Thanks to Sarah for her intro. “Long term girl geek”, gosh, that makes me feel ancient, and GGD have only been going for 2 years.
I solemnly promise to confine posts here to the girly and geeky only; all random ramblings and naughty nothings shall be consigned to my own blog (unless of course there’s demand for random ramblings here??). I also promise to keep my posts here (relatively) short! Just to prove I really can restrain myself if I have to.
Right, for my first post here I want to expand on the brief London Geek Girl Dinners discussion mailing list exchanges started by Penny Thresher, who pointed out a Silicon.com story “Berners-Lee attacks “stupid” male geek culture” by Tom Espiner. An identical story headed “Sexism in IT” was published on ZDNet, and it was also picked up e.g. by Techdirt and Slashdot.
The story reported comments by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, yes that “inventor of the Web” Tim Berners-Lee, who said that “stupid” male geek culture discriminated against capable women and discouraged them from entering the profession (engineering, computer programming, etc i.e. the science and technology professions). He pointed out that choosing to interview candidates based mainly on the number of papers they had published exacerbated the problem, because that method involved an “apparent” in-built bias against women – I put “apparent” in quotes because there has been some research on this, which I’ll come to below, so I think that in fact it’s “actual”! He also recounted the experience of an academic who had undergone a a sex change and found that the same papers were accepted when submitted under a male name, but rejected by the same recipient when submitted by a woman.
Lily Dey wondered if Sir Tim was talking about Ben Barres, whose story generated a lot of discussion at the time e.g. in the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. Ben wrote “Does Gender Matter?” an article in Nature (subscription-only for the full version, but see the summary) challenging the suggestion by Harvard University ex-president Larry Summers and others that women are not in high positions in science because of innate lack of ability. (I missed the chance to read the full article at the time, if anyone can lend me their copy I’d appreciate it.)
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Sir Tim was referring to Ben A. Barres, but I’d be interested to know if he was talking about someone else altogether. I remember reading another Barres story at the time in The Boston Globe, and thought that comments like “Ben Barres’s work is much better than his sister’s” were – and are – very telling indeed.
Just to add some more context, I’ve since found out that Sir Tim made his “prejudiced geek culture” comments at The Institution of Engineering & Technology’s 2007 John Pinkerton Lecture on 20 September, when he gave a speech on “Invention to Phenomenon” – the history and foundations of the World Wide Web. The lecture and his comments was mentioned in eWeek, which also highlighted a Women in Technology International report earlier this year (summarised here) that “female tech pros expressed mixed feelings about their companies’ climates, with only 52 percent believing that their organizations offered a favorable environment for women. Other women expressed that their input and presence was less in demand than that of their male co-workers, with half (48 percent) feeling that their views were not as acknowledged or welcomed as those of their male counterparts. Forty four percent also expressed that that women in their company received fewer invitations to participate in and lead large projects.”
Going back now to the points Sir Tim made, there was a very interesting article “Why Women Lose Out in the Labs” by Matthew Symonds, published in New Scientist in July 2007, which summarised the results of various studies. You have to be a subscriber to get the full version, but here’s one short extract:
“This under-representation of women in science is probably connected to the disparity between the rate at which men and women publish scientific papers. For many years, studies have shown that men publish more scientific papers than women. The difference is not slight, either. In a comprehensive review across science (American Sociological Review, vol 63, p 847) Yu Xie and Kimberlee Shauman showed that on average men produced 33 per cent more papers over a two-year period than women, and almost twice as many over an entire career. This difference is crucial because kudos – and that all-important funding – are awarded mainly on the basis of productivity. We all know it’s a case of publish or perish, so what causes this “productivity puzzle”?”
I bet this is Sir Tim’s point about men publishing more papers than women, and institutions tending to be influenced by sheer quantity rather than quality.
