She's Such a Geek | Annalee Newitz & Charlie Anders | Talks at Google

Hi, everybody. Oh, it is on. Okay, great. Welcome and thank you for coming. We're very privileged today to have not only contribute four contributors, but also the two editors of the anthology. She's Such a Geek. Women write about technology, science, and other nerdy stuff. So let me first introduce Annalee Newitz and Charlie Anders, the two editors. And I think you guys are mic'd.

Well, we should have the mic as well, just in case. I don't know, maybe.

Yeah. Hi, I'm Annalee Newitz, and as she said, I'm a co editor of She's Such a Geek. And this is Charlie Andrews, who's also a co editor. And we're just going to talk to you really briefly about some of the reasons why we wanted to do this book. And then each of us is going to read a little bit from the essay that we have in the book. There's about 25 essays in the book. Wait, is it 24?

24? I think, yeah.

There's about 24 essays in the book that come from women who are in every kind of geeky field. We did have to eliminate some fields that people thought of as geeky. Like, we actually didn't let any librarians into the book. We do have software developers, video game designers, science fiction writers, people who are interested in comic books and write comic books. So it's a. We're looking at geeks who are not just scientists and technologists, but also people who are interested in what we think of as geeky culture, like science fiction and comic books. The reason why we wanted to write this book or why we wanted to do this anthology was that for several years, Charlie and I had been feeling like there just wasn't anything out there that dealt with the really wide and varied experiences of women that we knew who considered themselves geeks or women who had jobs that made them de facto geeky, even if they didn't actually want to claim the name geek for themselves. And I think things came to a head a couple of years ago when I was giving a lecture at a hacker conference in New York. And Charlie was there in the audience, and I was on a panel, actually with another woman. And the guy who was introducing us said, hey, these are the only two chicks at the conference before we came up. And I actually. I was so pissed off that I actually did this to him on stage.

And there were dozens and dozens.

There were dozens and dozens of women in the audience. It was a huge, huge audience. And I looked out and I could see all these women just kind of hitting themselves in the head and saying, here we go again. You know, even though we're here, nobody will acknowledge that we're here. And I think that kind of anecdotal experience is actually borne out statistically as well. Back in 2001, the National Science foundation published a study that showed that 56% of degrees in science and engineering are given to women, but only 25% of jobs in those fields are held by women. So there's a huge drop off from sort of women expressing interest in the field by majoring in these fields in college and then actually getting jobs in those fields. So we really wanted to do this book, and luckily, Seal Press really wanted to publish it. And, Charlie, why don't you talk a little bit about what happened next?

Well, actually, Seal Press wanted us to look into, you know, what other competing books are there out there in the field, you know, what are we going up against and what books have been published that proves there's a demand for this, because in publishing, they always want someone else to have done it first. And so we searched and searched and just, you know, all we could find was like, a book that came out five years ago called Geek Girl. I think that was like a little coffee table picture book that was like, you might be a geek girl if you shop@Amazon.com and it was just like. It had little cartoons of a girl wearing glasses, and it was just like, really condescending and stupid. And we were just like, oh, come on. And so that was actually a challenge, was convincing them that there was a demand for this book and that even though nobody had done it before, it was something that people wanted. And then we put out a call for submissions, and it just got, like, spread around the Internet like wildfire. It was on the StarWars.com blog and it was in Norway, and it was like, you know, it was all over the place.

It was on Boing Boing.

It was on Boing Boing.

But not on Slashdot, because actually there are no women on Slashdot, apparently, according to Slashdot.

Sorry, I love Slashdot. Canadian Public Radio, like, interviewed us about it. And we just. We got like, 200 essays. And what we found was that, you know, we were blown away by the enthusiasm and people saying, thank God somebody's finally, you know, speaking to our experience and representing us and, you know, admitting that we exist. But also, we just found that there was. There were certain kind of things in common that we found in a lot of these essays where it was people had kind of similar experiences of being counted out or having to struggle against kind of a glass ceiling. Especially either going into college or having come out of college with, like, at the top of their class, going into grad school or the workplace, there'd be suddenly, like this moment where it was like, okay, that's as far as you're getting. And that was something we saw in a lot of the essays. But there were also these really encouraging, exciting stories of people who had broken out and had, like, had made a place for themselves. And we ended up being really excited and uplifted by a lot of the essays in the book that we ended up publishing.

Have Ellen read.

Yeah. So now we're going to bring up Ellen Spurtus. Who do you want to read here or do you want to read the podium?

Let's see.

I guess Ellen actually works here at Google and she also teaches at Mills College and her essay is awesome. So do you want the.

I like holding this mic. I don't know what's wrong with us.

Yeah, we're back.

Kay, thanks for coming. See some familiar faces here. Let's mess with their mind.

They can't hear us laughing either. Can you hear us now?

Let's see here. Can I hear this in New York?

Can you hear this microphone in New York?

It's on the New York side. Okay. Okay.

You can. Okay.

Well, my essay has never gotten this many laughs. Although I've been a geek all my life and am now a computer science professor at a women's college. I wasn't always a feminist. I used to be a male identified misogynist.

Tolerance on her side.

We're getting messages broadcast to us from New York here. For those in the studio audience.

Let's see, should I go on or wait?

Just go on.

Go ahead. Yeah, too bad New York just won't.

Get the good stuff developed to buy the book.

Yes, exactly.

