Twelve years ago, Prerna* had just graduated from a top engineering college, gotten placed in an excellent upcoming IT company that promised to help with her Masters’ degree and give her the chance to work in the U.S. Seven months ago, she finally decided she needed a new dream. “It’s not that things were devastatingly terrible,” she says quietly. “It’s just that you get tired of pushing against a wall. Boys with much less experience than mine were being given a lot more responsibility, perks, promotions. My work was never mediocre; in fact I have been commended quite a few times. But all of the challenging, exciting work never made it to my door. It was a quiet sort of a statement — you’re a woman, we can’t trust you with our top projects.”
Two years ago, Google Developers Group, Chennai, hosted the city’s first-ever Devfestw — a developers’ fest solely for women. The panellists were all women, as was the (mostly) college-going audience. While Sarada Ramani, CEO of CI.COM, talked about how every year, on an average, 52 per cent of the entry-level jobs in IT went to women, yet at the middle level, the ‘leaky bucket’ syndrome kicked in and more than half of that workforce vanished, I looked around and sure enough, four-fifths of the organisers were men.
A lot has been discussed ad nauseam about sexism in IT. The level ranges from overt to subtle. Female engineers have to field questions like “Are you married? Do you have children? How will you manage them while working here full time? When do you think you’ll get married? We only want to know so that we can figure how long you’ll work for us. Will your family/in-laws be okay with you working the night shift? Will you be able to juggle travelling for work and your marriage?” in job interviews. And top entrepreneurs are asked what it feels like to be a ‘woman founder’ in newspaper interviews. Meanwhile, no one asks a man how he’d juggle marriage/kids/in-laws/travelling/night shifts or how it feels to be a ‘top male techie’.
One might argue that there are quite a few top technology entrepreneurs, both abroad and in India who are women — Aditi Gupta, Menstrupedia; Sabina Chopra, Yatra; Chitra Gurnani, Thrillophilia; Valerie Wagoner, Zipdial (who famously quipped at a reporter, “Don’t call me a woman founder”); Richa Kar, Zivame; just to name a few — but the fact remains that the number is simply not enough and is skewed in favour of men. There have been numerous excellent, comprehensive articles on the topic, like the one in Newsweek recently, ‘What Silicon Valley Thinks of Women’. Apart from keeping the Twitterati buzzing about its controversial, some say sexist, cover (the cartoon of a woman whose skirt is being lifted up from the back by a mouse icon), the magazine’s story covered a lot of ground on the hows, whys and whats of gender discrimination in technology.
The numbers are hard to argue with — Google, for example, published January, 2014, global gender numbers on its >blog in May, 2014. And till now those numbers haven’t budged, or been >updated . In case you were wondering, Google’s global workforce comprises 70 per cent men and 30 per cent women. Also, according to an article in New Statesman a month ago, “Twitter’s staff is 70 per cent male, with men making up 79 per cent of leadership and a whopping 90 per cent of the engineering staff… There is a similar gender gap at Facebook, where 85 per cent of the tech staff are (sic) men. Overall, the company is 69 per cent male…” (‘Silicon Valley sexism: why it matters that the internet is made by men, for men’). And up until last year, ‘Amazon employed 18 women among 120 most senior managers’, according to The Guardian . The problem, however, does not just rest with IT; it is common for other STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) fields as well. And all of that is spilling over online and into entertainment.
“There are vicious trolls, there are those that think this is a joke, a time-pass and then there is the passive-aggressive type,” says Ashwini Asokan, co-founder and CEO of Mad Street Den, who herself was part of a fierce debate on sexist trolling against women on Facebook recently. While the post on a start-ups page was innocuous by itself — a piece on a woman entrepreneur — Asokan’s comments on the post faced a barrage of vicious trolling. When she was driven to abusing back, the moderator publicly asked her to back off, while claiming he had chastised the men attacking her privately. “When I asked him, aren’t you going to say anything to the men whose comments are hate-filled and misogynistic, he said he’d already chastised them in private. Can you believe that? We had quite the back and forth on Twitter. A lot of people stood up against him.” The post was later taken down altogether.
