World Women's Day
Close your eyes and imagine a computer programmer. For most of you, the picture in your mind’s eye is of a man; for a nurse, it would be of a woman. You don’t have to work hard for these images, they pop up naturally: a response to our experience of the world. Indeed, the facts seem to fit the stereotypes, just 17% of computer programmers are women, and just 11% of nurses are men.* This is the way the world is: no-one is forcing boys to aspire to be programmers or girls to be nurses. There are laws that stop companies turning down applicants on the basis of gender.
But what if, no-one knew what a computer programmer was; they closed their mind to imagine one, and what came back was blank. This was what it was like for Mary Allen Wilkes, a teenager in 1950s America. She had wanted to enter the law, a male dominated profession. The adults around just couldn’t see it - a legal secretary perhaps, a law librarian … a conveyancer? But the person making arguments in front of a judge - she simply wasn’t the type, so she didn’t bother.
One teacher recognised in Mary the kind of mind that would be good for programming. Programmers had to be precise - fussy about detail, if you were to put it unkindly: something, people at the time thought, women were naturally more like. Mary took up her teacher’s suggestion and joined this little known profession; indeed, up to the 1960s around 90% of her peers would also have been women. A field in which a woman, Ava Lovelace, had written the first programme and Grace Hopper was key in developing one of the first modern, machine-independent computer languages.
Mary Allen Wilkes was part of the team that developed the LINC, the world’s first interactive personal computer. In the early 1970s, as social attitudes to what a lawyer could look like changed, she retrained for her first passion. By this time, people were beginning to ‘see’ that a woman may take charge of a case in court, but the logic of programming was, with the rise of Silicon Valley, increasingly seen as male.
Today, ISA marked World Women’s Day. Across the world there remain many structural injustices and violence against women is a blight on nearly all societies. Worldwide, women are more likely to be poor, and less likely to be educated. They are half of people, but own less than 20% of the land**.
Behind all these injustices is something more fundamental - a failure of imagination. When Mary Wilkes’ mentors couldn’t see her as a lawyer, she didn’t try to become one. When we look at a child, do we instantly think we know who they are and what they may become? We may feel the statistics confirm our prejudices, that stating such assumptions is the voice of reason. But they are less the voice of reason, than self-fulfilling prophecies.
And things can change. Just as most programmers were once women, nearly all secretaries in the nineteenth century were men. It is not biology that makes these things so, but expectation. The real tragedy of this is not that young women miss out because programming is better than nursing, but that both boys and girls restrict their choices and potential.
Things are changing. In Heather Barker’s recent careers interviews with our Grade 10s - as many girls as boys wanted to be scientists, engineers and programmers. This doesn’t prove we no longer need to acknowledge World Women’s Day - but that raising awareness and challenging stereotypes works. It shows how important it is.
*According to ‘Wired’ and the ‘British Journal of Nursing’ respectively.
** According to the World Economic Forum
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