Put into its third printing. I grew up in an upper middle class Jewish family, dominated intellectually by my father, an MIT graduate. Next in line was my brother Michael, mathematics prodigy. And then there was me, who took to computers like a sponge to water. The best way to retain my status and self respect in our family was to act like a male and to disdain anything feminine. I felt I had little in common with my housewife mother and older sister Debbie, whom I considered not very smart or interesting. After all, they weren't good at math and science. I once asked my little sister Andrea if she thought of me more as a brother or a sister, and she responded, I think of you as a sibling. My mother on the other hand didn't know what to think of me. She had earned her position in life by attracting a wealthy husband and she considered conspicuous intelligence incompatible with femininity. My brother, who was otherwise encouraging, teaching me math and telling me inspiring stories, told me about the theory that mathematical ability was correlated with testosterone and the best modern female mathematician was very ugly. I concluded that women in science were necessarily unfeminine. You know. More recent research shows that testosterone is correlated inversely in men with mathematical ability.

Explains a.

But for some reason you don't hear that as much. I also felt that female scientists were lacking, not just as women, but as scientists. While I was easily the top girl in math, in school, at least until mit, there were always boys smarter than me. I remember telling my high school friends that I judged the difficulty of a class by how few girls were in it. My brother was a constant example of male superiority. Locally famous for mathematical achievements that I was never able to match. I concluded that the best woman would never be as good as the best man. And the best she could hope for was to associate herself with the biggest genius. When I began dating, I chose men who were brilliant at science regardless of their other qualities. In high school, I dated the boy with the top score on the national math examination. I was the highest scoring girl. I gushed to him at prom that of all the couples there, we had the highest combined national math exam score. At mit, I dated even higher scorers, although fortunately I got over my obsession with intelligence at a young enough age not to become a Nobel Prize winner. Sperm bank despite my prejudices, I wanted to meet other girls like myself. I went to one of the first computer camps in 1981 where the male female ratio was about 6 to 1. I was the only girl in the top class. And I told an InfoWorld reporter that I was disappointed there weren't more girls. In my first, but not last medium this quote, he wrote that I was disappointed there weren't more boys. Okay, so I'm going to skip ahead to past how I became a feminist and professor at mills college. In 2001, my fourth year at mills, I followed a web link that read, are you the sexiest geek alive? Idly, I took a qualifying test for what seemed to be some kind of geek pageant. To my surprise, I was invited to be a semifinalist. The winner would be decided by online voting. If I had worked at a male dominated institution, I would never have gone any farther. Just being associated with such an event would have undermined my professional credibility. Plus, I'd never get to be one of the guys again. I posted a suitably geeky photograph of myself and a profile listing a dozen of my qualifications, including I'm MIT cubed in computer science, bachelor's, master's and Ph.D. where I was active in the Nerd Pride movement. The license plate on my electric car is V Eqir Ohm's Law. I was one of three MIT women profiled in the New York Times under the headline Woman, Computer, Nerd and Proud. I've had a lifelong weakness for male geeks, one of whom is in the audience. When I was about 11, I ran electricity through my braces to get the attention of a young he nerd. I emailed my friends and told told my students, one of whom told me she voted for me many times and I won a position in the June pageant to be held in nearby Silicon Valley. What would I wear? Normal geek attire would be blue jeans and a free T shirt, but I no longer felt constrained by the anti fashion uniform. Instead, I wanted something simultaneously geeky and glamorous, showing that one could be both at the same time. The centerpiece of my outfit was a black corset inscribed with a circuit board pattern, which I wore with a black slit skirt. Through the slit you could see strapped to my leg, the slide rule handed down to me by my father from his days at mit. The look was inspired by the poster of Sandra Bullock in Miss Congeniality where she's done up in pageant attire with a gun strapped to her leg. For the five minute talent round. I considered and quickly dismissed the ideas of reciting pie or playing Robotron. I wanted to capture my broad range of geekiness as well as answering in what way geeks are sexy, a question already put to me by several reporters. My position was that geeks are passionate, powerful and playful, all sexy qualities. So I decided to create a video about my life. It began with my early experiences learning to program a mainframe as a small child and attending computer camp. My MIT years, including an endorsement from free software icon Richard Stallman, and most importantly, my years as a professor. I argued that I was the sexiest candidate because sex is fundamentally about reproduction and I reproduced the most geeks. I aspire to be a Geek Republic fertility goddess, I said. The highlight of the video, which is on Google Video, was a montage of dozens of my students and their students proudly displaying electronics and computer projects, accompanied by Cyndi Lauper's Girls Just Want to have Fun, Always the Teacher. I concluded the video with a quick lesson on how to count in binary on your fingers, which I accompanied live on stage before the dumb stage judges. And if you want to find out what happens after that, you'll have to read the book.

So next up we have Jen Shreve, who also works here at Google and has written for a number of techie publications, including Salon and many others. And she's been a guest editor on Boing Boing and all kinds of other great stuff. And so welcome and come up or you're already up here. So go over there, I'll go over here.

