The New Boys’ Club

Melinda at Sour Duck has a post up named “Speakers Wanted, Women Need Not Apply: Is this the brave new world technology brings us?” about the lack of female representation in technology conference speakerships (there was a fabulous post I read on Blogline giving the details of an upcoming conference but I can’t find it — anyone got the link?) and the networking tools that seem to keep women locked out. I advise you to all go read it before you continue here.

This topic is at the front of my mind since a discussion I had with my 16-year-old son in the car coming home from the first day of school. He mentioned that of the 30 students in his Cisco certification class, only 1 is female. He was surprised to see even one, and commented that IPods and peer-to-peer networks must be starting to bridge the “interest gap” (his words) and bring more girls into IT fields. He acknowledged that in the past there have been barriers to women in technology fields, but he believes that’s much less of a factor than that girls just aren’t interested in the nuts and bolts of server administration. He pointed out that there are a fair number of women in the “intellectual” areas of technology such as programming and engineering but that doesn’t translate into much of a presence in the day to day IT world. His theory is that girls (he uses that word because he’s talking about his high school peer group) are on an equal footing now but just haven’t chosen to pursue it. Having a girl in his class at all proves that to him.

The Cisco class is “by permission” only. Students must approach the teacher, a man, personally and prove their accomplishments to be admitted. How many girls, having encountered resistance before, will go through this process? Apparently, only one.

For my son, getting into the class wasn’t a problem. He’s confident of his skills and has the experience to back up that self-assurance.. He’s been working as a server admin since he was 14. He got his start through online gaming and did his first jobs setting up private servers for game play, then branched out into other networking situations. He currently runs several large sites, doing custom setups and installs. He’s self-taught and assumes that that skill set is available to anyone who goes after it. If girls haven’t, it’s because they’ve chosen not to.

Perhaps there is some interest gap there — I don’t know. But I suspect there is more at work. My son says the pressure out of the field is social but not official. To me, the result is the same. My oldest daughter is a gamer, but feeling unwelcome in these situations, shifted to more cooperative and problem solving games like World of Warcraft. She’s now doing her masters on gender interactions in on-line communities, which to me indicates she sees a problem in the tech world as it now exists. I suspect women are crowded out more than they self-select their exclusion.

The type of high-end gaming my son does is, if not actively hostile to women, not exactly conductive to their participation. They are in many ways a closed community of teen-aged and young adult men interested in first person shoot ‘em ups and other shared destruction scenarios. The groups he belongs to have no female players. From those gaming ranks come the system administrators, such as he, who enable the games to spread to new mods and new servers. But if women aren’t there in the first place, how can they advance?

My son grew up with women who gave him the expectation that we are competent in whatever area we choose. I’ve been doing computers since 1980. What I do is tech-related, though not nearly at the level of my son. I don’t implement networks or servers, but along with design work, I manage a server via CPanel, a much lower level of skill than admin’ing, I freely admit, but still not bad for a 46-year-old self-taught geek without a degree. My oldest daughter took a CS minor along with her Sociology major and combines the two in her graduate studies. My younger daughter is a scientist shooting for a career in public health. My son expects that any women can choose a tech career or anything else and pursue it without obstacle. If women aren’t there, it must be because they aren’t interested. He’s a good kid and mostly quite enlightened but it’s hard to see past your own experience sometimes. The world at large isn’t like it is at home.

For historical perspective I’ve been online since the days of text-based computer networks, such as GEnie, back in the days when the “net” had an admission test of being able to write a dialer script, or at least find one and implement it. In the early days of IRC, I always chose a gender-ambigious nickname to cut down on the sexual come-ons and outright harassment. The more popular the venue became, the worse the harassment got. Women were a tiny percentage of the online community at that time and many of the women I met were actually men mascarading as women for sexual attention. To escape the problems in the larger sphere, I created a women-only writers’ chat on a little-used network, though thoughtful and enlightened men did join us down the road. Because there was no emotional safe zone, I had to build my own. The fact that I did doesn’t invalidate the male-dominated atmosphere. It proves it.

In my experience the online tech-IT community is just as hostile now as IRC was 10 years ago. Digg (I refuse to link) is known as a news mecca of gaming/tech buzz but these days I only read it via RSS. If I choose to follow a link to a story, I won’t glance at the comments. The blatant sexism and at times outright misogyny leave me feeling dirty and sick. Even with my decade plus of online experience, I feel assaulted reading it. How must younger, less jaded, women feel? The average participant I would guess to be a male in his early to mid 20s, though I’d put the emotional age around 14. (Correction: my son says the actual age is closer to 14. I don’t know.) This is the younger generation, the one who supposedly grew up in an equal world with respect for women. Yet there might as well be a “No Girlz Allowed” on the banner. I’ve read the situation isn’t much better at SlashDot.

If there is an interest gap in IT coming out of societal pressure, I believe it’s coming from this new generation of men. The New Boys’ Club has evolved to take the place of the Old Boys’ Network with the same effect, if not intention, of keeping women out. If the workplace situation has improved, the road to that workplace is littered with landmines. To my mind, it’s a miracle that any make it across at all.

What’s your experience, male and female? How open is IT to women? Is the 1 out of 30 in this class an anomoly? I’d love to hear your perspectives.

(Note: I’ve taken several cracks at editing this for cohesion and can’t seem to get there. My mind is racing today and this is the best I can do. Sorry for that. But rather than take it down, I’m going to let it stand because I think the issue is important.)

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