Lambdaphagy

A few days ago my girlfriend sent me this link about Barbie the not-quite-a-computer-engineer, musing:

You do wonder where mattel gets the guts to do this, though

Here’s the offending image, if you haven’t seen it already:

I thought about it for a minute. Where did this book come from, and how did it get published? Did the board at Mattel decide to publish a book with the overt aim of encouraging girls to enter computing that covertly reinforced traditional gender roles? I’m sure there are authors in this world of seven billion souls who would be up for writing such a thing, but they probably do not get vetted and hired by large corporations with HR departments in order to write books promoting Strong Independent Female Characters.

Rather, I reflected, it was probably contracted by a woman who had a career much like Barbie the UX designer and thought that was a good thing. I wrote back:

who do you suppose the author of the book was?

and forgot about it.

A few days later, because the universe is apparently a simulation designed by an agent with a utility function directly pegged to my cringing, we find out:

The author, Susan Marenco, who previously worked at Microsoft Development Center Copenhagen for 10 years as an “editor and usability designer specializing in linguistic usability,” told ABC News this afternoon she considers herself a feminist and regrets that she may have let stereotypes slip into the book.

So Susan Marenco writing a book that reflects her own (apparently rewarding and successful) lived experience as a woman in technology is very very problematic. Aspiring writers will no doubt take note.

After Marenco’s struggle session, feminist computer scientists have stepped up to fill in the gap:

Casey Fiesler, a 32-year-old PhD student in Human-Centered Computing at Tech and a Georgia native, had another solution: she completely reedited the book..

What is human-centered computing?

Human-centered computing (HCC) is a broadly defined interdisciplinary buzzword [sic] concerned with computing and computational artifacts as they relate to the human condition. Researchers and practitioners who affiliate themselves with human-centered computing usually come from one or more of the following disciplines: human factors, computer science, sociology, psychology, cognitive science, anthropology, communication studies, graphic design, science and technology studies, and industrial design.

But presumably Fiesler herself comes from the CS side, right?:

I am currently a PhD student in Human-Centered Computing in the school of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. I am advised by Dr. Amy Bruckman, as part of the Electronic Learning Communities lab. I am interested in the interaction between computing, norms, ethics, and law. My dissertation research focuses on the role that copyright law plays in online creative communities.

Previous to my PhD, I earned a law degree from Vanderbilt University, with specialized coursework in intellectual property and Internet law. I served on the editorial board for the Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law, and my student note received a Burton Award for legal writing. I currently serve as the Associate Editor of the Journal of World Intellectual Property and am a member of the legal committee of the Organization for Transformative Works. In 2011 I was a Google Policy Fellow and had the opportunity to work at Creative Commons.

At Georgia Tech, I have taught the computer science undergraduate course Computing, Society, and Professionalism, covering ethics, technology law, and computing and society issues. I have also been a teaching assistant for Design of Online Communities and Issues in Human-Centered Computing, as well as Legal Writing in law school and Introduction to Computer Science as an undergraduate.

I also have an M.S. in Human-Computer Interaction as well as a B.S. in Psychology from Georgia Tech. I grew up in Georgia, played for the Georgia Tech marching band as an undergraduate, and am a published science fiction and fantasy writer. I attended the Clarion Writers Workshop in 2006 at Michigan State. I both knit and read voraciously.

Ok, so Feisler has very broad interests which… apparently do not include coding. Maybe her research profile will clear things up?

My dissertation research is generously funded by the National Science Foundation. Please see my publications page for the ongoing results of this work.

Copyright and Online Communities: An Empirical Study of Social Norms and User Conceptions

Copyright law, once primarily the domain of publishers and lawyers, is now relevant to anyone with an Internet connection and a “share” button. However, it is also one of the most confusing and subjective parts of the law, especially as policies struggle to keep up with developing technology and practices. How do people make decisions every day about how they can share and reuse content online? How does what people know (and don’t know) about the law affect their online interactions and technology use? To examine these questions I have conducted content analyses of Terms of Service and public conversations about copyright, as well as surveys and interviews with content creators. I have found evidence of chilling effects caused by misinformation online, complex social norms formed in the absence of clear legal rules, and ignorance of copyright policies and the terms you “click to agree” to online. Confusing policies and competing stakeholders create a complicated design space for online communities of creative production. Confusions and lack of knowledge about copyright is a pervasive usability problem worthy of our attention within HCI.

This work has been featured in media outlets such as The New York Times, Engadget, and TechGeek

I have also had the opportunity to work on additional NSF-funded research projects during my time as a PhD student at Georgia Tech. Pipeline.

Developed by Kurt Luther for his dissertation, Pipeline is open source software for collaborative creative projects. I contributed to research into how people used Pipeline, including extending the community of users to fandom-based groups participating in a scavenger hunt. My work with Kurt was a best paper at CSCW 2013, and the scavenger hunt work led by PhD student Joe Gonzales will be published in CSCW 2015.

Earsketch.

I assisted in writing the original grant proposal for Earsketch, a remix-based computer science education tool, and also developed copyright curriculum for the program.

[links withheld because formatting]

So Feisler, who is very upset that women are portrayed in non-technical, human-centered roles in information technology… has directed her own life towards a non-technical, human-centered role in information technology.

Feisler, who is very upset that Barbie the computer engineer thinks about how people relate to computers and lets men handle the coding… does not mention any existing code at all in her own research profile, except for a program she socially-analyzed… which was written by a man.

It feels pretty shitty to spell this all out. But really, this entire episode is like an Hegelian striving-of-the-world-spirit to parodize itself.

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To be clear, I don’t think the amount of sexism in the world is zero, and I’ve found straight-up, old-school sexism in places where I didn’t expect to find it. I’ve never declined to tell the people in question what I thought about that.

I’ve also run what is statistically way more than my fair share of introductory computing events aimed at encouraging people to consider taking up programming in some form or another. Those groups have always included young girls (without any conscious doing on my part), and I was once thrilled to speak to a summer camp composed exclusively of such girls. The love of my life is a “[actual] woman in computing”. It would be absurd to suggest that no women are interested in programming.

But interest in programming, like everything else, is non-uniformly distributed. Most women aren’t, because most people aren’t. My own estimate of the issue is a fair bit of the things/systematizing vs. people/empathizing distinction, which shifts the mean, and a lot of high male variance, which populates the right tail. Sexism is non-zero, of course, but it’s hard to imagine that it was worse in computer science than in medicine or law, (high-status occupations which concern themselves with human needs and motivations instead of abstract machines, and in which women are now doing pretty ok).

And to the extent that women have entered computing professions, they do seem to cluster–statistically, rather than essentially–into roles that emphasize human factors and away from roles that emphasize intense preoccupation with things.[0] And there are exceptions in both directions.[1] But you’ll still observe a statistical tendency: here, for example, both the woman in IT who wrote a book encouraging girls to enter IT and the woman in IT who criticized that book for being insufficiently encouraging, both do not code.

As long as we commit to treat individuals as individuals, there’s not even a problem here to be resolved. But things get confusing when we treat individuals as instantiations of classes with essential attributes, because some people apparently have the wrong lived experience.

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[0] Which is fine, as far as it goes. Design is important, often more important than traditional backend since you can compensate for the latter with hardware.

[1]: One of the smartest people I knew in high school, a real hacker’s hacker who got banned from the computer lab for being too clever for his own good, gave up a lucrative career in IT to go stamp passports at a customs checkpoint because he wanted more interaction with human beings. If that’s what he was looking for, I guess he got it.