Back in February I wrote a feature story about research by Sapna Cheryan at the University of Washington suggesting that the geeky stereotype of computer science could be keeping women out of the field.
The basic idea is that people can tell whether they’d fit in a given environment–a club, an office, a stranger’s home–based only on the stuff they find lying around. Severely geeky stuff (the study singles out Star Trek memorabilia, comic books and energy drinks as examples) calls up the image of computer scientists as nerds with no social skills who have better things to do than shower, and makes the majority of girls (and significant numbers of boys) think, “I wouldn’t like it here. I’d better go somewhere else.”
Cheryan tested the theory by putting students in either a geekily-decorated room or a neutrally-decorated room, and asking them how interested they were in computer science. Women reported way less interest when they’d spent time in the geek room. The study has been through several different incarnations, but every time, women steer away from the geeky environment.
It’s a pretty bold claim, and bound to anger some people. My first reaction (and I know I’m not the only one) was something along the lines of, “Wait a sec, I’m pretty feminine, and I’m a gigantic nerd. Are you saying geeky and femme-y are mutually exclusive?” Well, no, Cheryan says–it’s just that the only women who are ending up in traditionally geeky fields already identify with geekiness. Plenty of technically-minded people might enjoy coding but don’t want to join geek culture, and that ought to be allowed.
My feature was published online in August, along with a video and a podcast, but the actual peer-reviewed research paper wasn’t published until this month. That meant I got to write it up again as a news story for Science News, which was fun. But it also meant a flurry of stories from reporters and bloggers who clearly didn’t read the paper.
The most egregious offender is io9, which is like Gawker for science fiction. The first clue that they didn’t do their homework is here:
Add to that the loads of biases that seem to have been jammed into this study (like the idea that liking science fiction is “masculine” and science-fiction toys are automatically a boys-only thing) that it’s hard to take it seriously.
A look through the paper makes it clear that whatever biases crept into the study came from the subjects, not the researchers. Cheryan and her colleagues asked a group of undergrads to generate a list of things they associated with computer science, and then asked a different group of undergrads to rate each object on that list on how computer science-y they found them. Only the objects that got high enough geek ratings made it into the room.
Then Cheryan et al asked the subjects in the actual study–another group of undergrads, at a different university–to rate the objects on how masculine they found them, as well as how much they associated the objects with computer science and with themselves. None of this stuff is researcher bias–it’s genuine cultural bias.
But my bigger complaint is their assertion that “women who are interested in computer science will be, ipso facto, geeks, and that means they’ll be interested in geeky stuff.” That’s exactly the point. The entrance fee to a computer science career is membership in geek culture, and that’s way too restrictive. If any other field had a cultural barrier to entry like that, no one would stand for it.
The writers at io9 don’t seem to care that they’re excluding non-geeks–“Do you really want to attract English majors to computer science?” Comments on my feature when it showed up on Hacker News two weeks ago took a similar tone, worrying that letting in non-geeks would degrade the quality of the code, or mean less code gets written. “Socially mainstream means leaving work at 5pm and going to the pub, that’s what “normal” people do,” says one commenter.
Honestly, I fail to see how this sort of argument differs from asserting that black people are lazy or Latinos are stupid.
And this attitude means that not only are non-geeks missing out on tech careers, the tech industry is missing out on a diversity of ideas and perspectives.
That’s not just a women’s issue. That hurts everyone.
As an super geeky girl, I had the exact same reaction as everyone else, initially. But then I came to realize that people in the industry really *are* against anyone who is a non-geek being in the field. And CS isn’t any more inherently geeky than other fields; I know some real hardcore EE, physics, and even Nordic language geeks.
It’s a real tragedy, because programming is so *useful.* It should be studied by *everyone,* not just by geeks. Maybe the non-geeks won’t be as good at it, but let’s face it, non-geeks are never as good as geeks in any field.