So this essay is titled Geek Interrupted. If it took me nearly two decades to finally discover my passion for science and technology, it was because up until then I had only the vaguest idea of what these things really were. In the fundamentalist Christian schools I attended growing up, they force fed us not the watered down intelligent design version of science education, but the rich, meaty biblical variety, complete with side dishes on why evolutionists were a bunch of liars. And there's science full of phony baloney. It was a confusing state of affairs. One day, in accordance with state guidelines, we'd be taught the scientific method. Observe, hypothesize, predict, experiment. The next, we were being told that famous scientists like Albert Einstein had used these very same methods to further Satan's agenda. Science, we learned, required skepticism and critical thinking. In Bible class, however, we were informed that questioning God's ways was moral rebellion. And in case you were a doubting Thomas, my early teachers applied plenty of scientific sounding arguments for why carbon dating and Darwin were shams. God created the earth with the appearance of age. Duh. The science I'd encounter had barely been science at all. No wonder it often left a strange taste in my mouth. And technology hadn't fared much better. It was often viewed by many of my teachers and church leaders as the modern equivalent of witchcraft. Mess around too much with those computers and you might just wind up with some evil voodoo in your soul. ATM cards weren't just a convenient way to get money out of the bank. They harbored the underlying technology that would soon facilitate the dreaded mark of the beast. Select quick cash and you might as well be casting your vote for the Antichrist. Or so the thinking went. But when technology came to the rescue in the form of medicine or a satellite channel devoted entirely to the gospel, those around me would call it a miracle. As though God had the hottest RD outfit in all Silicon Valley. Nick's signals when it came to science and technology were besides the point, however, because I was a girl, thanks to feminism Women of my mother's generation were indeed becoming astronauts, computer scientists, surgeons, engineers, and architects. But as a young Missionette, the Christian alternative to the Girl Scouts, I completed detailed workshops on proper posture and the polite way to serve dinner. Lessons from the Bible emphasize service, not success, and the message was clear. Christian women were destined to serve God and husband and to bear children and raise them full time. And I had no reason to doubt it. The women who lived in the California agricultural town where I grew up were moms, house cleaners, babysitters, secretaries, and maybe teachers. They were really into their vacuum cleaners and dried flower arrangements. They were not physicists, doctors, or even farmers. In spite of all this, my inner geek managed to shine through in small but obvious ways. If the consistently high test scores in math and science weren't obvious enough, my addiction to Pac Man, Moon Turtles, Centipede, Space Invaders, and the early text based version of Oregon Trail where you had to type bang as quickly as possible or get eaten by a bear, were dead giveaways. That's how I learned how to type. There was also my preternatural ability to navigate the actual awkward user interfaces of our 1980s era consumer electronics without ever having to RTF him the Blue Ribbon Science Fair project in seventh grade, the high school award in chemistry. When it came time to dissect the frog in sophomore year biology, I was the first in line given the opportunity to do the same to a small cat. In college I bought a scalpel and enrolled in anatomy. I remember feeling great satisfaction in knowing the answers to my algebra and and pre calculus questions were correct. I caught glimpses of beauty in the steps I had taken to arrive at them. I took to computers and the Internet like a hen to its nest, clucking my tongue at the old fogies who couldn't grasp the fundamentals of pine, Usenet, and HTML. Yet if you were to ask me what I thought of math or science, or whether I was interested in becoming an engineer, a computer scientist, or doctor, the answer all the way would have been no. Eager to please, I had cast my lot with you humanities, which provided me my best chance of becoming what every good Christian girl dreamed of, a pastor's wife. Instead of going to Space camp in Huntsville, Alabama, I attended a fame like academy. Several summers in a row, starting at the age of 11, I spent weeknights at rehearsals for plays. In private lessons I learned voice, musical theory, piano, ballet, jazz, tap, stage fencing, and mime. To everyone's surprise, I scored scored higher in math and verbal on my SATs, but nobody looked askance when I decided to pursue a degree in literature and a career in writing. I completed the minimal science and math requirements as quickly as I could, and I didn't look back. Except I did. I too. I'm going to skip ahead. So I went to college and I had a reverse conversion experience where I joined the Secular humanist and became a bit of a rebel. I graduated from college in 1996 and the Internet was about to go big time, taking me along with it. Rather heading off to a podunk Midwestern newspaper to work my way up the editorial ladder, I landed a cool summer internship at Microsoft co founder Paul Allen's startup company, Star Wave, one of the first commercial producers of online content. The work was a perfect marriage of writing and geekiness. Each morning I tapped out shorts sassy synopsis of the day's political news for the very exciting website familyplanet.com every afternoon I hand coded my words and accompanying imagery into HTML. Dreamweaver was just a silly musical refrain. In those days, the incredible possibilities posed by the Internet's inherent interactivity were especially exciting to me. Before long, I was hitting up project managers to learn how to code more complicated content like quizzes and reader polls. Clearly, I had found my medium. The underlying science and technology of the Internet would also become my muse. My calling became undeniably clear that fall when I landed my first job at a San Francisco web scene that went by the name salon1999.com at the time, it's now known as salon.com when I arrived at Salon, I was still in denial about the full extent of my geekiness. I figured I would write about popular culture, literature, books, and politics. Yet the stories that interested me most were the ones about technology and at work I felt the closest personal connection not to the writers and editors, but to the weird, sloppy dudes who inhabited the IT room. The aspect of online publication I found most compelling was not its voice or point of view, but its choice of medium. Eventually, I could no longer ignore the facts. It was time to embrace my unique liberal arts infused geekiness. Full on.

Hi, so I'm going to read next. I'm one of the co editors. I also am a writer and I've been published in a bunch of science fiction web zines and magazines and anthologies. And I wrote a novel called Choir Boy. Actually, my essay in the book is about being a health care policy wonk, which is what I do a lot of the time for money. But I'm also a science fiction writer and I just excited to Read a thing about that Today you can actually read one of my science fiction stories if you go to Google and type the words Horatius H O R A T I U S&Clodia C L O D I A and it's the first few hits.

Can you get my mom? I bet it's the top hit for Horatius. It's the top hit.

It's also the first few after that.

So I think you want this one.

