Tuesday, July 08, 2014

Tech Is Not Pink

Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle had a front page article entitled How not to attract women to coding: Make tech pink.  Apparently, colleges trying to recruit young women to computer  engineering have been sending out flyers done in curly purple script, with flowers on them.  They create pink web sites for women computer engineers.  They refer to "web divas," in flyers printed on purple polka-dot paper.

Does this make you cringe a little?  It should.  They're trying to sell an actual, well paying career, and they present as if they're selling Barbie dolls.  You would think people running colleges would be smarter than this.  Folks, this approach is insulting - which, to the Chron's credit, was the point of the article.

I speak as a woman computer engineer.  I have 19 years experience in a mainframe data center belonging to a major bank; in retirement I support 3 web sites for local non-profits.  Computer science classes weren't available to women when I was in college - well, they were there (using IBM cards), but no one told women what they were about.  Women of my generation didn't get jobs working with computers, with very few exceptions.  (Grace Hopper was the previous generation.)

I started working with personal computers almost immediately after they came on the market.  I kept department books on an Apple IIe, using VisiCalc, in 1979.  I wrote my own menus and installed my own programs on an IBM PC-XT (10MB hard drive!) in 1982.  I took night classes, read books, took on free projects for experience building databases, and finally lucked into an "entry-level training program" at the major bank.  (If that rings a bell with you, you know what the bank was.  The program hasn't survived.)  When I retired I decided to do web management for non-profits; I taught myself that, too.  I don't do web design, I'm a mediocre designer; but I can set it up, I can maintain it, and if it breaks I can probably fix it.

I hate pink and never wear it.  Little flowery things make me wince. I'm interested in how things work, not how they look.  And while today's young women aren't like me in a lot of ways, if they aren't interested in how things work, they probably aren't going into computer science anyway.

Why do we all care that there are few women in tech?  Because women see things differently than men do.  Women ask different questions, and sometimes produce answers the men didn't think of.  If you ever wondered why the tech world works the way it does, the answer may well be, because it doesn't have enough women, asking those different questions.  Go for it, ladies; ignore the curly purple things.  It's a fascinating field, even if the recruiters haven't got a clue how to sell it to you.

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