IT Takes a Woman

Designed by blokes, built by computer, shunned by the girls . . .

Have you heard about the newly designed voice recognition-based videoconferencing system that was inadvertently calibrated only for male voices? The camera, designed to focus on the person speaking, could not "hear" the women's voices and so ignored them.

Ridiculous, right? Well at least the perpetrators of that little "cock-up" - using the word advisedly - only caused loss of money, not lives. That cannot be said of the predominantly male engineers who tested the first generation of automotive airbags only on the average 176cm male driver. Who knows for sure how many women and children died as a result of that stunning display of male-centricity, but die they did. Ditto for the artificial heart valves sized exclusively to the male heart. And let's not forget the aspirin a day theory. Tested on 20,000 males and not a single woman, it has since been documented to have led to significant harm to some members of the fairer sex.

Which goes to show that bad things happen when men do all the planning, development and designing in this world - as indeed, they pretty much do. The book Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing by Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher, puts it starkly: modern workplace systems are built around male cultural models, entertainment software fulfils primarily male desires, and there has long been a tacit understanding that working in computer science involves giving up a balanced life.

Small wonder that even after years of effort in addressing the gender gap, many women still see the digital revolution mainly as being about toys for the boys. According to the Consumer Electronics Association, a shockingly poor 1 percent of women today feel technology designers take notice of their needs and interests, even though women influence or control 75 percent of consumable technology purchases. That is hardly surprising, when the Australian Bureau of Statistics reports that just 16 percent of all people and only 5.7 percent of managers working in the hi-tech sector are women.

This state of affairs is not just detrimental to women, as the authors of Unlocking the Clubhouse make clear: in excluding women, the computer culture is denying itself a healthy and vital source of contributions.

Annemieke Craig, a senior lecturer at Deakin University's School of Information Systems, dedicates most of her time to devising intervention strategies to encourage girls to think and work positively with computers. She argues it is vital to bring diversity into the development and design arena for technology since women inevitably bring with them different life experiences as well as different skills. And it matters, she says, with numerous examples from science and engineering demonstrating what happens when development groups are not representative of users.

"Without diversity in boardrooms, technology companies may also create products which they think women want: mirrors on mobile phones or lipstick memory sticks," Craig says. "There is a fine line between making appealing technologies and patronizing an audience with products that do very little."

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Left Behind

Yet as the authors of Unlocking the Clubhouse point out, amidst the tumult of changes created by technology and its influence on our culture and the way we live our personal and professional lives, women and girls have fallen out of the loop. As many girls and women as boys and men are surfing the Web, and females, by some estimates, spend more on online purchases than males do. Yet hardly any girls and women are learning how to invent, create and design computer technology. In the nation's research departments of computer science, just a fraction of graduates are female.

Unlocking the Clubhouse is but one of a growing number of efforts to fathom the daily experiences of women studying computer science, to capture the dynamics and details of the so-called "leaky pipeline" - the exodus of women from computer science - and to develop ways of getting more women switched on to technology careers. Margolis thinks it is time women broke down the doors of the "all-boys clubhouses" that have so far dominated the conversation among computer sciences.

Why should it matter if the inventors, designers and creators of computer technology are mostly male? For one thing women who do not become engaged with technology are missing major educational and economic opportunities. For another, command of IT is an invaluable asset to many non IT-related careers. However, Margolis also fears a lack of female participation is damaging the health of computing as a discipline and its influence on society most of all, given how badly unrepresentative product design groups can go wrong.

"Along with technology's power comes the responsibility to determine what computing is used for and how it is used. These concerns may not be on the minds of young male adolescents who get turned on to computing at a very early age and go on to become the world's tech-gods. But these concerns must be part of a computer scientist's line of work," Margolis says.

She argues the conversations among computer scientists can no longer be isolated to all-boys clubhouses; women's voices and perspectives must be part of this conversation. For this to happen, women must know more than how to use technology; they must know how to design and create it.

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Unnatural Interfaces

There has been plenty of research pointing to the reality of the gender gap when it comes to uptake of IT.

For instance, a recent story out of Toronto confirmed the gender gap in high-tech gadgets, with a report suggesting 75 percent of all BlackBerry device users in 2005 were men. The report from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission also found males were the main users of PDAs, digital music players and Webcam devices.