Oh, yeah, whichever. Tom. Yeah. So my first time going to DragonCon, which is a big science fiction convention in Atlanta, I was still a guy. But that didn't stop me from dressing up. I wanted to look dressy and cool, so I wore a nice shirt, waistcoat, and silk tie. After all, I was there as a professional science fiction writer and I was going to be networking with other writers and, and meeting editors and stuff. People didn't quite know what to make of me. I wasn't dressed up in a costume or a recognized uniform like Hippie Pig and Larkburgoth. I wasn't wearing the designated non costume costume, which was a pair of jeans and a T shirt that would let everybody know exactly what species of fanboy I was. I bopped around in my Eurofag outfit and people just sort of ignored me. I did meet one editor of a magazine that crashed and burned after its first issue, and he spent an hour telling me that Rudy Rucker's novels were all about sentient cheese attacking people sexually and I shouldn't bother reading them. I told Rudy that years later, and he was vastly amused. At one point, he and I spent a really boring hour with Larry Niven, who seemed narcoleptic. But mostly I was both too weird and not weird enough to connect with anybody at that point. Convention. Some years later, I went back to Dragon Con and this time I was dressed as Wonder Woman. I spent countless hours sculpting my gold lame eagle and belt and finding just the right red cowboy boots. That time around, people noticed me and everything felt just that much more festive. Cosplay transcends language, social expectations and gender norms. Mostly people dug it. Okay, so there was one fighter mage looking guy at DragonCon who yelled at me that I needed to get me some damn boobies. At that point, I wasn't yet taking hormones, so I hadn't actually hormoned up any breasts of my own. And I hadn't really bothered to pad my Amazon bustier that much. But, you know, then later I did start taking hormones and anyway, in between those two visits, thanks to dragon Con. I had actually quit writing science fiction for a few years As I transitioned from a nice boy to a rude girl. I also became a serious literary writer. When I returned to writing science fiction as a girl, There were two things going on with me. One was that I discovered in my literary career that there were things that I could only explore using speculative elements, Things that I needed to be able to geek out about. And the other was that I finally found my place in the nerd community, whose culture defines so much of what science fiction is really about. I spent a few years back when I was a guy in a science fiction writing group where the guys mostly wrote science fiction space battles and the women mostly wrote fantasy bards, anti abortion vampires. That's true. There was a whole anti abortion vampire saga. As a guy, I wrote science fiction too, but my efforts were never quite nerdy enough. The science should be the main character in your story, one guy in the group told me a few times. Your actual human characters, they can have like, conflicts and stuff, but the science is the star. I tried really hard to make the science the star of my stories. My first dozen or so science fiction stories were fairly plot oriented. They had a pretty pat formula. A protagonist who is vaguely a person faces a problem involving science, usually in the first sentence, and struggles with it personfully for about 2,000 words. And then this protagonist resolves the conflict, usually in the final sentence. Eat your heart out, Raven Carver. So it was super helpful to start writing literary fiction instead. Not just because science couldn't really be the star of a story about marital conflicts and rococo design, but also I needed to make sense of all the changes in my life, like moving to San Francisco and becoming legally a woman. And I needed to model the world I had come from and the world I'd found myself in, and figure out how humans operated in both places. I needed a field guide for the alien creature I had become. In many of my literary stories, weird stuff still happened. People still had conflicts, Albeit usually without any pet resolution. The universe remained a ludicrous enemy to people. I tried to map out not just the sharp edges of our alleged reality, but also the contortions that people take on to avoid those edges. And little by little, I found myself writing speculative fiction again. But it was still daunting to go back and forth into the world of science fiction fans. I realized at some point that science fiction and fantasy defines a particular type of person, Just the way that certain queer literary authors have a devout following of people who all have sort of Matching punky hairdos, tattoos and found fashion. Fans of science fiction have their own ethos. I never quite felt culturally science fictional. I couldn't bring myself to read Robert Heinlein. I said, I still can't. I couldn't quite get used to some guy's lecture as conversation thing. But I found that there was this intersection between science fiction nerds and this whole tangle of alternative communities. At least some of the people who were fascinated by post human 30th century people were also open to other genders, DIY sexualities and non traditional families. You'd find yourself at a party with a guy named Ewok and that would be his hacker name. And then he would turn out to be some kind of genderqueer furry as well. And sometimes you'd run into someone at Cafe Scientifique and then a while later you'd meet them at some queer burlesque thing. And I started meeting more people in the science fiction writer community as well. Sometimes I'd run into writers at conventions or readings and they would know me enough to wave to the transsexual in the slinky dress. Sometimes they'd get my pronoun wrong and I'd have to correct them. Sometimes they would just treat me like one of the more exotic weirdos of fandom. And sometimes they actually started to take me seriously as a writer and as a woman.

