Dusty World: #feminism

Showing posts with label #feminism. Show all posts

Monday, 20 May 2019

Privilege Masquerading as Superiority

Last year while at the CyberTitan National Finals in Fredericton I happened to be standing by Sandra Saric, ICTC's VP of talent innovation, during a photo opportunity where the fifty or so student competitors were all together on a long stairway. Under her breath she wondered, "where are all the girls?" There were maybe three or four female contestants. Sandra's comment resonated with me and I became determined to put together a female team that would get their own points and where no one is 'just a sub'.

CyberTitan and Cyberpatriot have doubled down on this focus on bringing women into a cybersecurity industry that has only moved from 11% to 20% female participation in the past five years. For the 2018-19 season any all-female teams had their costs waived. For a program that isn't rolling in support, that made a big difference and enabled me to pursue this inequity.

Graduating girls into non-traditional careers is an ongoing challenge in education. Pushing against social norms is never easy, particularly so in our conservative, rural school where gender expectations tend to be even more binary and specialized program support significantly lower than in urban environments. I've managed to have one or two graduating female computer technology focused students each year, but even that small step has only come after massive effort, and it's not nearly enough. Even with all that stacked against us, we still managed a 33% female participation rate in CyberTitan this year, and of our six Skills Ontario competitors, two were female. We're aiming to raise that even higher next year.

This year CyberTitan made a point of trying to address the very one sided gender participation in the cybersecurity industry by making the national wildcard position open to all-female teams. There were only 15 out of 190+ teams in the competition, and our Terabytches finished in top spot. We were delighted to discover that one of our boy's teams actually finished one place out of the top four eastern teams. A number of people (oddly all male) grumbled about the all-female wildcard spot, but the irony is that we knocked ourselves out of the finals.

Taking an all-female team meant that I needed a female chaperone with us. Fortunately, our board's head of dual credit programming is a triple threat. Not only is she very tech focused (her student just won top secondary brick layer in Ontario!), but she's also computer science qualified and an absolute joy to travel with (I went to Skills Canada Nationals in Edmonton with her last year), so I quickly asked her to join us when the call came through to bring our girls to nationals. Not only did she not need coverage herself, but she kindly covered mine so my school literally paid nothing for this trip.

I like to think I'm pretty sensitive to gender roles in the first place, but taking an all-female crew to this event had me constantly seeing micro-aggressions I might have otherwise missed. Within five minutes of picking up the Toronto (all-male) teams on the bus ride to Ottawa, one of them had intimated that we were only there because we're a girl's team. Another later said that it's not fair that girls are getting special attention. It must be tough when everything isn't about you all the time. These comments were a daily occurrence from all the other teams, even the two co-ed ones, one of the girls of which said that she was just the sub.

That same Toronto team was able to attentively listen to a male speaker during the visits to cybersecurity companies in the Ottawa area after the competition, but the moment a woman stepped up to speak they began a loud and rude conversation among themselves. I wonder how often these little princes (who did ever so well in the competition) have had their gender superiority enforced to develop such outstanding habits.

Walking in to the competition, our team had all signed in but one and as she reached for the pen a boy from another team stepped in front of her like she wasn't there. Talking to Joanne and the team about it after, they shrugged and said, "you get used to it." By that point I'd been triggered by this so much that my already light grip on my aspie-ness was slipping and I was starting to get right angry, but even that anger response is couched in a male sense of privilege. When a man gets angry it's seen as assertiveness, when a woman gets angry she's a bitch, which brings up yet another point.

After fighting to get a team together against overwhelmingly genderized expectations in our community, and encouraging that team to develop a representative sense of identity in an overwhelmingly male contest, and then having to push back when the powers that be didn't like the name, you'd think this was all starting to get too heavy, but it has only clarified my sense of purpose.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if girls didn't have to get used to being invisible and could self-identify without being told what they can and cannot be called? Wouldn't it be wonderful if everyone could be what they are and explore what they could be without some small minded traditionalist trying to put them in a superficial box? When you push back against that social apathy you get a surprising amount of kickback from the people it benefits. Ontario's current political mess is entirely a result of that conservative push back.

You even get kick back from the people it subjugates. At an ICT teacher's meeting earlier in the year, a teacher from an Ottawa school said she would never run an all female team because it isn't fair to her boys. Were everything else level, I'd agree with her sentiment, but in the landslide of unfairness around us, you'd have to be wilfully blind to ignore historically integrated misogyny in order to be 'fair to your boys'. This teacher taught at the local International Baccalaureate school, which brings up yet another side of competition and privilege.

