The inventor of the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has called for an end to the “stupid” male geek culture that disregards the work of capable female engineers, and puts others off entering the profession.

Berners-Lee said that a culture that avoided alienating women would attract more female programmers, which could lead to greater harmony of systems design. “If there were more women involved we could move towards interoperability. We have to change at every level,” he said.

According to Berners-Lee, a culture exists where women can be put off a career in technology both by “stupid” behaviour by some male “geeks”, and by the reactions of other women.

“It’s a complex problem — we find bias against women by women. There are bits of male geek culture and engineer culture that are stupid. They should realise that they could be alienating people who are smarter and better engineers,” said Berners-Lee.

Engineering research facilities that interview candidates based only on how many papers they have had published also risk adding to the problem, according to Berners-Lee, because of an apparent in-built bias against women.

One academic went through a sex change, submitted the same papers under both identities, and found that papers were accepted from a man but were rejected when they came from a woman, said the web inventor. This bias is unaccountable, but adds to institutional bias, he said.

All of this is well worth reading, especially if you’ve ever thought that not fitting in with the dominant culture in a technical field reflected some flaw in you. (It took me a long time to forgive myself for my failing to fit in in physics, but now I know that I’d been brainwashed to be a science worshiper.) Remember, science is not perfect; it has a culture, too, and like all cultures, it has its flaws.

Here’s a taste of what Zuska writes here about women in engineering (WIE) programs, whose value is being debated since women still make up less than 20% of engineering majors, even after nearly thirty years of programs encouraging women to go into these careers:

So are WIE programs a waste of time and resources? I don’t think so, for the following reasons. If a college of engineering is going to do little or nothing to change business as usual, then a WIE program provides a safe haven for the women who do manage to slog it out in the Boy’s Club. They need a place to go once in awhile to get advice on moron management, you know. WIE programs can help reinforce the belief that it’s not abnormal for a woman to love technology. They can also help women see that one need not be completely obsessed with technology to be a “real” engineer. In this case, WIE programs are truly there just to help women deal with the status quo….

I’ve always said that women don’t need programs to help them deal with engineering; they are perfectly capable of doing engineering. Engineering needs programs to help it become more inclusive.

Well, no duh. We know that women in engineering, and female geeks of all stripes, don’t just geek out all the time. People all have their needs for love, intimacy, and sex, regardless of what they choose to do for a career.

But I also don’t think that posing in lingerie in front of a camera is the best way to communicate the message that women can be multidimensional. Instead, it just replaces the stereotype of the geeky woman with the stereotype of the woman who is there for men’s sexual pleasure. I doubt that anyone who buys this calendar is going to be reading the information on the women’s majors. That’s probably written in much smaller print than those images of skin and lingerie splashed across the page.

Hey, I’m sure the modeling sessions were fun, and it’s people’s right to pose for a cheesecake calendar if they want to. But aren’t “tongue-in-cheek” pin-up calendars way overdone, anyway? And if people really want to see how female geekery and sex mix, the written word can put a far more nuanced point on the matter anyway—as SSAG contributors Violet Blue, Suzanne Franks, and Quinn Norton do in their essays!

UPDATE: Zuska just wrote about this calendar, too—and reminded me that there have been others like it just within the past year. People, how about a different calendar that tries to show how original and creative y’all can be, for a change? This pinup stuff really is sooooo boring on top of all the other things wrong with it!

As it happens, I’d already been reading a book titled A People’s History of Science by Clifford D. Conner. Since I’ve been reading Zuska’s blog I’ve become much more aware of how little I knew about the culture of science when I was in it, and that my notion of it being this pure world where the Truth was the main object was horribly misguided. (I’ll admit, at the same it wasn’t like I was totally pure in what I wanted from science: a good career, a place where I would be validated for what I felt at the time to be my chief talents, an intellectual playground.)

In Conner’s book, the bulk of scientific knowledge came out of the “hunter-gatherers, peasant farmers, sailors, miners, blacksmiths, folk healers, and others who wrested the means of their survival from an encounter with nature on a daily basis.” Some of the discoveries that were credited to “Great Men” were actually taken right out of the folk knowledge. And of course once science began to form its institutions, those were directed towards upholding a certain norm—a norm, of course, that would not rock the boats of those in power.