But who cares? A non-geek programmer is better than a plain ol’ non-geek.
Very intresting. I’m not a geek nor a woman and love programming but felt an outsider all my life. Discrimination is discrimination, no matter what the arguments are.
I’ll take that the bias, as you asserted, cultural in nature.
But why is it that the onus is on the geek to bring in the non-geek, not that the non-geek to look past what does not seem to interest them to try.
Geeks have to do that for situations to fit in with non-geeks, yet there’s no quid pro quo here.
@Calyth: Huh, that’s a good question. My first thought is that the non-geeks don’t consciously realize that that’s what they’re doing. There’s research suggesting that the whole “math=male” idea is present in kids as young as 5, and it just gets worse as we get older. Sapna’s research suggests that the geeky image is really pervasive and not really questioned, even if the image isn’t entirely true. It’s hard to look past something if it’s so ubiquitous you don’t even see it.
But even aside from that, isn’t the onus always on the in-group members to become more inclusive if they want to diversify? I know it might be weird to think of geeks as the in-group, since geekiness is so correlated with being “unpopular,” but that’s what they are in this context. A lot of these responses indicate to me that geeks kinda like being exclusive, and they don’t want to welcome in non-geeks. That might be an even bigger issue than the stereotype itself.
I am definitely interested in your statement, and there are many issues where I think it’s relevant. It’s a conversation I tend to get into around conventions.
It’s a good question in many cases, but I don’t think the thought is as relevant to the OP. The onus is not on the geek or the non-geek in this case. Rather, the onus is on computer science as a field. Computer science is not synonymous with geek (1), but the distinction blurs in some departments and work environments. This fuzziness in definition may turn away talented people who would otherwise be interested in CS.
If CS wants the best people, CS needs to be inclusive enough so it can weed out folks based on their ability, not their outside interests.
1. See, oh, the entire CS graduate student population of UC Berkeley as an example. “Star Trek memorabilia, comic books and energy drinks” do not clutter the RAD Lab. ;)
Wait a second.
You write an article asserting that women are biased against geeks, and therefore avoid fields they believe are geeky. People point out that this is a problem with women, not geeks, and women should just be more tolerant of differences.
Then you compare the geeks to racists?
This looks for all the world to me like status marking, and instinctive response to status marking.
Geeky paraphernalia marks a room as low-status. Non-geek identified people perceive such an environment as a place for their equivalent of toilet scrubbers, and want nothing to do with it or with the people there. This isn’t a question of geeks excluding them. They are avoiding association with a repugnant minority.
Is it wrong to display markers that suggest low status? If it keeps out dilettantes and status seekers, maybe not. There are certainly plenty of incompetents coding, and driving them out would be a marvelous thing. It really turns on whether acceptance of low status markers correlates with coding skill, productivity, and design taste.
@Nathan: I’m not convinced that geeky means low-status. Aren’t tech jobs some of the most profitable careers you can have these days? Isn’t the richest man in America also one of the biggest geeks? Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are as much household names as Tiger Woods and Tom Cruise. I know high-paying and high-status aren’t entirely the same thing, but I don’t really get how computer science is low status. Could you explain it more?
This is probably false, since social work is considered much more low status than geeky jobs, yet women are well-represented in social work.
Also, the related hypothesis (on Hacker News and such) that women dislike the geeky room because they avoid low-status men is even more ridiculous, because it assumes that women go into careers in order to attract a mate.
Social work is not considered low status in the right circles (coastal liberal types). Teaching is the “noblest profession”, and social work is a close second, as are any other jobs where one “gives back”.
Second, the hypothesis that women dislike low status men does not presuppose women are going into careers to attract a mate. It merely presupposes that women dislike low status men in general, which I hardly think is a controversial statement.
Yet computer-related jobs are not perceived as low-status, since they are generally middle-class jobs, not working-class jobs. The average man working in the computer industry probably makes significantly more than the average woman working in all industries.
