A snippet from a letter to a high school programmer teacher by Rikki Endsley:
During the first semester of my daughter’s junior/senior year, she took her first programming class. She knew I’d be thrilled, but she did it anyway.
When my daughter got home from the first day of the semester, I asked her about the class. “Well, I’m the only girl in class,” she said. Fortunately, that didn’t bother her, and she even liked joking around with the guys in class. My daughter said that you noticed and apologized to her because she was the only girl in class. And when the lessons started (Visual Basic? Seriously??), my daughter flew through the assigments. After she finished, she’d help classmates who were behind or struggling in class.
Over the next few weeks, things went downhill. While I was attending SC ’12 in Salt Lake City last November, my daughter emailed to tell me that the boys in her class were harassing her. “They told me to get in the kitchen and make them sandwiches,” she said. I was painfully reminded of the anonymous men boys who left comments on a Linux Pro Magazine blog post I wrote a few years ago, saying the exact same thing.
Apt. 11d 
I wish I could say this wasn’t the case, but it’s still a reality in some places. I would argue this young woman needs to learn a key early lesson for any woman working in a male-dominated field: the put-down. In this case that sounds like, “I’ll make you a sandwich when you can actually get your sh*t to compile.”
What I actually find more insidious than this sort of super overt sexism is the more subtle assumption that a female can’t possibly know the technology. This frequently comes not from my colleagues but – more damagingly – from clients. They will ask someone on my project team who reports to me to verify technical detail! My approach to this has always been to ask to be put on the hardest, most stuck project available. Once people work with me they quickly learn that I know my stuff.
The thing that’s really sad about this is that I’ve found technology can be a great career for me. It’s very easy to measure your productivity and quality metrics are generally accepted and well understood. No need to rely upon face time or subjective measures. Which means people can basically assign out a packet of work that should be do-able by someone at my level, and give me a deadline, and get out of my way. I in turn can rearrange my schedule to handle my personal responsibilities as long as my deadlines are made. It also means that I can absolutely count on being recognized for my contributions – it’s totally clear what I’ve accomplished, that I’m the one who deserves the credit/promotion/raise. I’m less likely to be put in the situation where I need a patron to advocate for my work, or where the guys can toot their own horn but I’m perceived as bitchy or a glory hog if I do the same.
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“In this case that sounds like, “I’ll make you a sandwich when you can actually get your sh*t to compile.” ”
Yes, one of the lessons I’ve consistently told my daughter is to get comfortable being a militant feminist. I have found some women who can diffuse those situations with purposeful flirtation, but it’s not a character trait I or my daughter share (and not a talent we want to develop).
And, it’s important never to make the sandwiches, especially if they say they want you to do it because you’re so much better at it. As reported below, I fear my daughter might take on support roles that leave her out of the loop on those grounds, and that’s been a harder lesson to teach her.
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I wish responding with witty put downs was the answer to the problem of sexism in the workplace. How satisfying would that be?
Recommended reading: “Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office – 101 Unconscious Mistakes Women Make That Sabotage Their Careers” by Dr. Lois P. Frankel.
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In this case I think witty commentary actually might go a long way. Note that the crap this girl is taking is from her peers – a bunch of junior high boys. She is not being exposed to institutional barriers (that we know of). It’s not like her teacher is asking her to make sandwiches. Which, let me tell you, is a huge improvement over the late 80s.
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I don’t know any of the girls in question, but, in my experience, mildly witty putdowns are not a constant part of teenage (or adult) female conversation the way they are for most male conversation (at all ages). So I don’t know that most girls will be comfortable with that advice.
Also, a guy would respond with a sexually-themed insult: “I’ll start acting like a girl when you stop coding like a girl.”
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Think Mean Girls.
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Actually mildly witty putdowns are a part of teenage girl culture (though they can be short on the wit, and are more likely to be an insult couched as a compliment). Unfortunately girls often get advice that leaves them no options (no witty insult? then what?).
But, the advice does need to be tailored to the girl. If this girl can spar verbally, then that might offer her a solution (Rosalind Wisemen is on book tours, and one of her tidbits is to say that verbal banter is valued highly in both girl & boy culture). Other girls might need to develop other tools. But doing nothing isn’t an option.
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oddly this bullshit has become worse rather than better over the last few decades.