I'm going to read last. I am also a writer. I think we have a very skewed group here, which I think pretty much all of the people who are science and technology writers or science fiction writers are reading to you today. So many of the other essays are about people who sit in the lab all day and don't necessarily sling words around as much. So my piece is also sort of a coming of age piece about how I became geeky and also how I fell in love with technology and computers. So it starts when I'm quite young and the title of this piece is When Diana Prince Takes Off Her Glasses. How many people know who Diana Prince is? It's the secret identity of Wonder Woman. On the suburban lawn outside our condo, I imitate the way Diana Prince becomes Wonder Woman every week on television. I pretend to pull my hair out of a tight bun, take off my imaginary glasses and spin around until I explode like a star going nova. When the light withdraws, I'm wearing her lasso of truth and her bulletproof bracelets. The glasses have disappeared for the rest of my life. I find myself thinking occasionally about that transformation. In my 30s I buy the DVD box sets of the Wonder Woman TV shows to see if they hold up over time. Unfortunately, the plots are silly and Wonder Woman's self effacing heroism is wince worthy. Oh Steve, it's just little old me lifting up this tank. Yeah, you should check out the DVDs of Wonder Woman. It's quite interesting. Still, the moment when Wonder Woman takes off her glasses is burned into the retinas of my unconscious. She's a geek until she takes them off, but afterward she's a fantasy. Not because of her super strength and invisible plane, but because she's smart, commanding and sexually appealing at the same time. And as anyone familiar with mainstream US culture knows, such a woman is not supposed to exist. My first lasso of Truth is a Kaypro 4 with two floppy drives and a tiny green CRT screen. It has a modem, which my friend Don explains is for logging into a thing called a big BBS or a computer bulletin board system. He knows a good one called Wiznet, where up to a dozen people can chat all at the same time. Every night I log into Wiznet and talk until all hours of the morning with people whose bodies are lines of glowing text. I pick a gender neutral handle Shockwave writer. Everybody assumes that I'm male, and I don't bother to correct them. I write my first story about high tech outlaws in high school. It's about my best friends who recently cracked a piece of software. Cracking means breaking the copy protection scheme that prevents people from making free copies of the program. I sit with them while they go over dot matrix printouts and get them to teach me about assembly language and how to turn Apple's graphics program MacPaint into something that anyone can download for free. Later they teach you me about freaking a way of hacking the phone system so you can make free long distance phone calls. I sit at my KPRO for days composing a tale about geeks who are romantic outlaws liberating software for the benefit of humanity. My English teacher isn't really crazy about the story, but I gain a reputation among the computer nerds as a strange and unexpected ally. One of the freakers uses a version of my name as as a password to his bbs and I am honored. Two movies about science fiction. Sorry, two movies about science change my life while I'm in high school. Real Genius and David Cronenberg's remake of the Fly. Both of them are about heroic geeks who break the rules in the name of scientific freedom, and both have strong female characters who work alongside Men as Equals Real Genius for those of you who haven't experienced experience the wonder of this 80s gem, it's an anti war story wrapped in a teen comedy. Young Caltech physics student Mitch discovers that the mysterious project he's helping his respected mentor complete is in fact a dangerous space based weapons system. As he struggles with the morality of what he's doing, Mitch meets the hyperactive engineering geek Jordan, whose cute, dorky look and constant experiments with with bizarre equipment make her the first vaguely realistic female geek I've ever seen represented on film. With her help and the aid of some friends, Mitch finally exposes the true nature of his professor's research in a creative hack that involves taking over the weapon system and training its laser beam on the world's hugest container of Jiffy Pop, which just happens to be in his professor's house. As the house explodes under pressure from the popcorn, Mitch's shamed professor is arrested. Score one for justice, loving dorks. My friends and I journey en masse to watch real Genius in the theater, bopping along to the Tears for Fears soundtrack, thrilled that at last there's a movie that makes us look cool. But I'm especially thrilled because Jordan offers me a place in the narrative. For once I don't have to go through the trouble of identifying with the male characters a psychological sleight of hand that gets a little little old after you've done it every single time you read a novel or watch a movie about nerd stuff. The Fly, which seduces me immediately with its disturbing images of transfigured bodies and technical innovation run amok, is the first movie I've seen where a science journalist is a major character. Veronica meets the elusive genius Seth at a party and comes back to his lab with him to see an experimental device he's developed. It turns out to be a set of teleportation pods and he invites her to document it for an article. She becomes as involved in his research as he is and falls in love with him before she realizes that he's been doing teleportation experiments on himself. As anyone familiar with the oft retold plot of the film knows, the result of Seth's self experimentation is that he accidentally gets fused at the genetic level with a fly that's trapped in the teleportation pod with him. Slowly, his body rots away piece by piece, revealing a horrifying, insane human fly creature who wants nothing more than to take Veronica into the teleportation pod with him so that they can be together as one genetically fused entity. At 16, I watch the action unfold with a sense of nauseated enlightenment. It isn't just the graphic fly barfs that makes me queasy for days afterward, although that is pretty awesome scene. It's the realization that this is some kind of monstrous allegory for what can happen to women in science. If we are attracted to men in our fields, which is understandable enough, the result may not be the partnership that we seek. Instead, our male colleagues may try to absorb us, to turn us into functions of themselves, and in the process eradicate our existence. To me, the Fly isn't the story of Seth's tragic experiments with science. It's about Veronica's tragic experiments with a scientist. So I'm going to skip ahead a little bit. So I went to college, didn't major in science because of the Fly, and graduated in 99 at the height of the dot com boom. Graduated after lots of grad school, and I started writing about technology for a lot of magazines that are dead now, as well as Wired. And so I'm going to start in 99 when I was writing for the industry standard Rest in Peace industry standard. It's 1999 and I'm at a press conference for a company whose business model is to sell services to companies using Linux. I have no idea where this company is now. It probably fell off the Nasdaq with all the rest of the nice Linux companies from that era. I'm talking with another technology journalist, a guy who likes the same cheap engineers glass as I do, and he's congratulating me on an article I've just published in the San Francisco Chronicle. It's about a group of Linux enthusiasts who spend most of their weekends at a trade show doing install fests. They'll help anyone install and start running Linux on any computer. It's their way of challenging the Microsoft Windows hegemony one box at a time. A primary source in my story is the elusive head of a semi underground group called the Linux Cabal. So how did you manage to get him to talk to you? The journalist asks, narrowing his eyes. He won't ever talk to me, so maybe I'm paranoid, maybe I'm sensitive. But suddenly I realize that I'm the only woman in the room except for a few few marketing droids who look like they were paid mostly to look good in heels and lipstick, and I hear a barb in this guy's query. So I tell him exactly what I think that he's implying. I flirted with him. I say yeah, it's lucky I'm a girl, because geeks always want to talk to me. And then I stalk away. To the journalist's credit, he looks confused and a little shaken. Why didn't I tell the truth? Why didn't I explain that I spent a whole weekend at the trade show sitting at the install fest table and getting to know everybody who came? I watched install after install, saw kids and retirees get excited at the sight of a command line, learned the pros and cons of different Linux distributions, and I even talked to the gadfly trying to interest people in FreeBSD. I made Cthulhu jokes and admitted that Data is my favorite character on Star the Next Generation. I could have said that if you actually go out and pound the pavement and take the time to get to know people, they'll talk to you. I could have explained to him that this is my philosophy of good journalism, but I didn't. That is an example of how I think paranoia about the way people are responding to you as a woman can make you act like a dick, basically. So I'm not endorsing my behavior. A few months later, after this incident, I do an experiment. I decide to write an entire article about biotech using only female sources. I call scientist after scientist, getting amazing information about how to compare mouse and human genomes with small number crunching programs and constantly growing databases of genetic information. Each source refers me to several other top notch women in the cutting edge field of computational biology. One builds her own data mashing computer clusters. Another wrote the software that allows people to browse the fruit fly genome. It's one of the coolest articles I've ever written and every name in it is female. Thanks. There's more but. So we can take questions, criticisms or commentary.

