An aerial view of the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. David L Ryan/The Boston Globe/Getty Images
“We’re 3 female computer scientists at MIT, here to answer questions about programming and academia. Ask us anything!” we wrote for our Reddit Ask Me Anything session last Friday. And then, boom:
“Why does it matter that you’re female?”
“Why did you put gender in the title?”
“Why should your gender matter if you’re talking about research?”
Dozens of questions like these were interspersed with marriage proposals and requests to “make me a sandwich” in our AMA. We had intended for the AMA to be a chance to answer questions about what our lives are like as PhD students at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), and what we could do to get more young people excited about programming.
The AMA became, to borrow one Reddit commenter’s phrase, “a parody of what it’s actually like to be a woman working in a STEM field.”
Elena Glassman, Neha Narula and Jean Yang
Elena Glassman, Neha Narula
and Jean Yang are Computer Science PhD students at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL).
As computer science PhD students, we were interested in fielding questions about programming, academia, MIT CSAIL, and how we got interested in the subject in the first place. As three of the few women in our department and as supporters of women pursuing STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics], we also wanted to let people know that we were interested in answering questions about what it is like to be women in a male-dominated field. We decided to actively highlight the fact that we were three female computer scientists doing an AMA, to serve as role models in a field that’s less than 20 percent female.
As it turned out, people were extremely interested in our AMA, though some not for the reasons we expected. Within an hour, the thread had rocketed to the Reddit front page, with hundreds of thousands of pageviews and more than 4,700 comments. But to our surprise, the most common questions were about why our gender was relevant at all. Some people wondered why we did not simply present ourselves as “computer scientists.” Others questioned if calling attention to gender perpetuated sexism. Yet others felt that we were taking advantage of the fact that we were women to get more attention for our AMA.
The interactions in the AMA itself showed that gender does still matter. Many of the comments and questions illustrated how women are often treated in male-dominated STEM fields. Commenters interacted with us in a way they would not have interacted with men, asking us about our bra sizes, how often we “copy male classmates’ answers,” and even demanding we show our contributions “or GTFO [Get The **** Out]”. One redditor helpfully called out the double standard, saying, “Don’t worry guys – when the male dog groomer did his AMA (where he specifically identified as male), there were also dozens of comments asking why his sex mattered. Oh no, wait, there weren’t.”
As for the question of whether we brought this treatment upon ourselves by mentioning our two X chromosomes, it is well known people give women on the internet a hard time whether they call attention to their gender or not. And as one redditor says, “Gender neutrality and a push for equal rights is prevalent precisely because men and women have fought for it to become a topic of discussion.”
The dynamics of our AMA reflects gender issues that lead to disparities in who chooses to pursue careers in STEM fields. People treat girls and boys differently from an early age, giving them different feedback and expectations. There is strong evidence that American culture discourages even girls who demonstrate exceptional talent from pursuing STEM disciplines. For those few young women who continue to study science or engineering in college, there is still a good chance that they will leave afterward. There has recently been much discussion about how tech culture causes women to leave “in droves;” the “leaky pipeline” phenomenon of females choosing to stop pursuing careers in STEM is a well-known problem.
That’s why we wanted to talk about it. Head on. We made gender an explicit issue in the AMA to engage our audience in a discussion about both the existing problems and potential solutions. And in that way, it was a success. We were able to raise awareness about technical privilege, implicit bias, and imposter syndrome. The questions and responses in the AMA also gave both male and female Redditors a platform to share their own experiences in and suggestions for environments unfriendly to women. Many women supported our answers by telling stories of their own experiences. Numerous men asked how they could help be allies–and many people jumped in to offer helpful responses.
This is how change happens. Though we were surprised by the sheer amount of sexist and undermining comments, the overall interactions between commenters were heartening–and in many ways far more valuable than any of our individual contributions to the AMA. There is no denying that gender issues remain relevant in science and still often keep women out of science. By raising awareness and generating discussion, we hope to help women and other minorities feel more supported pursuing careers in STEM. We won’t keep quiet. You can keep asking us anything.
More about the authors:
Elena Glassman creates tools for teaching programming to thousands of students at once, and is President of MIT-MEET, which helps teach gifted Palestinians and Israelis computer science and teamwork in Jerusalem.
Neha Narula works on distributed systems and makes multicore databases go faster, and was previously a senior software engineer at Google.
Jean Yang created the verified Verve operating system and the Jeeves programming language, and also co-founded Graduate Women at MIT.
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