CODE: Debugging the Gender Gap
CODE is a documentary that exposes the dearth of American female and minority software engineers and explores the reasons for this gender gap. CODE raises the question: what would society gain from having more women and minorities code?…
CODE debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 19, 2015. Vauhini Vara of The New Yorker has written an insightful review of the film and its depiction of the history of gender imbalance in the coding world. An excerpt from Vara’s article “‘Code’ and the Quest for Inclusive Software,” is included below.
“‘Code’ and the Quest for Inclusive Software,”
Vauhini Vara, The New Yorker, Published April 19, 2015.
A couple of years ago, Robin Hauser Reynolds, a filmmaker and photographer in the Bay Area, learned that her daughter, who had been taking computer-science classes, had decided that she wasn’t cut out to pursue computer science as a career. In one particular class, in which there were only a few female students, she felt that she didn’t fit in. She also perceived herself to be doing poorly, despite getting decent grades. “She called home a couple of times and said, ‘Hey, Mom, I’m so bad at this, this is horrible, I hate it.’ And meanwhile I’d seen a bunch of newspaper articles that said, ‘Hey, if you want a job out of college, you should study computer science,’” Reynolds recalled. She began seriously contemplating a question that has occupied Silicon Valley executives for the past couple of years: Why aren’t there more female programmers in the U.S., and what can be done about it?
The result of Reynolds’s inquiries was screened at the Tribeca Film Festival on Sunday, with the première of “Code: Debugging the Gender Gap,” a documentary that aims to make sense of the dearth of women in computer science. “Code” has already received disproportionate amount of attention for a documentary by a relatively unknown filmmaker; Reynolds and her film, which was financed partly through a crowdfunding campaign, had been profiled in a number of major publications well before the première, reflecting the broad interest in the tech industry’s diversity problem. Last year, several Silicon Valley companies acknowledged, for the first time, just how few women they employed in tech positions (fewer than twenty per cent, in most cases). In January, Intel pledged to spend three hundred million dollars, over five years, to make its workforce more diverse, and in February, a discrimination lawsuit brought against the venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers by a former employee, Ellen Pao, went to trial, revealing sexist and gendered attitudes on the part of some of the firm’s most prominent executives.
To those who have been following the discussion, some of the ground that the film treads will seem well worn. “Code” describes how women engineers, including Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper, were influential in the early years of computer science, but have become footnotes in an official history that privileges the work of male engineers. It documents the rise in the proportion of computer-science graduates who were women through the mid-eighties, and attempts to explain the precipitous decline that has taken place since then, from nearly forty per cent to less than twenty per cent. (Some of the film’s interviewees propose that the prototypical image of the antisocial, uncool male nerd that emerged in pop culture during the eighties might have discouraged women from pursuing computer-science degrees.) And it highlights some of the ongoing attempts to change the proportions: a conference named after Hopper; a curriculum change at Harvey Mudd College; a number of nonprofits recruiting female students, from diverse backgrounds, to learn to program.
To learn more about the CODE documentary visit the official website here.