Toronto, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Vancouver... Fergus. Your
usual expected centres of digital excellence.

We're a rural composite school that spreads itself thin catering to our entire community. The major industry in our region is farming, we recently had our annual Tractor Day. Our school contains programs for developmentally delayed students and has a sizable special needs student population. We also manage to run a number of successful academic programs, but these are by no means our sole purpose. Tech exists in there somewhere.

As far as computer technology goes, our lab is a room full of ewaste we've re-purposed to teach ourselves technology. Thanks to some board SHSM funding and an industry donation from AMD we got the cheapest CPUs and motherboards we could find and put them in ten year old ewasted board PC cases running on ancient hard drives and power supplies. My students have never touched a new keyboard or mouse in our lab. We have to clear away our practice networks built of garbage because we have the largest tech classes in our board and province and we have no room in the lab to leave those networks set up with classes of 31 coming in next period. I don't imagine any of the other schools operate in a similar environment.

We returned the board desktops in our room to the school who redistributed that money into other departments because you can't teach digital skills on a locked down machine. We've received no school funding for the current lab. Looking into the backgrounds of who we were up against in this competition, every other school is a specialist school from an urban centre. In many cases they only teach top academic stream students pulled from other schools, and yet they can't put together an all-female team for this competition? One wonders if those competition focused, talent skimming schools inherently encourage gender imbalanced technology with their incessant focus on winning.

We're built on sweat and tears. Our disadvantage is also
our strength, but when it comes to competition it
gets frustrating not getting to run the same race
as everyone else.

The socio-economic side of privilege is every bit as battering as the sexism. One of the little princes from Toronto was telling a Terabytche about his parent free March Break touring Europe with his friends. She replied, "Hmm, I spent the week playing video games in Fergus..." Last year half of our CyberTitan team had never left Ontario before, let alone had a week in Europe with their buddies. The students who attend these specialized schools tend to come from economically enabled backgrounds and have parents looking to leverage that advantage. The amount of support those wealthy families rain down on these specialty programs is yet another advantage we can only dream of.

Think the privilege ends there? Because we cater to the full spectrum of students in our community, my classes are huge in order to reserve smaller sections for high-needs students (even though many of them also take my courses). In talking to other coaches, my class sizes were the largest by a range of 20% to a staggering 50%, and their operational budgets ranged from five to twenty times what mine are; I teach up to twice as many students with a fraction of the budget in a lab made out of garbage.

We were surprised to learn that we would be beginning the competition short-handed because one of the IB schools had exams some of their competitors had to write, so to keep it fair we'd all start short handed. Right. Gotta keep it fair.

That these urban, wealthy, gender empowered, privileged kids are flexing that privilege doesn't surprise me. That they continually complained about special treatment for a group of underfunded, rural, girls busting through gender expectations in technology, and who fought their way to these nationals literally using ewaste, only underlines the expectation that comes with their privilege; the expectation of winning.

In spite of these society-deep gender inequities and our specific socio-economic circumstances, the quality of my students continues to shine through. Finishing fifth last year with only four team members and two broken competition laptops was just the kind of awesomeness I've come to expect from our kids. It didn't occur to me to have the whole competition changed to make it fair for them.

This year we managed a ninth place finish out of ten teams, only beating the intermediate team who can't really compete with older more experienced teams anyway. That earned another round of, 'you're only here because you're girls' from other teams. After careful consideration I think my response is: if you came from where we came from, I wonder where you would have finished.

Is winning more about how you perform, or how you are economically and socially engineered to succeed? I'd love to give gender and social equity to those complaining about our presence. Having those boys experience people talking over them and stepping in front of them like they aren't there would be good for them. Facing down gender based prejudice in an industry where women are a small minority is an act of bravery, not special treatment. Wouldn't it be nice to bring everyone up instead of holding people down? To do that we need to recognize what winning is, and how privilege enables it.

Next year we have returning students for the first time in this competition. I'm aiming to put a co-ed team of our fiercest veteran cyber-ninjas together, build tech out of garbage and then win anyway. Nothing gets me going more than an underdog fight against privilege, especially when those with that privilege like to selectively ignore it.

