I am not a hacker. I wouldn’t mind becoming one, but I am only in the very beginning stages of acquiring the requisite skills; I started learning to program less than six months ago, and what I understand of computer science would fit in one of those little O’Reilly Pocket References. I don’t even have a Linux box (I want one, quite badly, but don’t have the energy just now to climb the newbie learning curve).

I am, however, fascinated by hackerdom, enthusiastic about Open Source in general and Linux in particular, and excited about what I can already do with Python. I even have a small Python program that I’m about to release as Open Source (although the damn thing needs to be rewritten from scratch with classes, and will be as soon as I get the chance). The user interaction is text-based because I can’t write a GUI yet, and it utterly lacks what I understand to be good coding style—but it does work. It does work.

It seems I’m a rare breed, though, judging from comments I’ve seen on the Python edu-sig mailing list (which promotes “Computer Programming for Everyone” and the use of computers in education) and elsewhere. There aren’t too many women who can program, apparently (even at my beginner level), and there seem to be even fewer who program for fun. I’ve never heard of any hacker demigoddesses; it’s vastly easier to find out about hackers’ wives!

I don’t know why this is. I suspect that anyone who claims to know is at best only partially in possession of the truth. Still, in the spirit of Eric S. Raymond’s amateur anthropologizing, I’d like to offer a few thoughts that might help the hacker community go co-ed.

A copy of the Python supplement to Linux Journal hit my desk this morning, and I read it eagerly (and laughed at the Monty Python take-offs, figurative and literal). Having recently started lurking on edu-sig, I read Guido van Rossum’s article on CP4E with especial interest. This article attempts to illustrate how children might soon learn Python programming, just as they learn reading and mathematics.

So, what are the little nippers up to, according to van Rossum? Let’s see:

“We walk up to two girls in the back of the class who are busy debugging a Barbie dress-up game used as an exercise.”

Excuse me while I barf. Do people really wonder why women aren’t hackers?

It’s bad enough, to start with, that the boys and the girls are in separate corners, doing Boy Stuff and Girl Stuff. I wish I could say that I found this automatic assumption that Boys and Girls never do the same Stuff an aberration among technogeeks, but I’m afraid I don’t. Hackers assume that hackers (and those capable of becoming hackers) are male.

Let us examine Eric S. Raymond for a moment, as long as I’m making myself universally hated by going after sacred cows. His "How to Become a Hacker” guide has a slightly unsettling bit:

"There are even growing numbers of people who realize that hackers are often high-quality lover and spouse material. For more on this, see Girl’s Guide to Geek Guys (http://www.bunnyhop.com/BH5/geekguys.html).”

What, no Geek Girls? Of course not (quoth the hacker). Girls aren’t geeks.

It’s not Raymond’s fault that no one’s written the Guy’s Guide to Geek Girls. (I’m tempted to do it myself; I’m not a hacker, but I’m quite as geeky as the many geeks I know, male and female.) And I do appreciate “lover and spouse” as opposed to “lover and wife.” Still… a nod in the direction of Geek Girls would have been quite appropriate. What would be even more appropriate (though not under Raymond’s control, obviously) would be a rewrite of the Guide to Geek Guys as a plain old Guide to Geeks. (Upon reading the said Guide, I think that’s reasonable. I myself resemble the Geek Guys far more than I do the girls that the Guide tries to convince to go after Geek Guys.)

Rather more unsettling is the description of Seymour Cray as “Real Programmer macho supremo” in “A Brief History of Hackerdom.” Supremo I understand, but why macho? Possibly I am more sensitive to this than others, because my educational background is in Spanish and I understand better than the average gringo just what macho really means. I don’t think I’m overreacting, though; I honestly think this is the Male Hacker Assumption showing.

Returning to van Rossum, I don’t think I need to tell most women (or even most men) why the Barbie example is insulting, not to mention unrealistic. For those who do need an explanation, though, allow me to attempt one.

Women have spent a lot of time and energy this century explaining that they, and the little girls they once were, can and want to do more than play with dolls and pay meticulous attention to their personal appearance. The truth is that many women aren’t interested in these things at all. Women are very much fed up with the assumption that dolls-and-dresses is all little girls (and not-so-little girls; these children are supposed to be in middle school!) do.

Using dolls—especially Barbie dolls—in a serious context as the quintessential example of Girl Stuff turns women off in droves. A few women (like me) will be interested enough to roll their eyes tiredly and go on to the rest of the article anyway. Many others will drop the article—and the idea behind it—in disgust.

That the evangelist of CP4E doesn’t seem to understand this strikes me as a pretty good explanation for why more women aren’t hackers. If he doesn’t learn this, moreover, I think CP4E might as well be renamed CP4M.

Judging from edu-sig, the architects of CP4E are uneasily aware that women are indeed part of “everyone,” but are conspicuous by their absence from the CP4E crowd. They don’t seem to be entirely sure how to bring women to programming, or programming to women. I’d like to offer a hint or two in that direction.

