Vikram Chandra - Geek Sublime - The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty

The annual Global Gender Gap Report 2012 , released by the World Economic Forum, ranks women’s status in countries around the world in four key areas: economic participation and opportunity; educational attainment; health and survival; and political empowerment. The report ranks the United States at 22 out of the 135 countries surveyed. India comes in at a dismal 105. 65Yet, according to some accounts, the proportion of programmers in India who are women may be higher — at least 30 percent — than America’s 21.1 percent. 66This might be dismissed as an anomaly were it not for other trends: the proportion of undergraduate computer-science degrees awarded to women in the US has declined from 37 percent in 1984 to 18 percent in 2010. The number of female freshmen who thought they might major in computer science has fallen steadily, from 4.1 percent in 1982 to 1.5 percent in 1999, and to 0.3 percent in 2009. 67

Meanwhile, in India, the trend has gone in the opposite direction. Until the mid-eighties, according to researcher Roli Varma, the number of women engineers was “negligible.” 68But in 2003, 32 percent of the Bachelor of Engineering degrees in computer science and 55 percent of the Bachelor of Science degrees in computer science were awarded to women. I’ve been told, anecdotally, that these percentages have risen since. Varma notes that Indian women took to computer science in spite of lack of early exposure; many Indian families cannot afford computers, and before opting for formal instruction, many of her respondents had only ever used computers in Internet cafés.

The young Indian women, though, came to computing with a confidence in their logical abilities which has been nurtured in their schools and homes. A study

showed that almost all female students [of computer science] interviewed asserted that mathematics was their strongest subject in high school, followed by physics. A little over half of the students also believed that their high school and intermediate college did not prepare them “well” for the study of CS at the university level, and another one-third felt “partially” prepared. These female students qualified their responses by stating that their schools either did not expose them to computers or did not teach details, applications, and basic languages of CS. However, they were extremely confident about their mathematical skills and, thus, their logical thinking and analytical abilities. Therefore, even though they found CS a hard, demanding, technical field, female students felt their mathematical training enabled them to do well in CS at the university level … no one ever considered changing their field from CS to something else due to difficulties. 69

The Indian women programmers’ notions about the characteristics displayed by a typical programmer were very different from those reported in the US, where “geeks/hackers/nerds [were thought to be] predominantly White males, fascinated with technology, [who] sit in front of the computer all day and sleep near it.” 70In India, however, the study

showed that most female students interviewed believed that the computing field is changing from being dominated by men to increasingly being penetrated by women. Female students believed that the typical computing culture consists of dedicated, hardworking, intelligent, meticulous, and smart students … They help those needing assistance and it is pleasant to be around them. They are active in social and cultural events held at their universities, as well as participate in sports. Most importantly, female students believed CS to be a field in which women could excel. According to them, economic rewards for a woman with a CS degree are much higher than with a degree in other [Science and Engineering] fields. Women who study CS are well respected by faculty and peers in the educational arena and by family members, friends, and neighbors in the social arena. 71

Parents want their daughters to work in computing in particular and scientific disciplines in general, and support and cajole and push toward this end.

In India, the logical nature of work in computing, its abstraction and headiness, is precisely what makes the field a kind of haven from all the indignities and horrific cruelties that subcontinental culture inflicts on women elsewhere:

For Indian women, being indoors in an office in front of a computer means they are protected from the outside environment, which is seen as unfriendly to women. Construction sites and factories are the work sites where a degree in other engineering fields, such as mechanical or civil, are seen as more suited for men. 72

Sexism of the most ugly and violent kind exists in the environments that these women must negotiate away from the computer, but knowledge itself is not gendered as male:

[Indian] women do not feel that teachers neglect them in mathematics and computing classes. This is one of the reasons that these fields do not emerge as a male domain. From early on, female students are taught to invest in hard work, which is seen to solve scientific and technical problems and, thus, a requirement to succeed in life. 73

The outlook for these Indian women is not altogether rosy, however. Alok Aggarwal is co-founder and chairman of Evalueserve India, a research and analytics company that employs approximately 2,000 people, out of which 30 percent are women. He told me:

We believe that currently in most IT companies (IBM India, Accenture India, Infosys, Wipro, TCS, HCL, Cognizant, iGate, etc.), the percentage of women is also 30 % [in the category of] “computer programmers.” However, unfortunately, at the managerial level, both within our company, Evalueserve, and the other IT companies mentioned above, the percentage of women managers drops to approximately 10 %. 74

In terms of the retention of employees, Aggarwal adds, “Among new joinees, 35 % are women but within five years, this number comes down to 25 % (because some of the women who get married leave Evalueserve India or the work-force altogether — at least on a temporary basis).” 75Cultural narratives about domesticity, children, and the exercise of power outside the home are still very much in place.

Still, research in countries as varied as Iran, Hong Kong, Mauritius, Taiwan, and Malaysia has yielded results consistent with those found in studies in India, showing that there is nothing about the field of computing that makes it inherently male. Varma’s conclusion is blunt: “The gender imbalance in the United States seems to be specific to the country; it is not a universal phenomenon, as it has been presented in the scholarly literature.” 76

In her book Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference , Cordelia Fine observes that “in prosperous countries it is not economic prosperity that tracks sex segregation in degree choices, but differences in adolescent boys’ and girls’ attitudes toward math and science. In richer countries, the greater the difference between boys’ and girls’ interest in science and math, the greater the sex segregation.” 77

Fine also cites studies of the participation of American girls in the prestigious International Math Olympiad (IMO), where profoundly gifted mathematical whiz kids spend nine hours solving extremely difficult problems:

If you’re Hispanic, African American, or Native American, it matters not whether you have two X chromosomes or one — you might as well give up now on any dreams of sweating for nine hours over some proofs. Then within girls, interesting patterns emerge. Asian American girls are not underrepresented, relative to their numbers in the population. But that doesn’t mean that it’s even simply a white girl problem. Non-Hispanic white girls born in North America are sorely underrepresented: there are about twenty times fewer of them on IMO teams than you’d expect based on their numbers in the population, and they virtually never attend the highly selective MOSP [Mathematical Olympiad Summer Program]. But this isn’t the case for non-Hispanic white girls who were born in Europe, immigrants from countries like Romania, Russia, and the Ukraine, who manage on the whole to keep their end up when it comes to participating in these prestigious competitions and programs. The success of this group of women continues into their careers. These women are a hundred times more likely to make it into the math faculty of Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, or University of California — Berkeley than their native-born white counterparts. They do every bit as well as white males, relative to their numbers in the population. 78