Sexism and Other Prejudices in the Technology World
I thought long and hard about whether to respond to Milo Yiannopoulos’s post about women in the technology industry. Mainly because I find his argument repulsive and I don’t want to draw attention to it. On the other hand, I get no traffic anyway, and there is a very clear argument to make in reply.
Here’s a snippet from a transcript of a panel discussion that he seems to have invited himself into:
Milo: Finds this discussion patronising to women. There are reasons which have nothing to do with prejudice why women are not more involved in the tech scene. Do we need to change the game? [...] No! We shouldn’t be apologising for having fewer women in a sector in which men naturally perform better
His argument boils down to “men and women are different, men are better at tech, deal with it”. This is bullshit. Here’s why.
Milo seems to think that technology is a pure meritocracy, and that we can therefore say that because there are fewer women in tech we can draw the conclusion that women are not as good at it as men. But this argument doesn’t fly.
While women are under-represented, there are also comparatively few people from ethnic minorities in programming jobs in the UK. However there are quite a lot of people from ethnic minorities working in more lowly (i.e. less well paid) technology jobs like first line support and so on.
Are we therefore to draw the conclusion that white people are genetically best suited to be programmers? Of course not. Descrimination is there at every level of tech, just as it is with so many other walks of life. Programmers in the UK are overwhelmingly white, male and under forty.
Over the course of my career, I’ve had discussions with colleagues about whether a candidate is “too old”, has “good enough English” (which is code for “white”) and more. I’ve had people ask me “did she have big tits?” after interviewing a woman for a development or project management job. I’ve been told that a candidate is “interesting”, with a coy little wink, which is code for “gay”. I’ve seen pats on the bum, “morning, beautiful” and other clearly sexist acts. These things have come from senior people as often as not. They are normally laughed off as being nothing harmful, just a bit of fun. If women can’t take them then “they don’t fit in”. These prejudices are there and they need to be attacked.
We also need to constantly remind ourselves that technology is, on the whole, quite shit. Large-scale software development is still incredibly hard and huge numbers, perhaps even the majority, of projects fail. We have no laurels to rest on. The technology industry needs to change, and increased diversity can only be a good thing.
Of course this is only my experience – nearly 20 years of it now – but I’ve worked with brilliant female developers as well as crap ones, just as I’ve worked with both brilliant and crap male developers. Brilliant developers are *very* rare, and the difference is not in the chromosomes.
It’s not that long since we debated whether “allowing” women into the Vienna Philharmonic would change the orchestra’s distinctive sound (it didn’t), or whether women were capable of running a marathon (they are). These barriers have been torn down and exposed for the simple sexism they were. The same needs to happen in the tech industry, and the sooner it happens, the better.
