Women, IT and the C-word

I've been on vacation, so I missed "International Why the @#$%! Aren't Women Going Into Computer Science? Day" on Monday. As it happens, we've also had a houseguest: an about-to-graduate female college student who'll be in the market for an IT job in a few months.

But reading all this stuff about the lack of women in computer science and IT leads me to wonder why most of the suggestions floated for increasing the numbers of women in IT strike me as just plain dumb.

Look, women can program computers. For a long time, women were the only ones who did -- it was the grunt work of computing, from the days of patch wires up through the early decades of coding. Women can also assemble and test hardware (they're the ones who "man" the assembly lines at many high-tech manufacturers). Ability isn't the question.

Neither is interest. Girls use computers. They make web pages. They IM. They get addicted to games (though not always the same games boys get addicted to).

I think it really comes down to one thing: Confidence. The newspaper and blog articles on this topic all eventually echo the same theme -- that female computer science students tend to be less confident than male CS students.

And you don't promote confidence by adjusting college curricula or redesigning computer games. Confidence comes from doing things successfully. And especially from succeeding after failing first and then trying again.

Here's Tara Espiritu, a Tufts student interviewed for a Boston Globe article, telling her no-confidence story:

Her father is a programmer, and she took Advanced Placement computer science in high school. Because she scored well on the AP exam, she started out at Tufts in an upper-level class, in which she was one of a handful of women. The same men always spoke up, often to raise some technical point that meant nothing to Espiritu. She never raised her hand. ''I have not built my own computer, I don't know everything about all the different operating systems," she said. ''These people would just sit in the front of the class and ask these complicated questions. I had no idea what they were talking about."

Well, of course not. Neither did a lot of other people in that class. But Espiritu's reaction wasn't to ask for clarification, or peg these few geek wizards as potential resources, or even to write them off as showoffs. Instead, she was intimidated by them. That's a lack of confidence. And she's right -- a big part of the reason she lacks confidence is because she lacks experience.

Which brings me back to our houseguest. I spent a few long hours on Tuesday swapping parts around in some aging classic Macs. She'd never seen the inside of a classic Mac, so she did a little spectating. She also got to watch as I yelled, snarled and occasionally swore at the hardware. Nothing new there: She's seen me fixing computers for most of her life. She's seen me fail, and keep trying, and usually succeed. But she knows that failure is always an option, and that frustration is usually part of the game.

(For the record, I managed to resurrect a dead Mac SE/30 and a Mac Classic. I know what was wrong with the SE/30. But I still can't figure out why the dead-as-a-doornail Classic motherboard started working again. She witnessed that clueless success, too.)

Last week, I was the spectator, watching her do what should have been a straightforward install of Windows XP on a newly built PC. But when the time came, XP wouldn't accept the product key. She concluded that the problem was someone else's previous aborted attempt to install a different version of XP on the hard drive. Erasing files didn't solve the problem. Neither did repartitioning. I finally suggested installing Linux to obliterate the traces of Windows, then installing XP. That worked.

Did the failures make her feel frustrated? Sure. Less confident? Maybe, but she knew I was just as sure as she had been that erasing and repartitioning should have worked. And she knew once that blue text screen came up for a fresh XP install, she had it nailed.

She knows she doesn't know everything. But she'll never be intimidated or silenced by people who know more than she does.

Women in IT and computer science need that confidence. And it'll only come from experience and success-after-failure. That, in turn, may come from early role models or mentoring or experimentation or curiosity or peer pressure or necessity.

But if we want more women to succeed in IT, they need that confidence. Focusing on anything else is just thrashing around.