Well, I find this statement controversial and unsupported. Do women dislike low-status women in general as well?
‘“Socially mainstream means leaving work at 5pm and going to the pub, that’s what “normal” people do,” says one commenter.
Honestly, I fail to see how this sort of argument differs from asserting that black people are lazy or Latinos are stupid.’
The example you use poorly supports the point you are trying to make. If excelling in a field really does require that you be passionate enough to keep at it beyond what the work day requires, that is a real difference. The people that do that are, I think, better at it than the people who don’t.
The comparison to “blacks are lazy or Latinos are stupid” is thus spurious because nobody has been able to produce any good evidence that blackness itself affects laziness or that Latino-ness affects intelligence, whereas evidence exists* that people who spend a lot of time tinkering with computers really are better at computing jobs.
*all the evidence I know of is anecdotal. I expect that actual research would back this up. Feel free to cite papers that demonstrate that “lots of time spent tinkering with computers beyond the normal work day -> better computer engineer” is incorrect.
@Marvin: I believe you that spending lots of time tinkering with computers correlates strongly with being good at computing. What I don’t believe is that being geeky automatically correlates with spending lots of time tinkering with computers. Some of the people who most fit this Star Trek etc sort of stereotype have no skill with computers, and don’t care. It’s the people who would enjoy spending lots of time tinkering with computers but don’t care for the environment they’d have to hang out in in order to do it who are slipping through the cracks here. And in that sense it is similar to racial bias: the people in one group have a set of negative, unfounded assumptions about another group’s ability to excel in a given domain.
The fact is, the theory in your article is not dependent on geeks “negative, unfounded assumptions” about women’s ability to excel in computing. Rather, women have negative, unfounded assumptions about the people in computing.
It’s similar to racial bias, but in a different way than you think.
Suppose it were discovered that white southerners dislike the “black room”, which is decorated with Malcolm X and Obama posters. They associate this with negative stereotypical black behaviors, such as trash talkin, eating lots of fried chicken and having babymommas. It is then discovered that white southerners avoid some career (e.g. social work) because they are turned off by the “black room”.
Would you seriously be arguing that social work needs to appear less black to attract white southerners?
That’s a really, really good point. Thanks for that.
I guess the point here is not to blame the geeks and pull their posters off the walls. The idea is to weaken this wider cultural assumption that only one kind of person can succeed and be happy in computer science, even though coding ability doesn’t correlate with knowledge of Star Trek trivia. And the best way to do that (without making geeks feel unwelcome in their own habitats) is still unclear.
[…] How the Geek Stereotype Stunts Computer Science: Lisa Grossman, writer of "Of Geeks and Girls", responds to some Hacker News comments: “The entrance fee to a computer science career is membership in geek culture, and that’s way too restrictive. If any other field had a cultural barrier to entry like that, no one would stand for it.” […]
Let’s assume for a moment that working longer than 9–5 is necessary for a computer science career (incidentally, this is different from a computing career).
Marvin seems to assume though that only people who identify with geek culture would do this, and “socially mainstream” people never would. This assumption also needs some proof. Computing is not the only professional career in the world where a 9–5 commitment is not sufficient, far from it. Medicine and law, to take two examples with a much higher number of women participants, also have this requirement, at least for many years. Neither is nearly as strongly geek-culture-associated.
So it seems unreasonable to make the argument:
1. computing careers need long hours
2. only geeks work long hours
3. therefore computing careers need geeks
without substantial investigation of both premises. (I’m a bit sceptical of premise #1 in any case, I certainly know some geeks who work very long hours, but they’re almost all doing startups, which seems to imply that founding a business requires long hours, not so much that all computing jobs do.)
[…] | Posted by Chill on 18 Dec 2009 at 02:35 am | This is almost completely wrong. […]
Nathan and other commenters are correct. The avoidance is due to avoiding the markers of low-status males, which many women are extremely allergic to –whether rightly or wrongly is an argument for another time, but equating geekiness with being racist is just asinine.