Darren Meister, associate professor of information technology at University of Western Ontario, told Yahoo News the slower adoption of handheld digital devices by women was understandable given that some of them had such an "unnatural interface". That is in keeping with research that suggests men and women value technology for different reasons. While women have finally caught up to men in most measures of online life for instance, research suggests men use the Internet for the experiences it offers, while women value it for the human connections it promotes.

The Internet was dominated by men in its early days. A November 1994 study found 90 percent of Net users were male but by 2000 and continuing on to today, as many women as men are logging on. But that the sexes have achieved equality in Internet use does not mean they use it for the same things. As early as 1992 a researcher named Susan Herring closely analyzed posting behaviour on several academic lists to conclude men were more likely to adopt an adversarial/challenging/superior stance while women were more likely to issue expressions of support.

In her 2000 paper, "Cyberjanes and Cyberjitters: Myths and Realities of Gender Differences and the Net", Phyllis Holman Weisbard explores Herring's work. "To dig deeper, Herring also surveyed the list members and found different value structures. Men championed individual freedom as the highest good, whereas women, 'harmonious interpersonal interaction'. Men like debate - "constructive denunciation" as one male SWIP [Society for Women in Philosophy] member referred to it, but not open hostility or flaming. In contrast, many women did not distinguish between hostile, angry, adversarial comments and 'rational adversariality'," Weisbard writes.

Then last year a Pew/Internet report concluded men still pursue many Internet activities more intensively than women and are first out of the blocks in trying the latest technologies. Men log on more often, spend more time online and are more likely to be broadband users. Women, having almost caught up in overall use, are now claiming certain Internet spaces as their own. Women, the survey says, are framing their online experience around deepening connections with people.

"Women are more likely than men to use e-mail to write to friends and family about a variety of topics: sharing news and worries, planning events, forwarding jokes and funny stories," it found. "Women are more likely to feel satisfied with the role e-mail plays in their lives, especially when it comes to nurturing their relationships. And women include a wider range of topics and activities in their personal e-mails. Men use e-mail more than women to communicate with various kinds of organizations."

Although men and women are just as likely to use the Internet to buy products and take part in online banking, men are more likely to use the Internet to pay bills, participate in auctions, trade stocks and bonds, and pay for digital content.

Men look for information on a wider variety of topics and issues than women do, and are more likely than women to use the Internet as a destination for recreation. Men are more interested than women in technology and they are also more tech savvy. Women are more likely to see the vast array of online information as a glut and to dig deeper into areas of greatest influence. They also tend to "treat information gathering online as a more textured and interactive process - one that includes gathering and exchanging information through support groups and personal e-mail exchanges".

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Confidence Gap

However, if women have caught up to men in their use of the Internet, their confidence is lagging badly behind. In 2001 and 2002, Northwestern University sociologist Eszter Hargittai put 100 people of different ages, education levels and ethnicities through a test of online computer proficiency and then asked her participants to rate their skill at navigating and harvesting information from the Internet. She found that although the online skills of men and women were roughly equal, women, as a group, rated their proficiency significantly lower than men did.

And these differences have not shrunk as women's use of the Internet has grown. This year Hargittai went back to retest and interview almost half of the subjects who participated in her 2001-02 study, after they had accumulated five more years of Internet use. She found that although men's and women's relative skill remained roughly equal, five more years of experience had not changed men's higher regard for their own skills.

"By underestimating their ability to effectively use the Web, women may be limiting the extent of their online behaviour, the ways in which they use the Internet and, ultimately, the career choices they make," she reports.

Code Dreaming

So is it nature or nurture that fashions feminine indifference - and diffidence - to technology? Are the differences in approach encoded in our DNA or are we simply victims of the way we were raised?

Margolis and Fisher note that as early as kindergarten, girls use computers skilfully for writing stories, but boys race to computers for free time and play. From the moment the computer is first introduced into children's lives, girls see it as a tool, while boys see it as an end in itself. Overall though, girls get less chance for hands-on exploration of the computer than boys and miss out on working alongside their fathers at the computer the way the boys do.