Are there comments from the other offices? Hi Hi.

Hi. Thanks for coming today. This is great. I wanted to ask any of you, but particularly and I didn't get the names Charlie to comment on the experience of being female or identified as a female in the more public areas of the web where there's free and open comments that people can make anonymously because the things I see curl my hair.

I can respond to that briefly. I've written about this and in fact in part of my article that I didn't read, I talk about some experience experiences I've had on Slashdot where articles of mine have been slash dotted. Things I've written for Wired, usually, sometimes for my column and almost inevitably the issue of how I look will come up like it'll Just be a link to, you know, here's an article about weird shit about RFIDs. And you know, about halfway down the comments, eventually someone will figure out that I'm female and then there'll be a debate, you know, am I too fat or am I too ugly or am I actually cute or just, you know, and people will post pictures. And I think a lot of women have had that experience. And I'm actually, I don't mind the idea of people caring how I look. The only problem I have is the fact that it's so one sided. If that came up when men's articles were linked to or men's ideas were linked to and people said, dude, Linus Torvalds is looking a little heavy or you know, Bill Gates is kind of looking old, he should get a facelift or something like that, I would be fine. I would be fine with people saying that I look like Velma from Scooby Doo. Which actually I thought was kind of a compliment when they said that. But I think that that's the problem that women encounter is that it's unbalanced. So it's not so much the problem of being sexualized, it's that we're the only ones who are. So I think either no one should be treated to the that or everyone should be. So I actually propose that we do kind of a gorilla action on Slashdot and start going in and commenting on how the people look who are posting and like, whoa, dude, I don't know, he's too fat or ooh, he's pretty foxy. And just bringing it up randomly in the way that happens with women and see how the guys react to that. So maybe they'll like it and then they'll kind of institute it as a tradition.

You know, I try not to spend too much time in online forums where I'm going to get insulted. Actually that's a decision I made some years ago and I've been pretty happy with that. But I'm doing more blogging lately so maybe I'll experience more of that soon. I don't know.

What about you guys?

I haven't really had any experiences with that.

Personally, I don't think I can tap your story. Gosh. No more questions or comments. I thought this was Google.

I have a question. Actually, you guys said that when you put out the original call for submissions, you got a lot of great response. And I was just wondering what the response was like in the media when the book came out. It's been really positive. We got reviewed in Red Book, which I think. Oh, Ladies Home Journal, which is actually even better. Yeah, Ladies Home Journal made us like a starred selection.

It was like their monthly pick.

Yeah. And so I think that. And there's been a. It's been sort of a wide range of places that have embraced it. Like Bitch Magazine, which is a feminist magazine, made it a pick as well as Ladies Home Journal. So I guess ladies and bitches both love us, so. Yeah, and it's been great. And the other thing that's been really great too is that a lot of. One of the things that we want to encourage is for men to read the book and men to share the book around too, because it's really about just familiarizing people with how it is to be a female geek. And a lot of women, actually, surprisingly enough, already know what it's like to be a female geek. And so it's nice because I think that it just sort of reminds people that, yeah, not only is there the one female geek that they know in their group, but actually there's a ton of them and they all have very different experiences. And so it's been nice to get a lot of feedback from men too, and from people saying they're buying it from their moms or for their daughters or whatever. And so that's really good.

I suspect Ellen will be the best one able to answer this, but anyone else can chime in. Do you notice an increase in the relative percentage or number of female geeks over the years? Is it primarily been a cultural thing that there have been so few or something different? If you're the one who sees the undergraduates on a regular basis, as it were?

Well, anyone know? Yeah, as Tom alluded to, I'm a professor at Mills College. Does anyone know what year the percentage of computer science students who are female peaked? Yeah, it was 1984. So in the 80s and much of the 90s it went down. Then it plateaued while every other field was going up. Women get almost 60% of bachelor's degrees nowadays, and interest in computer science has gone way down since the dot com boom. And I've heard it's gone down more among women than in men, which is part of the reason I'm on leave for Mills College right now. So if you're looking at computer science degrees, it doesn't look good. Annalee, I don't know if you can say anything about the industry.

