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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.

Read more…

To learn more about the CODE documentary visit the official website here.

The following is from the NYT article “Starving for Wisdom,” by Nicholas Kristof, published on April 6, 2015.

Starving for Wisdom

“We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.”

That epigram from E.O. Wilson captures the dilemma of our era. Yet the solution of some folks is to disdain wisdom.

“Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists?” Rick Scott, the Florida governor,once asked. A leader of a prominent Internet company once told me that the firm regards admission to Harvard as a useful heuristic of talent, but a college education itself as useless.

Parents and students themselves are acting on these principles, retreating from the humanities. Among college graduates in 1971, there were about two business majors for each English major. Now there are seven times as many. (I was a political science major; if I were doing it over, I’d be an economics major with a foot in the humanities.)

I’ve been thinking about this after reading Fareed Zakaria’s smart new book, “In Defense of a Liberal Education.” Like Zakaria, I think that the liberal arts teach critical thinking (not to mention nifty words like “heuristic”).

So, to answer the skeptics, here are my three reasons the humanities enrich our souls and sometimes even our pocketbooks as well.

First, liberal arts equip students with communications and interpersonal skills that are valuable and genuinely rewarded in the labor force, especially when accompanied by technical abilities.

“A broad liberal arts education is a key pathway to success in the 21st-century economy,” says Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard. Katz says that the economic return to pure technical skills has flattened, and the highest return now goes to those who combine soft skills — excellence at communicating and working with people — with technical skills.

“So I think a humanities major who also did a lot of computer science, economics, psychology, or other sciences can be quite valuable and have great career flexibility,” Katz said. “But you need both, in my view, to maximize your potential. And an economics major or computer science major or biology or engineering or physics major who takes serious courses in the humanities and history also will be a much more valuable scientist, financial professional, economist, or entrepreneur.”

My second reason: We need people conversant with the humanities to help reach wise public policy decisions, even about the sciences. Technology companies must constantly weigh ethical decisions: Where should Facebook set its privacy defaults, and should it tolerate glimpses of nudity? Should Twitter close accounts that seem sympathetic to terrorists? How should Google handle sex and violence, or defamatory articles?

In the policy realm, one of the most important decisions we humans will have to make is whether to allow germline gene modification. This might eliminate certain diseases, ease suffering, make our offspring smarter and more beautiful. But it would also change our species. It would enable the wealthy to concoct superchildren. It’s exhilarating and terrifying.

To weigh these issues, regulators should be informed by first-rate science, but also by first-rate humanism. After all, Homer addressed similar issues three millenniums ago.

In “The Odyssey,” the beautiful nymph Calypso offers immortality to Odysseus if he will stay on her island. After a fling with her, Odysseus ultimately rejects the offer because he misses his wife, Penelope. He turns down godlike immortality to embrace suffering and death that are essential to the human condition.

Likewise, when the President’s Council on Bioethics issued its report in 2002, “Human Cloning and Human Dignity,” it cited scientific journals but also Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.” Even science depends upon the humanities to shape judgments about ethics, limits and values.

Third, wherever our careers lie, much of our happiness depends upon our interactions with those around us, and there’s some evidence that literature nurtures a richer emotional intelligence.

Science magazine published five studies indicating that research subjects who read literary fiction did better at assessing the feelings of a person in a photo than those who read nonfiction or popular fiction. Literature seems to offer lessons in human nature that help us decode the world around us and be better friends.

Literature also builds bridges of understanding. Toni Morrison has helped all America understand African-American life. Jhumpa Lahiri illuminated immigrant contradictions. Khaled Hosseini opened windows on Afghanistan.

In short, it makes eminent sense to study coding and statistics today, but also history and literature.

John Adams had it right when he wrote to his wife, Abigail, in 1780: “I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History and Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.”

The following is an excerpt from an article by Ben Valentine of Hyperallergic, published April 7, 2015:

Not long ago I wrote an article celebrating the work being done by cyberfeminist collective Deep Lab. In a post-Snowden world that’s seen few legal or structural changes since the first leaks, and one that’s filled with male-dominated tech conferences that sound more like advertising than critical discussion, I still consider Deep Lab’s work to be invaluable.

However, after the piece was published, Dorothy Santos — a writer, curator, and friend who’s currently organizing an exhibition on privacy and surveillance and their relationship to gentrification in the Bay Area — wrote to me to express concerns about the lack of women of color (WOC) and queer or trans women of color (QTWOC) artists in Deep Lab. She questioned why I didn’t discuss that lack of representation in my article.

With Santos’s encouragement, I decided it would be valuable to do a follow-up piece and include perspectives from WOC and QTWOC artists and writers regarding Deep Lab, new media and technology-based art, and representation. We emailed a small questionnaire to 20 such women. Seven responded, and their comments are featured below along with Santos’s own answers. We encourage any WOC/QTWOC readers to comment on this article or email to share your perspectives. As Deep Lab continues its work in 2015, with exciting partnerships with the MIT Media Laboratory and NEW INC, we hope these voices will be taken into account.

Ben Valentine: How do you feel about the overrepresentation of whiteness in media, especially in projects such as Deep Lab, which seeks to nurture radical and marginalized voices?

Dorothy Santos (DS): I feel a strong sense of frustration, but I am resigned to the lack of representation. The second part of the question is tricky: If radical and marginalized voices were meant to be a part of the conversation, why was the group specifically hand-picked? Why not allow women to have a seat at the table and join the conversation? It becomes challenging when WOC and QTWOC are exchanging and sharing knowledge only among themselves — the situation becomes circular. The internet certainly allows for groups to engage in global conversations, but the fact remains that a “congress of cyberfeminist[s]”comprised of predominantly cis white women discussing issues of privacy, surveillance, new media, and digital art at a prestigious university doesn’t exactly help the communities that become the subjects of their discussions. It can be isolating to women in search of this type of (necessary) dialogue.

I acknowledge that everything can’t be covered in a mere week. For the record, the work produced by Deep Lab, from the recordings available on YouTube to the anthology, is invaluable and necessary. It is deeply impactful and influential. Yet I cannot help but perceive this work as being done in an insular manner that presents a highly privileged perspective.

Anonymous #1: It has always appeared that white people are more recognized for these positions, to speak neutrally about social issues to mainstream audiences. And white people are more often granted the power and opportunity and time to work in those places. This has been the norm throughout my education, and it makes predominantly non-white or visible minority groups who work with technology appear less interesting to white audiences, who might not be able to take into account the culturally specific and identity-related needs of marginalized people.

Anuradha Vikram (AV), educator, writer, curator at 18th Street Arts Center: I think projects like Deep Lab reflect the limited access to new technologies and media representation offered to people of color. It’s advantageous for them to reach out to more women of color for inclusion, certainly. Women of color have different and necessary perspectives on questions of surveillance, criminalization, and embodiment that need to be represented. It’s not fair to call them an exclusively white collective, though — they are underrepresented with respect to WOC but not totally unrepresented. Equally problematic is our overemphasis on American technologists when much of the most interesting work in this area is being done in places where technology is transforming economics and culture such as China, India, Brazil.

Anonymous #2: Whatever bias and discrimination that is perpetuated on the internet is purely imposed from the real world.

That being said, when I first discovered Deep Lab, I did not take into account or really notice their whiteness. I see a group of strong females coming together to voice their opinions and push for gender equality.

I only briefly went through the Deep Lab manifesto, but from what I’ve gathered, they address issues that concern people globally, regardless of race and gender. Deep Lab is in an infantile state, so there is much potential for growth for WOC and QTWOC.

…

Read the entire interview on Hyperallergic here.