Gendered narratives: reading between the lines

Recently I have been tasked to take a lead on enhancing the participation, recognition and support of women in STEM: particularly electronics and computer science. I may not be making much impact on the approaches and attitudes if my colleagues, but my own radar has been notched up to fine tuned!

My observations:

• I hear stories of everyday realities in education, learning, teaching and subject disciplines frequently presented as heroic narratives with male heroes.
  
• I attend seminars when slides are illustrated by images of male authors, occasional female authors referred to by initials with no images - thus becoming invisible.
  
• In presentations, references to female students encountering difficulties.
  
• Female academic 'actors' referred to in passing, male 'actors' portrayed as the ground breakers and pathfinders.
  
• Faculty discussions to ameliorate the position of female academics and postgrads are characterised by a model of deficits, the women are broken, help them mend themselves.
  
• Discussions focussed on increasing the percentage of female participants focuses on undergraduates and outreach rather than implementing structural changes across the board.
  

The result?

I find myself

• increasingly frustrated recognising the 'broken record' effect of this portrayal and discussion.
  
• wondering about how to make change happen. This stuff is too important to be left to a few (mostly female) evangelists.
• Seeking to identify and champion structural methods af making change happen
• Seeking patronage for change
• Being willing to hand over the kudos for making change happen to anyone else ;-)

 

CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 UK

Women in Technology

Over the summer two female interns who are also undergrads studying in Electronics and Computer Science have been working on reviving ECS.Women as an action and support group for all female undergraduates and post graduates in our area.  

The basic idea is to establish a full programme of activities ready to roll at the beginning of the academic year and to use the internships as a means of creating some momentum to sustain the group's activities and  thus secure its future.

A fundamentatal problem when women are in a minority, is that relying on voluntary activities is inherently risky, because you are seeking a big contribution from a relatively small pool of individuals - a call which can be particularly challenging when those individuals are trying very hard at the same time to work on getting a good phd or a high quality degree.  

I will be pointing at outputs from the internship in future posts, but meantime I wanted to use this post as a pointer to a couple of links

Interesting Blog Post from Tim Chevallier a member of the Haskell community titled "How to exclude women from your technical community: a tutorial". 

The blog includes links to Geek Feminism's WIKI  - resources for Allies and Good sexism comebacks - many of the links in Geek Feminism are understandably US centric, but none the less many others are relevant and helpful to those coming from a European perspective.  

 

International Women's Day - and (pink) princesses and princes

"Pink Stinks" its not just a website, its also statement which describes a phenomenon which has been troubling me for many years; International Women's day seems to provide a suitable prompt to make me voice my concerns so that they can be discussed and considered.

Much as I despise the abuse of the English language, so too do I despise the 'pinkification' - or rather colour categorisation of young women.

I am saddened and distressed to see girls dressed in pink, but more so when there are few colours to choose from apart from pink. I am saddened and distressed to see girls choosing to dress in pink (and not being ironic about it), and I  am saddened and distressed  when I hear young girls being referred to as princesses - this linguistic categorisation is as offensive to my ears as the rather more easily recognised (yet still not sufficiently challenged) 'tradition' of female genital mutilation.

I find myself half remembering Orwell's essays on the English Language, and wondering at the paralleled unconsidered acts of disempowerment committed as part of our daily ritual. I cannot celebrate any (unconscious) act of cultural disempowerment.

I believe that each child who is made a princess (or prince) is being denied those fundamental human rights of passage which step by step help us make the change from child to self-sufficient adult.

I believe the prince or princess who is adored, protected and idolised is also systematically being denied the everyday lessons and interactions which enable us to function as compassionate, caring, and sentient human beings.

The systematic (unconscious) categorisation and declaration of young females as 'princesses' is in effect a systematic act of disempowerment. Boys too are made into princes, and those individuals also are systematically disempowered.

I am troubled. We do not enter this world fully formed, we learn bit by bit to interact, to crawl, to walk, to utter, to converse. We learn - if we are lucky, that we are equal, and that every one of us is entitled to equal respect… or am I misguided???

I don't know by what miracle I came to adulthood owning such audacious thoughts. Perhaps it was a lucky accident brought about because my parents were children of a wartime era, which had no option but recognise the equal value of each individual, irrespective of social class or gender. Perhaps is was because I had a mother raised in the school of hard knocks, for whom the idea of daughter as princess was as unlikely as the prospect of wealth and lifelong happiness.

Perhaps it was this foundation combined with an adolescent reading list which was accidentally  literate, intellectual and left wing.

Perhaps it was an inevitable impact of the disadvantage of my mother's upbringing from a perspective of poverty recast into the perspective of the feminists and socialists of the early nineteen seventies. Whatever it was, there is something in my very being which believes that we *are* all equal. And I am troubled. Because when I see little girls being dressed in pink, and little buys being dressed in blue, I cannot think that for one it is no different than having a star tattooed into their flesh. And when the dressing continues into a colour coding through childhood and adolescence, I am still more troubled.

