In the beginning, the whole coding scene consisted of one woman.
In the 1800s, the story goes, an aristocrat named Ada Lovelace was studying maths with inventor Charles Babbage, who had built a machine that could perform calculations – what we’d call a computer. Lovelace came up with a series of commands for the machine:
Now, in celebration of this, the second Tuesday of every October is Ada Lovelace Day. It’s not surprising that this has spiralled to become the most symbolic day for women working in science, maths and engineering, with Lovelace a figurehead for ongoing attempts to close a worrying gender gap in those fields.
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It’s no secret that her field has bloomed and matured to have a stark male-female divide. Interest in the area grew rapidly in the 1980s thanks to the advent of the personal computer, but the proportion of women studying it has been declining since. Today, , compared with . The situation is . You can find a similar chasm in physics and some engineering fields. But is using Lovelace as a figurehead really going to address this divide?
I only ask because I had what you might say is the ultimate figurehead, yet still found myself put off computing. The first programmer I ever met was my own mother. She stayed at home to raise me – and taught herself to code.
In high school, I was interested in signing up for computer science. But when I peeked into a class, I saw only a clique of boys. I didn’t doubt my smarts (thanks mum). I just didn’t feel like I was going to fit in. (I ended up taking a physics course, along with my two best friends – and loved it.)
Wider issue
I’m not alone. Education researchers at Florida International University in Miami looked at methods commonly used to encourage high-school girls to pursue studies in science. Surprisingly, having a woman physics teacher, reading about women in physics, and having a female guest speaker .
Sexism is an elaborate system of societal standards and unspoken rules that pushes women away from computer science. Last year, a Stanford student wrote about her experiences in Fortune, reporting that .
When attending interviews for an internship, she forwent wearing dresses – her personal preference – in favour of the Silicon Valley uniform of boxy T-shirt and jeans. She says she received better feedback when she “looked the part” – and professional feminine wear didn’t seem acceptable.
Sexism isn’t always so subtle: instances of groping and sexual harassment have long pervaded tech conferences. And it’s not just an issue in computer science. A US study published in 2014 in PLoS One .
Addressing the divide
What will truly change matters are policies against this behaviour, combined with a cultural shift in attitudes. Of course, the latter could, in part, be buoyed by telling the stories of women in the field. But it takes more than just recounting a legend.
The study by Florida International University found one intervention that did help encourage high-school girls to pursue science – getting them to discuss the real reasons why there aren’t as many of them in the first place. Maybe it explained away that nagging feeling that they might not fit in, or perhaps it provided a specific instruction manual for how to get over barriers.
We should absolutely tell Lovelace’s story and others like it. But role models alone cannot fix the problem.
