Inspired by a post on web developer Kronda Adair’s blog, I thought it would be fun to tell my own nerd story. Fun, but also revealing on a number of levels. I think it’s a story playing out every day in many STEM/STEAM focused classrooms and other spaces in the current teach-your-child-to-code United States.
I spent a lot of my childhood in the company of older, male cousins. I loved playing sports, building model cars and airplanes, and reading Popular Mechanics with them. My cousin Jimmy was always working on British sports cars. He and his brother Frank worked in a home-based electronics repair business and drove around in a van crammed with soldering equipment, wires, cables, and tools. I was fascinated by the exotic tools they had and I loved hanging around in their basement watching them work.
Jimmy became a dentist, a logical fit given his skill at building models and his aptitude for science. Frank went to work for the electric company in the mid-sized city we lived in. Me? I followed a different path.
It was one thing to hang around with my cousins when I was in grade school, but when I went to college, having a top notch social life was pretty high on my “to do” list. While all freshman were required to take computer programming at the university I attended, I quickly noticed after spending many bleary eyed late nights in the computer lab, that this class was not aiding my quest for a stellar social life. I did enjoy learning how to program, but since I couldn’t imagine what I personally would want to program, I pretty much capped my CS endeavors at that first class. And that cap stayed on pretty tightly for years.
One day while browsing in a bookstore, the cover of a book titled “Net Chick: A Smart-Girl Guide to the Wired World” caught my eye. The cover was very colorful and the inside was full of interviews with women in the tech world. There was even a section on coding a web page with HTML. I have no idea why that book spoke to me so loudly, but it’s the thing I credit with unleashing whatever curiosity was sparked in me during that initial programming class years before.
After reading the Net Chick book, I began to hand code web sites for fun. The sites were simple to be sure, but because one of them got a top placement in Yahoo’s search engine, I got thousands of hits each month and received lots of email and “fan mail” from site visitors who seemed to enjoy the content I was putting up. I mostly blogged about pop culture from a feminist point of view (ok, a very snarky feminist point of view), but I was hooked on being able to interact with so many people and thrilled that I had an audience for my writing.
A friend of mine hoping to make a career change asked me to sign up for some programming courses at a local technical college with her. I did, and when she dropped out of the program after the first semester, I kept going until I got a certificate in web development. Suddenly, the stacks of O’Reilly books my husband, a software engineer, had lying around our place took on a magical quality. I “borrowed” his Perl book. And his Javascript book. Then I got a few PHP books of my own. I think we shared a Linux administration book at one point but I know I eventually got a copy for myself.
I landed my first job as a web developer for a university near the Vermont border. I was hired to build an online learning program from scratch. I ran the server we used to power our LMS, supported the software, wrote PHP scripts to bolster the web interface, trained faculty, and more. And then I hit another fork in the road. I could see one path: more technical, more “sys admin-y”. And I could see another: more end-user focused. That’s the one I picked. I definitely fall on the UI/UX side of things. In that relentlessly popular book “What Color is Your Parachute?” I always come out as someone who wants to work with “people” and not “things” or “objects”. When my work starts skewing towards “things” and away from “people” I get uncomfortable. When it comes to technology, it’s what makes things better, easier, more satisfying for people that interests me.
I’m not in love with technology. But I like using it as a tool to do things I want to do. I think this is an issue central to so many current efforts to get more girls and women into technical careers. What’s missing is the “why” for them. “Because you can” or “because it’s there” aren’t especially compelling reasons for many tween and teen girls.
I know those certainly weren’t compelling reasons for me. I didn’t care about coding until I wanted to build a web page. I wanted to build a web page because I wanted to communicate with other people. I also wanted to belong to this interesting community of women in the tech world that I read about in the Net Chick book. Communication and community were my reasons for getting involved with technology. Now that I work in a technical field, my reasons for staying in it are a little more varied.
I’m sure a lot of girls grow up like I did, hanging around with boys and liking a lot of the same things that boys do. But at some point, most girls veer off onto other paths. Many have stronger interests in other areas but some just can’t see themselves in certain roles or occupations. In my “real” life, I didn’t know any other women who were coders and developers (I lived in a very small town in a rural area so this is not too surprising). But my world changed when I found out about other women (possibly like me) who were running their own web sites and web design companies. While I felt I had nothing in common with the male CS students I saw in the computer lab back in college, I definitely felt a kinship with the tech women in the NetChick book and with the women I met online through their websites. If nothing else, I certainly wanted to be like them! A lot of times attempts to reach girls and young women that focus on fashion, pretty colors, socializing, and crafts are trivialized and even maligned. But the bright colors on a paperback in a random bookstore caught my eye and the stories of the women inside the book drew me into a career in a technical field. Pretty powerful for something so “trivial”.