And the early years are just the start. By primary school the researchers found adults were projecting unconscious expectations about boys' expected success in computer science and that those expectations tended to deepen into self-fulfilling prophecies. "We found that very early on computing is claimed as male territory. At each step from early childhood through college, computing is both actively claimed as 'guy stuff' by boys and men (and parents), and passively ceded by girls and women," Margolis writes in a preview of the book.

In fact the intensity of interest in computers is so high in men and boys that the authors invented the term "dreaming in code" as a working metaphor for how male behaviour becomes the icon of this computer-oriented world. They conclude women cede the field not through genetics or circumstances but as the bitter fruit of many external influences.

Yet Dr Louann Brizendine, an American neuropsychiatrist, is convinced there are real biological differences between the sexes. In her new book, The Female Brain, which she has described as a "kind of owner's manual for women", Brizendine outlines her beliefs about the biological reasons that girls gravitate to dolls and boys to trucks, not to mention the hormones that make teenage girls obsessed with shopping and the sending of mobile phone text messages.

"Common sense tells us that boys and girls behave differently. We see it every day at home, on the playground and in classrooms. But what the culture hasn't told us is that the brain dictates these divergent behaviours. The impulses of children are so innate that they kick in even if we adults try to nudge them in another direction," she writes.

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"One of my patients gave her three-and-a-half-year-old daughter many unisex toys, including a bright red fire truck instead of a doll. She walked into her daughter's room one afternoon to find her cuddling the truck in a baby blanket, rocking it back and forth saying, 'Don't worry, little truckie, everything will be all right'.

"This isn't socialization. This little girl didn't cuddle her 'truckie' because her environment moulded her unisex brain. There is no unisex brain. She was born with a female brain, which came complete with its own impulses. Girls arrive already wired as girls, and boys arrive already wired as boys. Their brains are different by the time they're born, and their brains are what drive their impulses, values and their very reality."

Brizendine told CIO the default gender setting in nature is female. A brain becomes male when the tiny testicles develop in the foetus eight weeks after conception and testosterone makes physical changes in the brain. And what are these changes? Testosterone shrinks the communications centre, makes the hearing cortex smaller and makes the part of the brain that processes sex twice as large.

Brizendine's book contains other gems, like:

• Why Women Can Read Emotions in Faces and Voices and Why Men Are Always Surprised By Tears At one hour old, female infants spend much more time studying the faces that appear in front of them than male infants 24 hours old. Because of this, the typical female can read emotions from faces, mirror them and predict behaviour two to three times more accurately than the male. Females read signs of subtle sadness in a female face 90 percent of the time. Males, on the other hand, read subtle sadness in a female face only 40 percent of the time. So when a woman cries, it seems to come out of the blue to a man.

• The Neurological Reason Women Talk More Than Men The hearing and communication cortex is much larger in females and so women do talk more. Men use an average of 7000 communication "words" per day while women use 20,000 communication "words". And, women get a dopamine rush from talking to each other - the same kind of rush a heroin addict gets. Men do not get a response from their pleasure centres from talking to each other, so don't blame your man if he is less social than you are.

In fact women's brains, Brizendine says, have a thicker corpus callosum, the cable of nerves that channels communication between the brain's two hemispheres.

All of this, as the growing number of social researchers, women's special interest groups and others know, matters deeply because cyberspace is affecting the way we live, our environment and our culture.

"The products of computer science influence how we do business, our work-life balance and how we spend our leisure hours," Margolis says. "It matters if boys make things and girls use things that boys make. Our culture reflects the desires and sensibilities of males, to the exclusion and often denigration of females."

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Change Is A-Coming

Marketers and systems developers may sometimes be slow but they are not utterly stupid, and a growing recognition of the gender gap is slowly leading to changes in the way technology is developed and marketed. Survey after survey now tracks gender differences in use of the Internet and IT. Differences in the amount of time women and men spend online is also keenly watched, and as we discuss in part two ("Strangers in a Strange Land", ) there are concerted efforts to lift female participation in the computer sciences and IT profession.

Some segments of the market are either consciously working to develop better targeted content and technology for women, or at least making the right noises. For instance, David Gardner, Electronic Arts COO for worldwide studios, recently urged the video games industry to stop failing women by not producing suitable content. Gardner is concerned by EA's own research that found that only 40 percent of teenage girls played video games compared to 90 percent of teenage boys. Most girls lost interest in games within a year. "We have all been talking about this for a long, long time" he says, and suggests cracking the problem would be worth an extra billion dollars in sales.

