’t have to figure this out on your own. There are a number of groups doing labor organizing in tech that would be happy to help you plan out the next step.
And finally — get rid of the interview questions that are just there to make some people feel smarter than others. We’ve been following something that people came up with in the 1960s to thin the candidate pool, and not because they were getting better programmers as a result. Maybe we don’t host many dinner parties these days, but I think you’ll find other great ways to ask people how they solve problems, make a plan, organize information, and communicate.
	Slides: https://www.slideshare.net/aeschright/unraveling-the-masculinity-of-technology-2018-edition
	Today I’m going to be talking about gender, technology, and meaningful change.
	In the program it says we’ll “learn about the gendered history of computing and explore how we can write a new narrative of participation.” — and that’s only sort of true, but I’ll explain.
	To start off — hello!
	This was supposed to be an update of a talk I gave a couple of years ago at AlterConf.
	For the version I did back then, in 2016, I started off with the idea that we could observe that technology and programming are frequently considered to be male or masculine.
	It’s apparent in job ads, speaker lineups, company team pages, and so on. This has obvious effects, like allowing men to find it easier to get interviews and jobs, be paid more and promoted more often, and that leads to them being able to invest in new companies and bring more people like them into this industry.
	And once we establish that, I can show you how the field of computing was created by women in the 1940s and 50s, still heavily depended on us through the 1960s, but in the 1970s and 80s the computing industry redefined itself in order to become more masculine. Some people benefited from this quite a bit! and others went along for the ride.
	We went from this, the original women who programmed the ENIAC — (and yes, they’re programmers, not just assistants or technicians) [ENIAC team, 1946]
	— to this, the two Steves who founded Apple, working on early ideas at the Homebrew Computer Club. [Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, 1978]
	How this change happened isn’t a ‘somehow’, because we have research we can use to explain how the industry developed between 1946 and 1978. As the computing industry grew, companies created hiring processes and cultures that made certain kinds of masculinity the default. I’ll have some references for this at the end.
	Proceedings of the Fourth Annual SIGCPR Conference on Computer Personnel Research, ACM, 1966
	This puzzle-loving, risk-taking persona of who makes a good programmer wasn’t the only option to consider, even in the 1960s. Here’s an article from a popular women’s magazine.
	If you’ve ever interviewed for a programming job, you probably know which idea stuck around.
	Collectively, we’re paying more attention to gender diversity than we were five years ago, or even two. Companies now routinely monitor their own stats.
	Facebook: over the last five years, women in technical roles rose from 15% to 22%. https://www.facebook.com/careers/diversity-report
	Google: the 2018 global workforce composition by gender is 21.4% female. https://diversity.google/annual-report/
	In Portland, where I live, a group of 21 companies had their own tech diversity pledge and agreed to share aggregate data. Their numbers are pretty similar. There’s a little bit of improvement between 2016 and 2018. https://techtown2018.herokuapp.com
	I don’t know, I’m just not that enthusiastic about companies expending all this effort on diversity — to basically maintain the status quo. Are you?We could at least aim a little higher. For the modern computing industry, the peak of women’s employment in technical roles, as measured by the US Bureau of Labor, was 36% in 1991. And that’s a generation ago, so many developers may not be aware of it.
	Source: https://www.ncwit.org/sites/default/files/resources/ncwit_women-in-it_2016-full-report_final-web06012016.pdf
	I’m sick of talking about diversity. I’m sick of trying to convince people they should care. I’m even sick of discussing the central idea that felt novel to me when I wrote the first version of this talk in 2016, which is that there is a financial and professional benefit to limiting who can participate in our industry. Programmers are better paid and receive more respect when programming is hard and the qualifications are strict.
	Not talking about it doesn’t make the problem go away, unfortunately. This is a satirical “Diversity in Tech Report” by Sarah Cooper, who also has a book called How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men’s Feelings. https://thecooperreview.com/diversity-in-tech-report/
	We’ve done some things that worked. RailsBridge has had a huge impact on the diversity of new Ruby programmers, for example. Companies are much more diverse in their entry level hiring than they were a decade ago. railsbridge.org
	You may have seen this news story a couple of weeks ago.
	“When Google covers up harassment and passes the trash, it contributes to an environment where people don’t feel safe reporting misconduct,” said Liz Fong-Jones, a Google engineer for more than a decade and an activist on workplace issues. “They suspect that nothing will happen or, worse, that the men will be paid and the women will be pushed aside.” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-sexual-harassment-andy-rubin.html?action=click&module=inline&pgtype=Homepage
	So now I want to talk about what we do next.
	Almost of these statistics I’ve been citing focus on women and men. The Portland Tech Diversity pledge does have a third category, “non-conforming” — but I don’t think that’s actually a gender and I would feel pretty gross about making someone check that box.