Well, from the research that I've done, it is true that there was a peak in the 80s and a lot of people speculate that that's because during the 1970s there were a lot of liberal education programs that were established to interest girls in the sciences and in computers. And so there was a bump in college graduates in the 80s because of what had happened in the 70s. And also based on the statistics that I mentioned earlier about so many women majoring in engineering and science but not getting jobs, it seems to me that the issue is less women's interest in the field and more an inability to get jobs or women hearing that it's hard to get jobs and becoming discouraged and choosing to go into other fields like biology or cognitive science. When I was at Berkeley, one of the jokes was that women tended to go into CogSci instead of CS because it was easier for them to find jobs in the end, even though they wound up using a lot of the same tools. So I think we are seeing an upswing of interest. But it may be from women who are joining the business force later, you know, who are going to.

If I can clarify just a bit, I didn't necessarily mean just computer science or the sciences. Also the cultural aspects of geekiness.

I think women are definitely joining into the cultural aspects of geekiness much more. There is an idea that women don't like to be called geeks and that maybe there's plenty of women out there who are doing geeky things, but they just wouldn't identify themselves as geeks or as nerds. I don't really know if that's true or not. I don't. I mean, maybe it's a self selected group that we have in this book because of course we're all calling ourselves geek. But you know, I haven't, I haven't seen that happening.

There were a few people who were kind of telling us about it, especially when we wanted to use the word nerd in the title. Some women really didn't like that. They thought that that was really pejorative and harsh.

Yeah, it's true.

Basically, I have one kind of question and I don't want to limit you, but could you guys give us five or background first? So I like this whole women in technology thing. Like I've been in technology and I'm really interested in women in technology. And that's like something that I think is. I don't necessarily understand why employers aren't necessarily that interested because I think gender balance is much more important in the workplace than. But anyways. But the thing that I would like is I didn't read the book yet. I'm interested in reading the book, but at least five things that we should or shouldn't do to encourage women or not encourage, but just to keep it. Things that either men, co workers do or don't do that either discourages or hurts or what we can do to encourage in education or what we can do. Should we be going to. Should we be going to elementary schools? These type of things. Is that clear enough?

So things that you can do to encourage women in technology and science or.

What we shouldn't do when we interact with them, that we do that's negative.

And what you shouldn't do.

Yeah, I mean based on the essays in the book and people we talk to, things that you shouldn't do include just like drawing attention to people being women unnecessarily making that an issue when it doesn't have to be things that you should do. You know, support programs that actually encourage women to get into computer science even if they have an undergrad degree in something else. There actually was a great program at Mills until recently that did that.

It hasn't been. It still exists.

Oh, okay. Great. Support programs like that. I know Annalee and I have talked a lot before about mentoring. Like there's a, there's sort of, a lot of men in the workplace feel like there's a stigma. If they start mentoring women. It's going to be assumed that they're.

You know, that they're macking on them.

That they're macking on them. That there's some ulterior motive and you know, that prevents people from, that prevents men from mentoring women and mentoring is really important to getting ahead in the workplace. Anything else?

Yeah, I think it just, I think.

It starts really early. I think, you know, there's a lot of focus on sort of the college level decisions. But you know, I think it starts at really young age for women, you know, just in the examples they see and the types of experiences they have with math and science. So I think really looking at early education as well is really important to make women see, start to really when they're starting to formulate their dreams and ideas and what they want to do with their life and sort of that vision for themselves that it will include these fields and then that can build on itself and grow over time so that when they reach college it's just sort of, of course I'm going to be a computer science. Of course I'm going to be a scientist. Of course I'm going to be a mathematician.

Val Henson wrote Linux how to on how to get more women involved in open Source Software. And I recommend reading that. Meng, do you have a question?

I have a question. Yes. I really appreciate your telling your personal stories in this book, so I have a somewhat personal question. So if the genie appears and each of you gets one wish, what would the wish be? Had a Google interview question?

World peace?

No.

So it has to be a wish related to women in technology, I'm assuming.

I know you have a foundation. Meg, would this be a proposal?

Wow.

I don't know.

I wish there were some way that we could push for gender balance in the workplace, but at the same time solve a lot of the anxieties around affirmative action programs. Because whenever we give these talks, that issue always comes up, like, you don't want quotas, you don't want people to be hired, and then have the other people in the workplace think, oh, you were hired just because you're a chick. So there. It'd be nice to. To have some way to have a balance where you're recruiting women and same thing for recruiting minorities, but that you're not creating a situation where the other people in the workplace feel that they've been slighted in some way because their groups aren't being recruited. And there's really. It's very hard to resolve that. So, yeah, maybe a genie could help out with resolving that typical social issue.

I think I'd like a genie to. Maybe we break the divide between technology and software and programs that are designed for women and are pink and frivolous and silly and ones that are just out there normal. I would love. You know, I remember when the Sims came out with such a revelation because it was a video game that was truly for everyone, and women were really drawn to it. And so more things like the Sims that are great for women and for men, but aren't for women. I mean, I can't tell you how many, like. I mean, I think pink cell phones look great, but, you know, it's like, this is technology for women. It's pink with a flower on it. Great.

I mean, it's really condescending.

Yeah, I think breaking that barrier and, you know, that's a. That's a design thing.

I actually had a question for the audience because I was interested in what that guy was asking about things that people could do to encourage women in the workplace and not discourage them. Is there anybody in the audience who has any thoughts about that? Like, just even from experiences at Google where they might have, you know, wanted.

Where's the microphone?

Okay.

Actually, I prefer another question I was going to ask too but okay. But also just for a comment, if.