A poor examination.
Your assumption that women’s intellectual pursuits are determined by the desire to get married to a rich man is ridiculous. And sexist.
Social work is considered much more low status than geeky jobs, yet women are well-represented in social work.
Well, why “How the Geek Stereotype Stunts Computer Science”?
Why not “How Women Stunt Themselves With Stereotyping”?
[…] December 18, 2009 Via geekfeminism.org (that weekly link round up is really invaluable), I read about a study that one factor turning off women from computer science is the close identification of geek culture […]
I think the assumption that non-academic tech-industry careers are dominated by “geeks” is incorrect. Granted I’m a Unix sysadmin/DBA, not a programmer, and I do mostly contract work for commercial and government shops, but wherever I go, the majority of my coworkers are decidedly non-geeky, didn’t major in Computer Science, don’t read/watch much SciFi, and don’t go home and work on computers for fun after work.
Honestly, most of the managers I’ve ever worked for wouldn’t understand how or why you would want to exclude non-geeks. If you add recruiters (who are usually extremely non-geeky) into the mix, you’ll find that certifications and job history get you a lot farther than geek-cred, ever will.
I’m also with Calyth in questioning why geeks are blamed and expected to do away with the geek stereotype. “Plenty of technically-minded people might enjoy coding but don’t want to join geek culture, and that ought to be allowed.” Allowed by whom? Geeks are not the gatekeepers, we just live here. If you don’t like geek culture, nothing prevents you from making your own culture.
“The entrance fee to a computer science career is membership in geek culture, and that’s way too restrictive. If any other field had a cultural barrier to entry like that, no one would stand for it.”
Really? You can be a stock broker and not be into sports and material goods? Or an executive and not play golf? Or be in primary school education and dislike children? …Ok, of course you can, and people are, just like there are lots of non-geeks who are into tech. But I do wonder how much such stereotypes play into field choices as a whole, or if it really is specific to (or unusually prevalent in) technology.
Also, is the actual paper available on the public web anywhere? A perhaps-too-quick search shows up articles and posts that refer to it, but not the paper itself. I ask because the implications that I got from this post, the io9 post, and the Science News summary were that all geeky environments had a much more negative effect on women than men. But your story from February also includes a section about the CS grad student lounge at UC Santa Cruz which implies that there could be geeky environments that are not (or are at least less) unwelcoming to women. I feel like that nuance is important, and am curious if the paper covers that aspect at all. If not, then I think it’s begging for a follow-up.
@allen: Do you have access to a university library or something similar? The actual paper is here: http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/97/6/1045/, but it’s behind a pay barrier. If you can’t access it, I bet if you emailed one of the authors and said you were interested they’d email you a PDF.
The paper doesn’t really cover the point you’re asking about, though (actually, Dr. Cheryan hadn’t considered it until I asked her about it for the story). I would love to see some follow-up there too. They’re starting to do the geek room studies with CS students as subjects, instead of deliberately focusing on non-CS students, and I’m really interested to see how that turns out. I’d also like to see them do a study where actual self-identified geeks decorate the room–I think the fact that the rooms were decorated by non-geeks could be a weakness.
Before I comment on this, Lisa, did you ever see http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science ? I really like these speculations on why women tend to not go into grad school and the sciences in general.
I’m entertained that so many commenters are quick to place blame somewhere, rather than engage in the subject matter. The subject isn’t *blame*.
CS often provides a welcoming environment for a one group of people (geeks). It sometimes is shown to isolate other people who would otherwise be capable, interested, and talented in CS.
Being a geek has spurious connections to the quality of the resulting code or experiments. Liking Star Trek != the ability to analyze a large distributed system. Being in an environment that makes you feel like you’re required to like Star Trek in order to analyze large distributed systems is going to naturally some folks — folks you might actually like working with, you do good work.