I hope we'll be back with another all-female team too. Many of the Terabytches are interested in returning, but I can understand their hesitancy. Working through this competition has challenged them in ways that were unintended. If it was just about technical skill, then we'd have been much further down the track, but when you have to fight to be noticed and are constantly talked down to, it's exhausting. I get why they might think twice about going through the never-ending online and face to face sexism all over again. It'd be nice if other schools would pick this up and run with it instead of rolling their eyes at it.

Last year was all about giving the haves a black eye, and it thrilled me. We didn't return home with a trophy or a banner, but we were running a different race. I'm not even sure how anyone could make this an even race. Teaching technology is dependent upon access to it, and the digital divide is deep and wide. This year it was about something even bigger. Yet again we came home empty handed, but I think what we won was worth more than any of the prizes. I hope the girls see that and come back to defend their title.

An amazing opportunity and a chance to begin to create balance in an industry that lacks it. Great work ICTC!

Saturday, 30 March 2019

What's In a Name?

Last year we drove across Canada. We were having breakfast in Drumheller, Alberta when a big family came in. The grandfather/patriarch of the family was talking to a granddaughter he obviously dotes over. She was going into high school the next fall and he asked her what she was looking forward to and she said, "wood shop!" He immediately responded, "why would a pretty girl like you want to do that?" She did the only thing she could think to do without causing a scene and laughed. I didn't laugh, I was staggered by that exchange. Welcome to the world of #girlsinSTEM.

***

We're taking our second run at the CyberTitan cybersecurity competition this year. Last year's success suddenly meant a surge of interest, so I was able to quickly put together two teams. When none of them were female (again), I started asking the keenest girls from my junior classes if they would be interested in forming an all-female team.

Cyberpatriot, the competition that Canada's CyberTitan works out of, has also recognized how few women there are in STEM in general and information technology / cybersecurity in particular, so offered to waive the application fee for all-female teams this year. At national finals last year an ICTC organizer noted how few girls were in the competition. With that observation and support I was encouraged to convince six of my strongest former grade 9 girls to give it a go.

Early on I noticed how differently they approached the intensity of the competition from the two all-male teams. Where the boys tended to specialize and generally work independently, the girls were constantly conscious of how everyone on the team was contributing and were always finding ways to integrate each other into what they were doing. In some cases, members of the male teams did very little, but none of the girls were so relegated.

All three teams were new to this (all of last year's team graduated), so no one had previous experience of the competition, but the sense of ownership was much more absolute with the male teams. That sense of male ownership and dominance has been an ongoing theme in teaching technology - I've been writing about it for years.

One of my standard team building approaches is to encourage the teams to name themselves to help bring them together. Both male teams took names that were almost an afterthought because they were only loosely teams and didn't feel like it mattered, because it didn't - they all feel empowered and capable. The female team came back to me with something that spoke to their experience, charged them up and created a sense of identification and belonging vital to survival in such a difficult circumstance.

I have to admit, the name did cause me to pause, but my first reflex was to support this sense of edgy self-identification, especially when I saw how it unified the girls and helped them deal with the pressures on them. I passed on the name to admin and it was ok'd for competition with no discussion, which surprised me a bit, but also delighted me because it meant (I thought) that the the difficult circumstances of this team were being recognized.

A byte is 8 bits of information - typically a byte is used to denote a character in a computer using ASCII code, so each letter you see in this blog is a byte of information. A terabyte is an almost inconceivable number of bytes - about a trillion of them. How big is a trillion? If you spent a million dollars a day since year zero to now in 2019, you still wouldn't have spent a trillion dollars. It's a powerfully big number used in the male dominated field of computer technology to denote massive amounts of memory.

The girls' team came upon the idea of combining terabyte with bitches into the Terabytches. I doubt the grandpa telling his granddaughter to do girl-appropriate things would approve, but anyone with any degree of feminist sympathy would recognize the power in combining a traditionally derogatory term used to limit and belittle women (especially smart, vocal ones) with a powerful technology term from deep within tech-bro culture.

The Terabytches put up with the condescension (most of it unconsciously delivered without malice) of their male colleagues throughout the competition by looking after each other and generally ignoring it. In our conservative, rural school, the idea that tech is for boys is firmly entrenched in spite of my ongoing best efforts. At one point one of my seniors who is also an engineering lead (and a genuinely nice kid) said, "why are there so many girls in here?" at lunch one day. There were two girls in a room of 20+ people. I immediately called him on it and said, "you mean the two girls in here are too many?" and he quickly backpedaled, but the assumptions implicit in the comment still echoed around the room.