You could answer that.

Oh, for a comment. Just treating us completely equal. Because I found one of my old bosses said guys in tech tend to treat women one of three ways. One, like they're a guy and not even realizing that they're women. Two, like they're a set of boobs, basically. And like, it's like, no, no, no, my eyes are up here. And three, just ignoring them, not out of malice, but just, like, because they aren't sure how to interact with women. And it doesn't make for good coworker relationships if you're, like, being ignored even if it's not out of malice.

So would you rather have people just treat you like a guy?

I'd rather have people treat me like a guy. But even better would be just to treat me like everyone else, acknowledging that I'm a woman and not making a deal out of it. Not like, oh, you're great for a woman, or like, you're the best girl geek I've worked out with. You know, like, hey, you're great, period.

Treat you like a human.

Exactly.

That's too much to explain.

There was somebody in the back also who had a comment.

There has been research that has shared with us that teachers, even in the elementary level, tend to call on their voice students more often. Even feminist teachers who try not to do that find that they have done it unconsciously.

I think that we need to address.

These gender imbalances and at very early levels, and we need to address them really specifically.

So call on women more.

Yeah, I found the environment at Google to be very good. It's so incredibly hard to get hired by Google that if you're hired, people just assume that you're good. But I also think the interview process could be improved and we should look at if we're unintentionally filtering out people who would be qualified but maybe don't fit the standard MIT male model, such as somebody who originally studied another field before going into computer science or didn't. Maybe had children and couldn't devote herself full time to a career for a while.

All right, I have another question, sort of semi related. So what do you think about while there are starting to be a few more women in tech? I think it's, there's not a lot of femininity in tech. Like, a lot of the women are very tomboyish. You know, like, to get ahead in this industry, you really have to act much more masculine. And personally, I, you know, I like being girly, but you know, if I'm like, oh, my God, I got this new glitter stuff instead of, oh, my God, I got this new RC truck. It's a very. It's a weird thing. And so what do you guys think about the fact that, you know, while there are more women, it's still very. The tomboyish women, which nothing's wrong with that. Just, you know, it just seems to be like it's not all women.

That is a big issue. And actually, one of the things that we're really psyched about in this book is that we do have several essays where women talk about that specific issue, about how difficult it is to be feminine and girly and be taken seriously. As somebody who is doing amazing work in technology and science, for me personally, it hasn't been an issue because I always have been a tomboy, and I like being treated like a guy, and I like hanging out with guys. And it is very true what you're saying. It's much, much easier for me to integrate into groups of techies when they realize that I'm just a dude. And for someone like Charlie or any of the other people up here who don't want to look like dudes or act like dudes, it can be extremely difficult. What do you guys want to say about that?

That was something that's nice about being a professor. At Mills College, where most of the students and faculty are women, there's room for a diversity of women.

Yeah, I think I suffered sort of a crisis of identity over it because I was not only a girly girl, but I didn't have a science degree. And yet, you know, I had all this passion for those things.

And.

Yeah, it's like, I like clothes and I like computers, and I reconciled those. But I definitely felt like I didn't always fit in with the geeks because of that.

Do we have any questions from the distributed offices or the ability to hear them?

Whiteboard.

Okay, yeah, looks like we can focus here.

Should we maybe wind down after one more question?

Yeah, maybe like, one or two more.

So I guess this question might be more directed at Alan, but just in general. A book like Unlocking the Clubhouse seems to have suggested a lot of things that could be done to improve at least undergraduate curriculums so that they're more amenable to supporting females and males that don't have as much experience in computer science through a computer science curriculum. And it seemed like there were a lot of convincing arguments for what can be done to improve these curriculums.

But.

But. And it seems like by now, there's been enough time for it to have been implemented in different schools. Do any of you know if these suggestions have been taken to heart by schools other than Carnegie Mellon or.

Well, unlocking the clubhouse is misleading. They talk about a number of ways to make computer science programs more hospitable to women, and the percent of women in their department went way up. But in fact, the reason it went way up, I'm told, is because Carnegie Mellon changed their admission. Carnegie Mellon is a top school. They get more applicants than they can do anything with. So unlocking the clubhouse isn't the whole story. I've heard that there have been some recent studies that pair programming is something that's helpful with bringing students in. In general, in computer science education, there's been a shift between having Weider courses like when many of us were in school because of the decline in interest in computer science departments, whether they care about women and diversity or not, are just trying to make their classes more welcoming. They're having to change around and do things differently. And I don't think anyone knows what to do yet. There's ideas, but no results, I think.

I mean, I worked a lot with UC Berkeley's College of Engineering and their center for Information Technology Research in the Interests of Society. And like, when I say that, and I mean for them, it was a big concern. I mean, they. I know that their feeling was that for the field to progress, it needed to have equal women, equal parts men and women. And there was a lot of hand wringing.

They just.

They weren't sure. They were still really struggling, trying to figure out how to make it appealing to women and how to make it make sense. And so I think it's something that we're all still thinking about and looking at and working on.

It's taking longer than we thought. And that's one of the things that people find frustrating, is that it's not changing in one generation, and it is slowly changing. If you look at statistics, you know, there are virtual zero women in the field back in the early 60s. And now, you know, women do have, say, depending on which study, you're looking at between 15 and 20% of jobs in the field. So it has changed a lot in what amounts to one generation. May take another whole generation before you have women who say what? There used to be fewer women than men in this field. That doesn't make any sense. And I think at some point that that will be the case. But it is slow, much slower than we thought. Maybe we should take one more question, and then that. Actually, we're already out of time. Okay? So. Well, thanks very much for coming.