Hence, because the CS environment does not feel welcoming to some people, CS as a whole suffers from the lack of possible diversity in problem solving.
The issue is not “geeks are bad and geek interests should be suppressed”. It’s also not “these people are bad for feeling uncomfortable around geek interests”. (There are many reasons for this possibility, and if you claim it comes down to one… I’m glad you’re not my coworker. I’d hate to work with someone who only sees one solution in his code or experiment and refuses to think beyond that. ;) )
The issue is that the work environment, for better or for worse, strongly excludes some people who could be great in the field. This hurts CS.
Maybe we’re better off brainstorming and addressing the issue — how to bring in talented people who do not always share the same interests — rather than be offended and saying “It’s all X’s fault. I am not involved. Let’s ignore it!” Because, you know, I know so many coding projects that have benefited from that approach. ;)
@Kata: Oh yes, I’ve seen that! A lot of people sent me that when I was applying to grad school in astronomy. Not too encouraging!
You’re right that there’s a whole constellation of reasons why women might be turned away from science that have nothing to do with ability, probably as many reasons as there are women. No one idea covers everybody.
Thanks for your comments, I think they’re spot-on. No one wants to shove geeks or geekiness out the door. The idea is just to make it easier for non-geeks (by which I just mean people who don’t feel like they fit in geek culture, not people who lack passion and drive and childlike giddiness about computers) to come in.
[…] How the Geek Stereotype Stunts Computer Science Back in February I wrote a feature story about research by Sapna Cheryan at the University of Washington suggesting […] […]
I was a geek as a kid, although not the computer programming kind – more the read a ton of books and daydream kind. I excelled intellectually but was pretty stunted socially. I lived on the promise of the day when what I could do – and not who I could befriend – was all that mattered.
I think I would’ve cried if you’d told me that that day would never come. Luckily since then I have learned that other people are great fun to be around, but the truth is social community is an important part of a career, completely separate from how good you are at it and how much you enjoy the work. I want to spend my days around people who can make me laugh and argue with me about politics and show me cute kitten pictures. How many women avoid things like, I don’t know, investment banking because they perceive iBankers to be mean and cutthroat and full of themselves? (okay, maybe my anti iBanker-bias is showing)
Whether women reject the social culture of computer science because it isn’t “cool” or because it can be pretty deeply misogynist – both of which I think influence them – I agree with you that we shouldn’t dismiss the role that social stereotypes and social community have on people’s career decisions.
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Hi, found this via a post on geekfeminism.org :)
“Plenty of technically-minded people might enjoy coding but don’t want to join geek culture, and that ought to be allowed.”
– I think it’s the people who don’t want to join geek culture are the ones who need to allow themselves not to have to do that. I mean, geeks (the out crowd) have to work and change to be accepted in non-geeky areas, why should we have to then do the same if we’re the in-crowd in a supposedly safe space for us (even if it’s one society made)?
The CS course I did wasn’t overly geeky in its population, we had stereotypical “jock”-types, stereotypical “nerd”-types, geeks and folks who didn’t fit any type in particular, and we all got on fine. Even though I’m a geek, I never felt it was what you had to be to be accepted in CS, more that it was actually socially acceptable to be a geek there (as well as anything else). Out in the real world I’m finding it’s not (no matter how many “I <3 Geeks" t-shirts you see), and it's a bit of a shock.
I can kind of understand where folks talking about "low status" are coming from, though I don't think it has anything to do specifically with geeky men vs non geeky women, and certainly has nothing to do with looking for a partner. My being female doesn't seem to make my geekyness or techyness any more socially acceptable to non-techincal people (not people who might be technical but don't identify as a geek in anyway, they're actually fine with it).
[…] male geeks, a popular explanation for both these phenomena is that women avoid “low status” males, because […]
[…] male geeks, a popular explanation for both these phenomena is that women avoid “low status” males, because […]
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