Women in the techie world, far from being a bed of roses

By Athene Donald, Professor, Department of Physics, University of Cambridge

If Steve Jobs had been a woman, let’s say called Stephanie, one has to ask whether she could have gone on to be the leader of Apple. Not because of a lack of brains, or innovation skills or imagination, but because she would have found the environment in which she worked so unpleasant she might have decided she’d rather work in some other field which didn’t make it so hard to progress.

Maybe Stephanie would have gone on to excel in some other sphere, or maybe her innate creativity was sufficiently specific to the world of computing that her amazing skills would have been permanently lost, but as the recent story of Adria Richards —known as "Donglegate"― reminds us, women and the techie world isn’t a match made in heaven ―at least as yet.

«Somehow tech culture is stuck back in the Stone Age and, given the vile abuse that was generated by Donglegate, it seems unlikely it’s going to clean up its act fast»

I’m a female physicist, and I’ve frequently found myself in a minority of one in a meeting room, or a somewhat larger minority at conferences, but the sort of hostility which seems to pervade the world of PyCon —where Donglegate took place― and the like is beyond my experience. I don’t believe academic science is full of misogyny, although it may be full of people (men and women) suffering from a bellyful of unconscious bias.

Pirelli calendars no longer grace my department walls and I haven’t seen a woman asked about her engagement ring and child-bearing intentions for a long time at interview. Somehow tech culture is stuck back in the Stone Age and, given the vile abuse that was generated by Donglegate, it seems unlikely it’s going to clean up its act fast.

So, if Stephanie Jobs had been born, I suspect she might have been inclined not to fight against the tide just because she had so much to offer, but to take her skills to an arena which was better able to appreciate them and treat her decently at the same time.

A biased culture for heroes

By Siri Hustvedt, novelist, essayist and poet.

© Marion Ettlinger.

Steve Jobs is an icon of late capitalism. A parallel, equal feminine icon is impossible. No matter how sleek her products, the hypothetical Stephanie Jobs could not and would not occupy the same place in our culture as her brother. It is not that there are no female entrepreneurs or CEO’s, no brilliant women who can package a product as well as any man, but rather, that Jobs is the projection of an idea that remains hyper-masculine, a rags to riches American myth for our era. Along with beautifully designed computers and phones, Jobs sold himself as tech hero, master of a new revolutionary culture of connectivity that is still coded as male not female.

«Jobs is the projection of an idea that remains hyper-masculine, a rags to riches American
myth for our era»

It is fascinating that Jobs chose Walter Isaacson as his biographer, a man who had previously written best-selling books about Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein. Franklin, Einstein, and Jobs have little in common except their iconic “genius” status, which is, of course, the point. Simone de Beauvoir’s reiterated statement in The Second Sex that woman is Other to man, that women are not accorded universal status, or, in other words, Everywoman is radically different from Everyman, remains true. Men are not trapped inside their sex. Women are. It is this inescapable “femininity” that makes the woman “genius” an anomaly, a riddled, contorted, or suppressed being in history. Consider this: The person credited with creating the first computer program was Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace (1815-1852), daughter of the poet and Anne Isabelle Milbanke. Although there is no question about her contribution, she is not a historical icon.

«It is this inescapable “femininity” that makes the woman “genius” an anomaly, a riddled, contorted, or suppressed being in history»

If we do not examine and articulate the reasons for our hero worship, we will continue to be duped by unconscious biases against women. Apparently, Isaacson’s biography uncovers a ruthless, unpleasant narcissist. As Sue Halpern noted in The New York Review of Books, the biography proves that “it is possible to write a hagiography even while exposing the worst in a person.” Could a grasping, manipulative, ambitious, high-achieving woman gain the same stature as cultural saint? At this juncture in history, it seems to me that the answer is a resounding no.