In France computer game giant Ubisoft recently backed three teams of girl game players in Britain, France and the US on the competitive circuit, to help it promote computer play. The Entertainment Software Association reached out to women by laying down tougher enforcement of exhibitor rules for the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles last May, threatening to fine vendors whose booths used bikini-clad women to represent female characters in games. And in Germany recent organizers of a game convention in Leipzig worked with a magazine for teenage girls and popular television show The Dome to produce a rock concert featuring female German pop stars and Lordi, the ghoulish heavy metal winner of the Eurovision song contest.

Such efforts seem to be paying off, according to Media Life magazine, which notes that increasing numbers of women over 40 years have now taken up playing games as a quick diversion from their daily lives.

The magazine quotes a new study conducted by Harris Interactive for RealNetworks that finds two-thirds of these women play digital, arcade, card or word games per week, and about 60 percent of them prefer games to talking on the phone, knitting or doing home improvement projects. The reason for the surge in uptake? RealNetworks, the magazine notes, specializes in the types of computer games that these women play: puzzles that they see as both educational and good stress relief.

Nintendo is also targeting the feminine demographic, after having "tremendous success" with their Nintendog series with girls.

And when the GNOME project (GNU Object Model Environment), which aims to build a full, user-friendly desktop for Unix operating systems based entirely on free software, received 181 applications for its latest Google Summer of Code (SoC) program - none from women - it initiated a Women's Summer Outreach Program (WSOP) to bring more women into the GNOME fold. Better still, the program is credited with having jump-started efforts to actively recruit female developers within other open source projects as well.

After the nil response from women, GNOME's Chris Ball and Hanna Wallach decided that was not acceptable and proposed that the GNOME Foundation use some of the Google SoC money to fund a project specifically to get women involved with GNOME. As if to prove that women are delighted to join the clubhouse when the doors are not bolted firmly against them, not only did more than 100 women then apply to join, the program also received more than 200 e-mail messages from women voicing support for the program and from women who "didn't yet have the relevant coding skills, but wanted to contribute to GNOME in some way".

According to NewsForge, Wallach says not only did many female applicants fail to hear of the initial calls to take part in the SoC program, but the call for WSOP proposals managed to reach women in other computing groups, at universities and online. Several of the applicants that replied to the call for WSOP projects noted that they had not heard about the SoC, or they would have applied to that as well.

However, the real barrier, it seems, remains women's confidence. "Many of the women who contacted us expressed concern about their coding skills, yet were extremely well qualified. Google's 'prove you're the best person for the job' attitude may be off-putting to people who aren't entirely confident in their skills", Wallach says.

And so the viscous cycle continues. While initiatives like these can only be applauded, until there are vocal, confident women on every board and development and design team, women as a whole are likely to remain convinced that computing is all about boys' toys, and little enough about meeting their own wants and needs.

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SIDEBAR: 10 Tips for Recruiting Women

by Cheryl Bentsen

Material benefits are important, but so is the psychology of the workplace

• 1. Ask women in your IT organization for their perceptions about the work environment and ways in which it might be improved.

• 2. Find out what women want. If not foosball, how about concierge service to pick up dry cleaning and run errands? Women are looking for ways to simplify their busy lives.

• 3. Provide a work environment that takes into account safety issues, such as well-lit, secure parking facilities.

• 4. Offer incentives/rewards for employee referrals.

• 5. Build a relationship: Follow up applicant interviews with e-mail or phone contact.

• 6. Network with grassroots organizations such as Women in Technology International (www.witi.com) to keep in touch with professional IT women's groups.

• 7. Encourage women applicants to meet women within the organization.

• 8. Read the latest tech study by the Association for American University Women (available online at www.aauw.com) to learn more about women's attitudes toward IT.

• 9. Provide options for flexitime for employees with child- and elder-care needs; offer continuing education opportunities.

• 10. Create a work atmosphere that values diversity and encourages employees to freely contribute ideas. If women are not accepting your job offers, ask them why.