	If we’re going to improve gender diversity in tech, we have to do more than count the number of women in a certain job category, or start more women in tech groups. We need to make room for the diversity of who people really are. For example — [slide]
	I want to read you this illustration by a fellow Rubyist [Jameson Hampton], about women in tech events.
	When I ask if I’m welcome at their events, some groups say things like…
	“Well I guess you can come but it’s not really meant for non-women” ):
	And other groups say things like…
	“Yes, we want to support all non-men – women AND nonbinary people!” (:
	(Every time a woman says that first one to me, it makes me want to start a group for nonbinary people so I can say, “Well, it’s not really meant for men or women…” That’s a spiteful reason to do it, but it’s not a bad idea!) https://recompilermag.com/issues/issue-8/programming-while-trans/
	To go a little further, even the best-intentioned efforts can make some of us feel like an afterthought. It’s ok if you don’t know all of these terms, but they’re a good place for you to start learning more.
	When we only talk about gender, we erase so many other kinds of identities and experiences. It’s like we’re saying, let this group get ahead and you’ll have your turn. How many generations would that take? We need to work on centering things like race, disability, sexuality, socioeconomic background, and immigration status.
	The most striking thing about that Google diversity report isn’t the total gender breakdown, but what happens when we look at race. You know who’s really under-represented? Black women, Native women, Latinx folks, and other non-white, non-Asian groups.
	https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/06/15/google-diversity-report-black-women-make-up-only-1-2-percent-of-its-u-s-workforce/?utm_term=.e7bf47245f10
	Just in case you think I’m only picking on Google, here’s Apple’s most recent diversity report. White people are still about half of all technical employees. I think we can consider their 23% female tech workers just average.
	The inequity between white and black women in tech sticks with me, because there’s a long history of white women telling everyone else to wait their turn. If we go back to the first feminist movement in the US, focused on women’s suffrage or ‘right to vote’, we’ll find several incidents that stand out, including a 1913 parade where some of the organizers wanted the black women’s delegations to march at the very back. After the men.
	Companies have started to recruit at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), many of which have strong computer science programs. Maybe we’ll see things change another half a percent on the next report!
	The last thing I want to say about these areas of identity and discrimination is that each of us is more than a single trait. As a friend commented, to ignore that “feels like you're building a D&D character and you have to add one ‘quirk’. [It] reinforces the idea that programmers are supposed to be a certain way, and the single-variation rule is just a way of adding a little bit of ‘flavor text.’”
	Next I want to talk about collective action.
	On November 1st at 11:10am, in every time zone with a participating office, Google employees walked off the job in protest of the company’s handling of sexual harassment and discrimination. About 20,000 people participated. That’s over a fifth of their entire global workforce.
	In my time working in tech, I have never seen anything like this. As a community organizer, even 10% of employees deciding to participate would be amazing and impactful. <3
	https://www.thecut.com/2018/11/google-walkout-organizers-explain-demands.htmlThe organizers’ demands.
	So far, Google has only agreed to part of the demands.
	https://www.thecut.com/2018/11/google-walkout-organizers-unsatisfied-with-company-response.html
	https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-09/where-google-s-reforms-fall-short?srnd=business-of-equality
	It’s a start, but companies are choosing to update a small set of policies rather than uproot the entire system.
	https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/daveyalba/tech-companies-end-forced-arbitration-airbnb-ebay
	https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2018/11/9/18078664/google-walkout-history-tech-strikes-labor-organizing
	Organizing is a process. It doesn’t have to be global and it doesn’t have to be dramatic. Working together in solidarity is how we create change.We often wait for someone to step up and guide us, but leadership is a skill to develop.
	Ask — Who’s going to take action? Who are you following? Who does the work? Because if it’s —
	- Bosses (don’t share your interests)
	- Marginalized people (centering them does not mean making them do all the work)
	Why not you?
	Money will buy a lot of things. It pays for lunch when we have meetings, creates strike funds for hourly workers who can’t just walk out, and so much more. Programmers with fancy tech salaries — you can do a lot for people whose income is much more precarious.
	Ultimately, things don’t change because we want them to. They change because we’re working together, building alliances, sharing our resources, listening to our most marginalized community members, and taking action. We have power when we work together.
	As a tech worker, you have power because you have something companies want. Because software is part of everything we do now, and you can’t create software without software developers — that labor is your lever.
	You don’t have to figure this out on your own. There are a number of groups doing labor organizing in tech that would be happy to help you plan out the next step.
	And finally — get rid of the interview questions that are just there to make some people feel smarter than others. We’ve been following something that people came up with in the 1960s to thin the candidate pool, and not because they were getting better programmers as a result. Maybe we don’t host many dinner parties these days, but I think you’ll find other great ways to ask people how they solve problems, make a plan, organize information, and communicate.