It doesn’t matter if a woman is a CEO or a regular Jane. There is always a spewing of hate if she voices an unpopular opinion. Case in point: #GamerGate. The hashtag became exceedingly popular during the latter half of last year and came to symbolise the vitriolic attacks against female game developers and game critics, and against journalists focussing on feminism in games — a disservice to the kind of coverage the #GamerGaters claimed the gaming industry actually deserved. It started with the online harassment of Zoe Quinn and Brianna Wuu, both game developers; Anita Sarkeesian, a gaming critic; Mattie Bryce, a writer; and Jenn Frank, an award-winning games journalist, and quickly spread; the trolls’ sole purpose being to malign anyone remotely feminist in the industry. What it all boiled down to, however, is that feminist gamers, developers and gaming journalists were seen as ‘outsiders’ who disturbed the status quo — interlopers who forced men to look beyond games that had them in heroic, most often chauvinistic, roles, ready to rescue hyper-sexualised damsels in distress. While some saw the #GamerGate movement as a success, as it promoted “scepticism about videogame journalism,” said Jordan Ephraim, a gaming writer for What Culture in a Vox article (‘#GamerGate: Here’s why everybody in the video game world is fighting’). But, as Todd Wanderverff went on to explain in the same article, “a lot of what #GamerGaters really want seems to be about things that are so nebulous as to be meaningless… to stop covering issues of female representation in games… given the increased prominence of women as both game players and people within the industry, this is almost certainly not going to happen.” Cold comfort, however, to Bryce and Frank, both of whom have stated they will not write about games any more.
And then we move on to popular culture, where television series like The Big Bang Theory , Silicon Valley , The IT Crowd , and reality shows like King of the Nerds rule the roost. While the first two seasons of King of the Nerds (the show is in its third season) were won by women — Celeste Anderson and Kayla LaFrance, in that order — the other geek/nerdist TV shows fail to pass the Bechdel Test. The IT Crowd , a British sitcom that ran from 2006 to 2013, was all about the stereotypes. It revolved around three employees of the fictional Reynholm Industries’ IT department, with Maurice Moss, the geek genius; Roy Trenneman, a bit of a slacker; and the sole woman, Jen Barber, the HOD who knew zilch about IT. Silicon Valley — a series about the young Turks and start-ups of the actual Silicon Valley that premiered last year, and currently holds a 96 per cent ‘Certified Fresh’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes — has a number of main cast members of whom only one is female. Monica’s character plays assistant to an investor and basically does secretarial jobs and is touted to be the potential love interest of Richard Hendriks, the programmer protagonist, in the next season. In fact, the only professional female to have lines on the show thus far has been Kara Swisher, the tech journalist, who had a brief cameo in the season one finale.
The Big Bang Theory (in its eighth season now and massively popular) is about four friends — two physicists, an astrophysicist and an aerospace engineer. While Sheldon Cooper’s girl Amy Farrah Fowler is a neuroscientist and Howard Wolowitz’s wife Bernadette Rostenkowski a microbiologist, Leonard Hofstadter’s fiancée Penny is a former waitress/struggling actress currently employed as a pharmaceutical sales rep, while Rajesh Koothrapalli has only recently started dating Emily Sweeney, a dermatologist. A majority of the seasons have focussed on the romance between Leonard and Penny, with Bernadette and Amy starting out as recurring characters and many jokes revolving around Penny being unable to understand Leonard’s ‘nerdspeak’ and Sheldon not considering her ‘worthy’ enough. However, The Big Bang Theory ’s treatment of women characters is a lot better than S ilicon Valley , not least because they are shown to be a part of STEM (minus Penny, of course).
Unfortunately, perhaps it is unfair to judge popular culture too harshly. After all, it is only echoing reality.
*Name changed to protect privacy.
