GIRLS KEEP OUT: The Perception of Women in the Techno World and Gaining Access into the "Boys Club"

Click here for a study done on perceptions of women and computer sciences by John Ballard, Karen Scales and Mary Ann Edwards. Perceptions of information technology careers among women in career development transition.

I’m sure that all of us are familiar with the classic “KEEP OUT” club sign. In our younger years clubs were our miniature clicks where we could all converse in a tree house or under the playground slide about whatever we decided was important to us at the time. Unfortunately, as is the problem with most clicks and clubs—whether it’s at the elementary level or beyond—someone is always left out of the fun. Although the “friendship clubs” of yesterday seem to be a far off memory, the basic idea of them remains and continues to bring back those old feelings of being an outsider.

Women are quite use to the GIRLS KEEP OUT concept. Over the years women have been told to keep out of things such as speaking in the presence of men, publishing, voting, learning, working, and the list continues on. Though women have been granted access to some of these “clubhouses,” there is always one that manages to keep the GIRLS KEEP OUT sign framed and hanging. Like many new technologies, when the computer burst onto the scene they were new and exciting. From the Colossus to the Macintosh computers have continued to fascinate us and be useful to us. However, like the telephone when it was first invented, the computer and the profession that it has created, computer sciences are viewed as “boy toys.”



Cake Mania

In Professor Sharon Meraz’s lecture, Gendering the Internet, Professor Meraz discusses the struggles that women are facing when it comes to the world of technology. Professor Meraz began her lecture discussing the incredible shrinking pipeline. The incredible shrinking pipeline is a term that refers to the decreasing percentages of women in the computer sciences field. The fact is, women are slowly leaving the computer sciences; they aren’t signing up for classes or looking at this field as being a potential work opportunity. So we have to wonder…why? Where are the women? Are women keeping out of this club because they just aren't interested, or are they being forced out by the perception that they don’t belong in the first place?



Professor Meraz discusses many subjects and areas in which women are scarcely represented. I was most interested in the subject of women in gaming as well as women that I like to call “the techno women” like Sheryl Sandberg, Mena Trott, and Meg Hourihan.

Ivy from the combat video game Soul Calibur

Professor Meraz mentioned the game Diner Dash in her lecture. In this game, the main character, which is a female runs around a diner playing the hostess, the waitress, and the cook. She runs around multitasking in order to earn money. This is a game that I have played as well as games such as Supermarket Mania, Cake Mania, and Sally’s Spa. In each of these games the women characters multitask by stocking groceries, baking cakes, or giving customers massages. On the other side of gaming, men get to slay the bad guys, save the country, and drive cool cars. If by chance there is a female in a game other than the domesticated ones that I have mentioned above, they are scantily dressed with outrageous curves and are either dumb, in need of saving, or getting beaten and raped (i.e. Grand Theft Auto). In games like Soul Calibur women have whips for weapons and kill their opponents by wrapping their barely covered thighs around their necks and strangling them. The game world truly is a fantasy world where the unseen can be seen and the desires of those who create the games can be put into a virtual world. In my opinion the way the women are depicted in games is a reflection of how they are perceived outside of the game. In games women are as they have been since the beginning of time. Women may have broken into the business and have access to education and many of the same rights that men have outside of games but in the gamin world women are either cooking, cleaning, watching over children, or being sex symbols. For once it would be nice for a female character to be the hero. 

Sheryl Sandberg is a CEO for Facebook. It would seem that Sandberg is a girl who has gotten into the boy's techno club on some level. However, Sandberg was bashed about publicizing the fact that she went home to be with her children at 5:30 after work. She had been doing this for seven years but recently came out with this "secret."  However, I agree with Professor Meraz when she stated that it would have been much more useful to other women in the computer science field if she had came out with this information before becoming a CEO for Facebook to say that you can be a woman with a family and still be a part of this field. But then again, that would be sending the wrong message because had she done this, she probably wouldn't have gotten the chance to be a CEO at all. The reality is, Sandberg probably had to work harder than any man would have to in order to be a CEO to prove herself because she's a woman. Perception comes into play. People believe that in the computer science field you should work 24/7. Humans are not the technology that they work with, we can't go 24/7 and have no time to ourselves!

In class we have talked about the perception tool of framing. Framing was used in two stories of women who were looking to created blogs and men ended up taking the credit for it. Mena Trott and Meg Hourihan, both very capable computer science savvy women, teamed up with their significant others to create blogs and the men were seen as the computer knights in shining armor who developed the perfect programs that they needed. I have included a piece of Professor Meraz’s presentation here:

In 2001, Mena Trott couldn’t find any software she liked to use for her online journal. She complained to her husband, Ben that the available tools didn’t offer enough control over comments or archiving, for instance. So Ben, a software developer, build a program that gave Mena everything she was looking for. The result is now one of the most popular Weblogging tools around.

In this instance, it seems like the woman knew absolutely nothing about computers and needed her husband to help her. What the story leaves out is the woman’s contribution that is downplayed because providing the architectural insight for the blog is not considered as important as the hard scale coding for the blog.

Women have created women only blogging sites in order to be taken seriously and voicing their opinions (i.e. BlogHER). So now women are starting our own clubs…but is this okay? Should women have to create their own places to be part of technology because the men won’t validate their opinions? I don't think that women should have to form a separate area for them to converse and share their opinions. Although it has been a way for women to voice their opinions without being scrutinized or feeling like they have to compromised themselves by being "sexy bloggers," it feels like a bit of a white flag has been thrown up. Have we come back to being separate but equal in this regard as well? 

To come back to my earlier question: why is this happening? Why aren’t women being granted access into the club? Professor Meraz offers reasons from both men (i.e. women are less tech savvy, women have more family commitments to tend to) and women (i.e. women are not taken seriously). Some think that women are turned off by the “geek” title that comes along with venturing into computer sciences. It’s all about perception. It has been established that women don’t belong in this field for whatever reasons and it is exclusions like this that give me a flashback to the 50s! It starts with the selection, the stimuli that we are faced with daily, which allows us to make the important subconscious decisions. When we look at a Geek Squad commercial, we see men fixing the computers. If you walk into a computer class we see a male instructor, if you do run into a women in the computer science field she is a web designer or doesn’t have much to do with what goes into a program at all. The organization of these stimuli, we have ended up separating women and all things technical. We have an idea of women should and should not be involved in. Finally the interpretation, attaching meaning to all of these things…and now we come to it, GIRLS KEEP OUT of technology! Once again, women belong at home with the children cooking and cleaning and writing blogs about sex, the latest scandal, or how to make the perfect rosemary chicken dish for Sunday dinner.

It is my opinion that women are being kept out of the computer sciences (out of technology period) because of the sexism that exists in this area. I remember taking a computer class in high school and feeling as though I didn’t exist. The instructor didn’t take any of my questions seriously. In fact, I don’t know whether he even thoroughly paid attention to the work that I was doing in the class. I have to admit that I am not as interested in computers as I was back then because I was discouraged to continue on with my interest in this class. Who wants to be a part of something when they are made to feel that they don’t belong?

Sources:
Pictures--http://google.com/search
Attatched Document--www.osra.org/itlpj/ballardscalesedwardsfall2006.pdf