Well, That’s Us Stuffed Then

~ Cheryl

Apparently it is now official – researchers at the University of Washington claim that women avoid careers in IT because they associate the field with reading science fiction books and watching Star Trek.

I wonder what would have happened if they had decorated the offices with Twilight posters.

13 thoughts on “Well, That’s Us Stuffed Then”

  4. Well, I did become an engineer because of SF and Star trek so does that make them right or wrong?

  5. Anne:

    Yes, I saw your tweet. Depressingly predictable – I could see what was coming very quickly.

    And it is, I think, much more of a real problem than the research I pointed to, which I suspect is as much a product of the researcher’s personal biases as anything else.

  6. I might add that I have seriously considered inventing a male alter-ego for those times when I need to interact with IT support people and open source communities.

  7. Our IT guy didn’t recognize the Cthulu figure I have on top of my CPU… no one gets the LOL cat with the Dune reference…and someone asked what the postcard on my bulletin board was meant to be (nice B/W of The Creature from the Black Lagoon). On the other hand, I left free copies of New Moon out, and no one wanted them.

  8. What they’re measuring here is the effect of cultural conditioning. They’re not saying that women have some inherent inborn aversion to sf; they’re saying that women have spent a lifetime getting messages from popular culture that computer science is for male nerds who eat pizza and watch Star Trek, and that has an effect. The effect is made to manifest by exposing them to things that trigger the stereotypes, like computer games and pizza boxes.

    Yes, some women go into computer science despite the stereotypes. Different people get a different mix of messages from pop culture, and different people will have a different level of susceptibility to any particular message. Note that not every woman in the experiment was put off by the environment. But the effect is real, it does affect how women behave (or how men behave, in a situation that men stereotypically don’t belong in, or how people with different skin color behave in a situation which triggers racial stereotypes, and so forth), and it is something that needs to be addressed if (but only if) you’re concerned about the gender balance in computer science.

    The experimenters’ point is, I think, really this quote at the end: “The media can also play a role by updating the image of computer science. It would be nice for computer scientists in movies and television to be typical people, not only computer geeks.”

    As for the Twilight posters, no, they probably won’t help, if the idea is to create a “girly” atmosphere. If you get women thinking about gender and computer science at the same time, regardless of which gender stereotypes trigger it, the effect should be much the same. (You might make people think about the stereotypes even more, in fact, by putting in something which is so out of step with the stereotype.) The items “non-stereotypical” setting are all neutral in an office environment.

  9. For me it’s complicated. I am not put off by science fiction in the least, but a strange room* with a bunch of SF posters, video game boxes and garbage (coke cans) I wouldn’t find very inviting. It’s partially because my personal experiences with guys who hang out in rooms with that kind of decor have been negative – it’s not that I don’t like science fiction or video games or soda, but that the guys I imagine populating that room I wouldn’t expect to treat me as someone who also likes those things and should be treated as an equal.

    Any touches that made the room less single-dude-bachelor-pad-like would make it more inviting.

    * If it were the room of someone I knew and liked, then it wouldn’t put me off at all.

  10. Peggy and Petrea both have good points here, though I think the article made it very clear that someone (either the journalist or the researcher) thought what the experiment proved was that women don’t like science fiction.

    So yes, the experiment could equally have proved that what the women were reacting to was a vision of the sort of man who lived in that sort of environment. Equally they may just have found the whole thing unprofessional. The reason I suggested Twilight posters was because I figured they might prove equally off-putting. Would you want to take a job in a company that looked like it had an atmosphere just like high school?

  13. I’ve several headlines that frame the study as “women don’t like science fiction”. That Science News article is a much clearer version, and it doesn’t seem that the study concluded that women don’t like SF, rather:

    Previous research has found that a person can get a good sense of what another individual is like just from spending a few minutes perusing that person’s bedroom. Cheryan wondered if the same was true of classrooms.

    “You can get a message about whether you want to join a certain group just by seeing the physical environment that that group is associated with,” Cheryan says. “You walk in, see these objects and think, ‘This is not me.’”

    [snip]

    “It’s a consistent effect,” Cheryan says. “The environment can communicate a sense of belonging, but it also communicates a sense of exclusion, or a sense that this is not a place where I would fit in.”

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