Admiral Grace Hopper designed Cobol even longer ago than that. In the 60s IBM reported the time taken on new programs in girl-hours not man-hours..
http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/brograms-and-the-power-of-vaporware/
In the late 80s my my postgrad CS degree program had equal numbers of men/women, the head of department was a woman. When I started work in IT the gender distribution was normal. However in those days CS was about as glamorous as accounting, and only slightly better paid: as the money and power accumulates around CS, so it becomes much more attractive to jerks and the brogrammer-types.
To buttress that argument, see also Harvard Business School,
As bj says, militant feminism seems the best response..
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It is getting worse, which is why I’m glad I teach Computer Science in a girls’ school. I have 20 students right now. I sent my first senior off to a CS program in an engineering school this year. I will send 7 more off this year. We have these conversations all the time. After 2 years of programming, my girls still believe they’re not as good as the boys who hacked around in the basement nor even as good as the ones who haven’t because they’re guys and guys are good at this and girls aren’t. I try to disabuse them of their incorrect theories but it’s hard because whenever they’re around guys, the guys act like they know everything and the girls believe them. I talk about the research that shows that the guys actually don’t know everything; they’re just good at looking like they do.
I took CS in the early 90s. I was the only girl. Once I began working in the field and it was just showing what I knew, I didn’t have any trouble getting taken seriously, but I’ve always worked in the education sector, where sexism is less tolerated. I’m not sure what it would have been like to strike out in the late 90s in the CS field. I suspect it would have been challenging. A lot of people are working on this issue: CSTA, NCWIT, most college programs. I think it has to start earlier than college or work. Girls have to be empowered and boys need to be around more of those empowered girls to understand that girls can code, too.
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I forget if I’ve told this story here before. Indulge me.
A year ago, my then rising 5th grade daughter did a summer robotics class based on LEGO Mindstorms (which she’d had a chance to fiddle with at home in the previous year or so). The highlight of the class, I belatedly discovered, was robot battles. There weren’t many girls in the group and the girls were very supportive of each other, but there was at least one boy who was constantly trash-talking my daughter. He was initially doing very well in the robot battles and was very cocky about it. By the end of the week, though, my daughter’s robot was beating his robot. C, while very competitive, is also magnanimous (not a bad combination), and by the end of the week-long camp, she was asking me to set up a playdate with the boy who had been trash-talking her. I, however, am not nearly as magnanimous as C, so I did not do that.
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My son did a Lego robot thing just last week. He said there was only one girl, out of maybe 10 kids.
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I sent my girls to technology camp at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago this summer, and it was just the same – battling robot camp. The girls HATED it; I had trouble even getting then to go back on day 2. Which was awful because they went to Technology Camp for Girls last year and had a great time. But it does seem that as soon as the genders mix it’s basically boys-first, girls-adjust. (Sounds like regular life, doesn’t it?)
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C loved that camp and was disappointed that it wasn’t offered for her age group this year but 1) there were supportive girls and 2) her robot crushed the boy’s robot and 3) she is mildly autistic, so she cares more about her projects than she cares about what people say about her (she cares, but not as much as the average girl would). All of those things helped keep her spirits up in spite of a very hostile environment. .
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Girl Scouts has been trying to run girls’ robotics groups here. Don’t know how well they are working, but I do think that gaining competence in the early years is an important factor in helping girls cope with the aggressive environments they encounter later. The girls do have to have an interest, though — and in my experience they are less interested. And, then, there’s a tipping effect, where if there are few girls, other girls who would do it with a crowd don’t do it.
Of course, the same effect occurs in drama. I know a number of “dramatic” boys, including my own. They like stories and plays and performing but they also like being with boys, not girls, so when they find themselves in theater class with 2 boys and 10 girls, they quit before they even get started.
I’ve nudged, shall we say it, my capable girl into trying math club this year, partially convincing her on the grounds that she can be a groundbreaker and potentially help other girls who want to do it, but not with just boys. But, we’ll have to see how that goes, because although she’s good at math, it’s not what sparks her mind. I’m encouraging her to try, just in case she’s wrong about that, because math changes, but altering gender stereotypes can only go so far. The boy did drama this summer, too, for some of the same reason. Not sure either will stick, but at least they’ve tried.
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