When I was in middle school, I certainly wasn’t playing dressup with Barbie. (I never had a Barbie doll. Never wanted one.) I was interested in theatre, as it happens, and I played a number of “trouser roles” because a lot more girls were interested in theatre than boys, and by the time I was 12 I was 5-foot-8 and had a speaking voice that was lower than most middle-school-aged boys can manage due to inescapable deficiencies of the youthful male vocal apparatus. Something my drama coach said once (as he watched several girls competing for the attention of one of the few boys who participated in theatre) may prove enlightening for the CP4E and hacker communities: “I don’t understand why boys go out onto a football field and get sweaty, dirty, and hurt trying to attract girls. They should come and do theatre—where the girls are.”

I think van Rossum was trying to go “where the girls are” with his Barbie example, and I appreciate the attempt despite my (all too evident, I’m afraid) annoyance at the results. Perhaps a suggestion or two as to where we elusive females might be located, and how we can be hooked, would help. Sort of a Geek Guy’s Guide to Girls, as it were.

If you’ve read this far, you are probably wondering who I am, and what the heck I do with Python. Well, I’m the epitome of the effete, useless literature major that technogeeks love to hate, the kind of person (leaving my gender wholly aside) that CP4E would dearly love to know how to attract. Until a year ago, I was pursuing a Ph.D in Spanish historical linguistics. The job I found—and am still doing, and love—after I left grad school is SGML and XML work for publishing. I use Python for text processing of various flavors; I can’t write a GUI, but I can construct one helluva regular expression. (The program I want to release, incidentally, constructs an Open eBook package file given a directory of files belonging to an eBook. If you’re curious about Open eBook package files, check out http://www.openebook.org.)

Looking through edu-sig at the applications of Python that are being constructed in the context of CP4E, I notice a near-total dearth of text-related ideas. What I see are the same whizbangs that have been touted as computer-whizbangs-for-kids since I was a child being introduced to BASIC on an Apple II: robots, math games, pretty pictures.

I speak for many girls and women (and probably a healthy complement of boys and men) when I say I find this kind of toy excruciatingly boring, and unrelated to anything I do or have ever done. There certainly are girls who like robots, math games, and funky 3D stuff, and I suspect they represent the majority of female programmers today. (There certainly are boys who don’t—but enough do that these whizbangs have heretofore been sufficient to attract programmer material, so “boys who don’t” haven’t been an important focus of CP4E. This is, of course, wrong, and if what I am about to propose to attract women ends up attracting more men, too, then I’m more than satisfied.) For the rest of us, though, CP4E needs a major relevancy check.

In the course of my job, I deal with people who work for book publishers; checking my email address book, many more of my contacts are women than men. Off the top of my head, I can name several female Web designers I know (some of whom can program). I’m not even the only woman in the Electronic Publishing department here; counting our supervisor, three out of the six of us are women. I am a member of several mailing lists that discuss the nascent electronic book industry—plenty of women there! In case the thrust of my argument is not clear:

Lots of women (and men, too, for that matter) love text, work with text, and could use programming to work with text. To ignore text is to write these people off.

So what might van Rossum’s middle-school students—boys, girls, who cares?—be doing instead of playing with Barbie?

• They might be making interactive web pages; that’s the obvious answer.
• They might be writing and optimizing a search engine, though that might be a little advanced for middle school.
• They might be writing a program that produces all the forms of a Spanish verb given the infinitive (for extra credit—or perhaps as an extension written later in the year—the program should correctly handle stem-changing verbs and irregular first-person-singular-indicative forms).
• They might be working on speech synthesis, and gaining a solid experiential understanding of English orthography, phonetics, and phonology in the process.
• They might be programming a sentence generator, and refining it so that it does not generate syntactically unacceptable English sentences. (Forget sentence diagramming—what an utter waste that is!)
• The 2003 version of my old middle-school theatre crowd might be programming a theatre lighting system that reacts to the sound of particular lines, or coming up with a text-manipulation program to help directors decide where to cut lines in plays that are running long.

There are plenty of problem domains that Python can help with in the textual realm; in my grad student days, I played (in a rather hamfisted fashion) with using computers to help with linguistic analysis of texts. Just by way of example—it was a computer that finally determined once and for all that the brilliant Spanish play La Celestina really was written by two authors, not one. I hate to tell you how much ink was spilled on that question in academia before someone programmed a computer to look at vocabulary usage.

Moreover, there are at least as many children having problems with language skills as there are children who can’t do math. The CP4E enthusiasts are vocal in their desire to use programming to teach math; I hope I can be forgiven for being vocal about using it for language work. (Allow me to say to every technogeek who is now sneering, “Yeah, I’d hate to teach her calculus!” that I in fact got an A- in calculus in college—and I’ve had trouble teaching technogeeks Spanish, too.)

If CP4E wants to live up to its name, it must stop thinking of women as little fluffbrains who trick out their GUIs with “pink heart-shaped button”s, and it must make an effort to search out problem domains that women work on. Women can program, and will program if they can see the use of it—that’s how I got started programming, after all.

And, who knows? Perhaps some of them will become hackers. Real Programmers hembras supremas.

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