My male teams both did very well in this competition, but at no point did they ever feel like they shouldn't be there, the girls frequently questioned their presence in it. This was a subject that boys did in a room almost always full of boys. Even in my most gender diverse class I'm lucky to approach a 20/80 gender split, most are much less. Many of these culturally enabled boys will go on to successful careers in digital technology while being told, 'atta boy' by family and friends. Meanwhile, girls are being asked why they are wasting their prettiness on technology... and that's the nicest kind of negativity they'll get. More often it's outright dismissive chauvinism. The fact that they had each other to lean on allowed them to battle on in a chauvinistic field of fierce competition.

I had a female teacher tell me last week in Ottawa that she won't run all-female teams because it's unfair unless all of her students can participate. That kind of pick-and-choose-equity when it comes to fairness is very frustrating to hear, especially from a female colleague. When we don't live in a remotely equal society, saying that everyone should get the same supports is really code for maintaining status-quo prejudices.

The chauvinism the Terabytches face hasn't been limited to passive aggressive face to face situations. When we discovered that they had gotten through to nationals and neither of the male teams had, the first thing out of most of the boys was, 'they only got through because they are girls.' My response would be, 'they got as far as they did in a workspace and field of study that they were continually alienated and dismissed by." That included barbed comments from anonymous people online and having to study material written almost entirely by men for men while competing in a contest created almost entirely by men for men. A better question would be, with all of those advantages, why didn't you boys do better? The Terabytches finished right behind our senior all-male team in points and beat them in some aspects of the contest.

Picking a sharp name that counters stereotypes is not only a smart move from a competitive point of view, it also highlights all of those assumptions people make around gender and technology. Male teams can name themselves after historically white rapists and murderers, using names that glamourize violence. They can be raiders with creepy viking logos and (white) crusaders battling (brown) infidels, they can be marauders and pirates, cavaliers and knights. Pick your strong male historical context and there's your team name. The male culture of team naming also likes to identify with violent animals and revel in that association with male predators. If you see a bird logo it's a male-centric one. The cardinals are red, the blue jays are blue, the orioles are orange and the falcons are big and burley and aggressively male in appearance. If you want to go mythical, you'll see all sorts of griffins, dragons and argonauts, but medusas, sirens and harpies? Not so much, because the connotation is different. History and culture aren't kind to strong female stereotypes. When 'babe bunch', 'daisy dukes' and 'fembots' are in your list of 'top powerful female team names', you know we have a long way to go on this.

With media attention ramping up now that the Terabytches are the top all-female team in Canada, concerns have arisen around the name. Worries about how the media will spin this to create sensationalism are fair, but my first reflex is still one I'm comfortable with, especially knowing how intelligent and outspoken these Terabytches are. Having any male tell these young women that they can't create a strong, edgy team name that speaks to their experience in facing obvious and open sexism while outperforming all-male teams from all over the country is something I'm going to dig my heels in about. Should they face reductive, sensationalist press in the process of being national finalists, I have no doubt that everyone on the team will be a spectacular ambassador for girls in STEM.

Jaime, the reporter at out local paper, had a great interview with the girls the other week. She has written a newspaper article about it, but it's only the tip of a thirty minute interview that had the Terabytches talking so frankly about the challenges of competing as girls in such a male dominated contest that I was tearing up. The fact that they are an all-female team has allowed them to weather the negativity and succeed in spite of it. Though several of them are very competitive by nature, they all want to reform the team again next year and aim even higher. This is about so much more than where you place in a competition.

Competitive teams tend to double down on the male stereotypes when identifying themselves. If a female team attempts to do the same thing from their own lived experience, there are questions around appropriateness that start to feel like status quo sexism. Competing in the bro culture of technology in the male dominated world of cybersecurity in a conservative, rural community was always going to be an uphill struggle. I know the Terabytches are up for it. I need to lean on the strength of my convictions and back them through the continuous and sometimes overwhelming static. If every educator approached the sexism systemic in our subject areas with the same zeal, we could eventually level the playing field and let everyone participate on equal terms.

In the meanwhile, I'm proud to be a Terabytch!

Think I'm over stating male dominance in cybersecurity? As one of the most conservative specialties in a male dominated industry, women in cybersecurity face challenges a lot more perilous than an edgy team name. If you're an ally, be an ally:

https://hackernoon.com/trailblazing-women-in-the-cybersecurity-field-8743a39a00dc