Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Girls Who Coded: Gender in Twentieth Century U.K. and U.S. Computing

2018; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 44; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/0162243918770287

1552-8251

Kate Miltner,

Art, Technology, and Culture

In May 2017, the Wall Street Journal caused a commotion when it reported that women software engineers at Facebook were 35% more likely to have their code rejected by the company's internal peer review system (Seetharaman 2017).The results of the original study, conducted by a former Facebook employee during her tenure at the company, suggested that the rejection rate implied more intense scrutiny when it came to the code of women engineers.However, a followup study carried out by Facebook's head of infrastructure concluded that while women were receiving higher rates of code rejection and notes, the issue was connected to rank, not gender.While Facebook acknowledged that "the current representation of senior female engineers both at Facebook and across the industry is nowhere near where it needs to be" (Statt 2017), it denied that gender was a causal factor in the uneven rates of code rejection.Instead, Facebook chastised its employees for leaking the information, arguing that such stories damage Facebook's "recruiting brand" and makes it harder to hire women (Wong 2017).The issue of gender discrimination in the technology industry is a hot topic these days, with journalists, policymakers, tech executives, scholars, and others decrying the exclusion of women and girls from an industry that has been positioned as "a bright spot in an otherwise dull economy" (Wagstaff 2012) and "a ticket to economic salvation for the masses" (Farag 2016).The assumption underlying most attempts to fix tech's "women problem" (Bloom 2017) is that there is a 'pipeline' issue.This assumes-for a variety of reasons ranging from discouragement to unappealing stereotypes-that girls and women are uninterested in tech careers or lack the skills to get in the door.Most of the solutions to address this purported problem focus on teaching girls and women to code, with the expectation that these programming skills will be the key to self-determination in the contemporary digital economy.However, as Marie Hicks (2017) argues in Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Its Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge In Computing, "initiatives to get girls, women, and people of color to train for STEM jobs cannot undo the underlying structures of power that have been designed into technological systems over the course of decades" (p.325).The close relationship between masculinity and computing has been explored in a variety of contexts, (e.g., Kendall 2000, Eglash 2002), but in drawing attention to the gendered power dynamics associated with technological practice and systems, Hicks gestures toward a literature that examines the imbrication of gender and technology more broadly.As Lerman, Oldenziel, and Mohun point out, "gender analysis illuminates our understandings of technology, and attention to technology illuminates our understandings of gender" (2003, p. 5), and the co-constitutive relationship between gender and technology can be seen on multiple levels ranging from individual identity to