Simone de Beavoir spoke eloquently of the 'other', but her story of the 'other' was one which engendered respect.

I am troubled, when I see reported a family who have 'lost their princess' or see a little girl scooped up and forgiven the ordinary manners and social norms of every day life with an en-compassing 'my princess' I am troubled. I fear for the future of that small girl, I fear for the future of our society. Perhaps I will be dismissed - with another cliché - a middle aged women, a granny, an ageing hippy, what do I know of the modern world, or the ways things are. It was ever thus.  Move over and make way for the next generation.  But I am troubled….

I look at the few young women who come into computer science and I wonder why. I look at the female participation in higher education and I am impressed. I look at female achievement in schools and I see that they out perform young men. And then I look at the average salary after graduation and I see that women earn less. I look at the number of women in technical roles and they are under-represented. I look for women in executive roles and they are under-represented. And I am troubled….

And I want to do more analysis. Perhaps those clever women who go to uni, who come into computer science, who get jobs in business make choices, perhaps  they opt out, perhaps they understand that there is something valuable in the work life balance… but then would you not expect some young men to come to similar conclusions...

I am troubled.

How we apply sloppy thinking to other people

I am frequently disappointed to learn of ways which people get labelled. As a short, small, woman, who does social science in a computer science department I get to experience what I imaging are the consequences of such labelling.  Of course we can't disown our cultural heritage ( I would be a real 'girls blouse' if I did ;-) There are cultural traditions, sometimes assumptions, sometimes unwritten rules, other time written rules which categorise individuals by their outward appearances rather than the use of actual evidence or clear logical thinking.

Sloppy thinking leads to decisions like the (now overturned) thinking of the International Association of Federations' ruling that Paula Radcliffe's women's world marathon record could not stand because she was 'paced' by a MAN!

Having heard of female students who have been told by their male colleagues that girl's can't program, I thought this illustration from the fabulous xkcd was just the ticket

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/how_it_works.png

 

Ada Lovelace Day, Blogging for women

Commit to blog to inspirational women in technology they said. So this is my pledge for Ada Lovelace Day (#ALD09) Where do I begin? With the observation that it must be partly due to their scarcity factor that women in technology are inspirational?

At the University of Southampton I am in Electronics and Computer Science. We are lucky to have Wendy Hall, our previous head of school, first out of US head of the ACM, previous president of the BCS and professor and dame of the British empire. Wendy is a first class role model, fabulous and inspirational, which is a good job because there are only three female academics in ECS, among the 100 so total number of academics, so she had better be inspirational!

I'm trying to do my bit - I have got some cash from our diversity committee and have set up a self support scheme (called CareerStep) to empower female colleagues to progress up the career ladder. Other female colleagues contribute too. We work through ECSWomen for female undergrads and post grads in ECS, Theano supporting female undergrads and postgrads across the Faculty of Engineering, Science and Mathematics and WISET working with women academics in our Faculty.

And when I think about it, I have to suggest that alongside Professor Dame Wendy, I have to list each one of our ECS Academic female colleagues; reader; senior lecturer; lecturer ( conveniently one representative at each academic level! I also want to recognise every one of our women senior researchers, researchers, postgrads and undergrads. I want to recognise the mature role models who have made their life choices ( and who help embody our understanding of the work life balance) and to the young women who I see coming of age and emerging as strong independent female computer scientists. I want us to recognise all the strong women (who have families as well as work roles, who have a life outside of their working hours and some of whom have made difficult life choices, challenging their family's assumptions, or throwing off their hijab to provide intelligent, independent statements which step outside of stereotypes) I want to acknowledge all those strong women who by their daily interactions in our male dominated environment show that women are just people who do stuff, and like all the members of our very special research group ( the Learning Societies Lab ) are making change happen.

LSL is special because its one place in the whole of ECS where we have a much larger proportion of females than anywhere else in the School (female academic ratio soar to 1:10.5, overall in LSL its 22:66) Its also a new research group which has grown phenomenally, and attracts a wide range of interests, and does research which is interdisciplinary mixing technical rigour with social areas of study/focus.

As a feminist and socialist, I believe that humanity should be treated with equal respect, women who work in contexts against the odds deserve respect for their doggedness surviving and flourishing in a climate which is sometimes hostile, and often uncomfortable. Our academic school is richer for its diversity, and will be stronger and even richer when it embraces diversity with greater enthusiasm.

LSL Women
EA Draffan, Jessie Hey (we share her with IAM), Yvonne Howard, Debra Morris (we share her with the Library), Susan Walters, Su White, Pei Zhang, Lauren Dampier Noura Abbas, Kikelomo M (Maria) Apampa, Ani Liza Asnawi, Norhidayah Azman, Lisha Chen-Wilson, Roziana Ibrahim, Ilaria Liccardi, Athitaya Nitchot, Dade Nurjanah, Asma Ounas, Clare Owens, Yulita Iskander, Reena Pau, Onjira Sitthasak