A Trifle Absurd

The Shame of the Industry

8 March 2005 at 17.47 • in Programming

Shelley Powers satirizes, psychoanalyzes, and pulverizes the male-dominated world of blogging (with some explicit language). It’s the best kind of satire: hilariously funny, with a very serious point.

There are women out there blogging, and excellently: Rachelle Mee-Chapman and Julie Leung are good examples. But Shelley’s point is well-taken: the blogosphere is, tragically, by and large a boys’ club.

And if you look solely at programming, the situation is even worse, not just in blogging, but in the industry as a whole. A sad-but-true story: in my freshman year of college, we had a guest lecturer one day for the introductory C++ class. He insisted that zero was a natural number, but since we’d been taught that the natural numbers started at one, dissent arose. His counter: “How many women are there in this room?”

Since then I’ve worked on several development teams with fifty or more programmers. None had more than five women. We should be ashamed of that. There’s no excuse for that kind of imbalance — it’s not just imbalance, it’s injustice.

Keeping in mind G.K. Chesterton’s reminder (”What’s wrong with the world? I am.”), I want to find some way to be a force for change. I want to help, not just stand idly by and wag my finger at some imagined class of prejudiced people. But how? I don’t know yet.