Other issues mentioned in that article were:
- Early mentoring helps, but women don’t get so much of it – early-career mentoring in academic medicine was found to have positive effects on career satisfaction, progression, AND also subsequent productivity. Typically, female medics reported they’d had less mentoring than men. (So on the Girlygeekdom initiative by Nicole on mentoring in technology, I’d say “Yay, you go girls!”)
- Women publish less, particularly in their early years – female vs male differences in productivity was found to happen very early on in their careers, within two years of first publication, which is rather interesting though it seems difficult to explain, maybe women take more time to gear up?
- But women win on quality – in science, quantity of research is thought to be a good indicator of ability, but a study found that men and women with equal numbers of papers showed clear differences in quality – the women’s papers were cited some 20% more than the men’s, on average. “Aga
in, the possibility that women focus on the quality of their science rather than on quantity is inescapable. In the long term, solving the productivity puzzle will not come just from analysing publication trends. Instead, we must examine why women are slower at publishing at the outset of their careers.”
So it seems that, at least in academia, it may be a good career strategy for women scientists to find a mentor and publish, publish, publish ASAP – never mind the quality, feel the quantity! I wonder if “publish or perish” also translates across to other fields – in other words, might it pay off for women in science or technology generally to churn out lots of product as fast as possible as soon as they can, instead of focusing on the quality of the end result? It’s an idea certainly, and I say that only partly tongue in cheek… What do you think?
In relation to mentoring, as those who went to the London Geek Girl Dinner on 16 September 2007 know (see Maz’s post, or mine), there are plans spearheaded by Nicole to set up a mentoring system for women in technology. An excellent idea, particularly in the light of the research studies, and not before time it seems.
Of course there isn’t just the glass ceiling issue, the concern about whether the culture in science / tech industries is just too much of an in-built barrier and how it could be changed. There’s also the issue of getting more women to go into science, technology, engineering etc in the first place – both in terms of catching the young ‘uns early, and also (from a purely selfish viewpoint!) in terms of encouraging and helping more women to move into those areas as a second or even third career. The latter is a subject I don’t think gets much if any serious attention, but I feel strongly that it should, even though IT seems to be a notoriously ageist industry so that there are double barriers to overcome there.
The webcast of Sir Tim’s speech will be uploaded to IET.tv in the not too distant future, hopefully in the next week or two. Unless someone who was at the lecture (or who can point me to a more comprehensive report) can enlighten me, I guess we shall just have to wait until then to find out whether Sir Tim was referring to Ben Barres or someone else. Meanwhile, I’m off to churn out lots and lots of blog posts!
Thanks for your comment Nan. I agree, there are lots of good guys around, hey two of my best friends are male!
However, I thought the “quantity over quality” point (do lots of visible stuff, early on) was interesting and worth highlighting, even if the institutionalism of sexism in the geek culture is an old and well known issue.
I’m probably still going to post about insidious or not so insidious sexism, indeed I just have, but I’ll try to keep it more fun or at least lighter in the future. And clearly I need to get out more and do stuff like learn golf…
I completely understand why you didn’t put my previous comment in. I didn’t express myself very well at all.
What I was trying to say, is that, in terms of managing the emotions associated with this sort of topic, it is easier to digest in the discussion group, as it is not ever present.
I enjoy reading Imp’s postings, but a topic like this, being an older techie who has seen a lot of insidious sexism, kind of screws me up for a bit…so I prefer to see fun stuff about technology and events here so I keep the clear head I need for coding.
Fortunately the world is also full of a lot of good guys who do value the women they work/talk with, and it is nice to see some of them contributing here too.
Geek culture which is a bit on the borderline for me includes…too much pizza, not enough washing, thinking coders are better if they work all night and sleep under the desk, talking in obscurities that have no practical benefit, playing DnD or warcraft for more than half a day a week. If I switch to project management, I think I may also need to learn golf?
I reckon a lot of guys find these things a pain too. Just like fitting in any culture, some bits are fun and some bits are plain daft.