Conner writes of how the Royal Society, the UK’s academy of sciences and one of the oldest such societies, was formed in 1660 soon after the restoration of the monarchy to the throne after the country had been a republic and then ruled by a dictator over the previous couple of decades:

Although the ruling class in Restoration England was at first unwilling fully to embrace the new science, a new intellectual elite had nonetheless begun its rise to prominence. A major milestone in that process was the creation of the Royal Society, which gave institutional form to a new scientific ideology. Anxious to put the turmoil and divisiveness of the revolutionary years behind them, the society’s leaders explicitly ruled controversy over political, religious, and social problems outside the bounds of the new science. It was “not the business and design of the Royal Society,” Robert Hooke declared, to be “meddling with Divinity, Metaphysics, Moralls, Politicks, Grammar, Rhetoric, or Logick.”

“Enthusiasts” and “fanatics” would not be tolerated in their midst. Radical-minded people were thus excluded from the Royal Society, and the organization of science as a profession was consciously tailored to fit into a new kind of civil society that was rising in England. As the premier historian of the English Revolution explained, “The Society wanted science henceforth to be apolitical—which then as now meant conservative.”

The leaders of the Royal Society believed that by banning ideological discussion they had thereby exorcised ideology from science, but what they had actually accomplished was to assure the monopoly of their own elitist ideology. The neutrality that they promoted as the ideal of scientific objectivity was a fine-sounding abstraction, but in practice some people and some viewpoints were always “more equal” than others.

And this is the root of today’s science culture, in the Anglophone world at least. So much for Truth, huh?

I’m now beginning to feel that there should be a course, perhaps like Zuska’s, which everyone considering going into engineering, science, or math should take to give them a more comprehensive historical and sociological perspective than what they get in the strictly technical instruction. Although twenty years ago as a college freshman I would have dismissed this, I now think that this awareness is mandatory if science is to have any chance at being a more humane place in which people of all genders, colors, and ethnicities can thrive.

Anyway, go read Zuska’s analysis of how people should have handled the incredibly rude situation when a male professor from the Stone Age snubbed a female academic. In a nutshell: if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.

Zuska suspects that the “inappropriateness” of the book is due the fact that several essays have to do with sexuality and the female geek and perhaps some frank language. And she goes on to argue that you can’t have an honest discussion about women and science without acknowledging these issues. Here’s an excerpt of what Zuska writes:

A “role model” book for young girls has to address sex and sexuality. It has to show what it’s like to deal with the vast majority of boys who are intimidated by smart women; what it’s like to deal with the ever-present comments on your sexuality in the workplace; what it’s like to discover your sexuality within and because of your geekhood. I think these are the kinds of true life stories that can help girls, as much as or more so than one more nicely varnished volume about the handful of women who’ve won the Nobel Prize.

Writing about the intimate and personal lives of women geeks, and putting that writing into the hands of young girls, is a political act with the possibility for great reverberation. So it’s no wonder some people are going to be reluctant to find such writing “appropriate”.

Of course, you should read her complete entry.

Zuska is right that the truth isn’t very easy or welcome, because it can be a threat to the status quo. She’s talking here about the discussions of sex in the book, but I also think it’s important to talk about how science and technology careers are sold to girls as well. The thing is, the thinking seems to be that to inspire girls to keep up with science and technology, you have to keep it relentlessly positive, talking about how many opportunities they have and how great it is to be someone who’s succeeded in one of these fields. And it’s true—girls really do have lots of opportunities in the scientific and technical fields if they stick with it, and many women do succeed there. Inspiration most definitely comes from having good things to aspire to.

But not every female science/technology career thrives, and for a variety of reasons that can be very different from why men leave. It could be said, with apologies to Tolstoy, that happy careers are all alike, but every unhappy career experiences its own set of obstacles and setbacks. And I think that we shouldn’t sugarcoat the very real issues that a girl could face in her future if she’s considering going into some of the tougher technical careers.

For example, physics is a very beautiful science that can see some very ugly hierarchies, competitiveness, and people who don’t consider their effect on other people, among other things. (I’m sure it’s the case for other sciences as well; I just happen to know physics from experience.) But growing up in suburbia and hearing about the corporate politics that my dad had to deal with in the insurance world, I made the mistake of thinking that, because science seemed pure and beautiful, the scientific working world would be, too. (Back then engineering didn’t seem sexy enough to me, being so damn practical and prosaic, with its coefficients for this and all that focus on how things worked, not why.) And because I felt in my element at college and did well enough to be rewarded with fellowships as further encouragement to continue on to graduate school, of course I continued my education, extrapolating that things would continue to come up roses.

But they didn’t come up roses, partly for reasons that I was unprepared for. It wasn’t that I didn’t know that graduate school would be hard—no, I’d seen and talked to the graduate students around my undergrad campus. What I didn’t know at the start was how it’s better to take on a “less ambitious” problem that will get results and build your confidence as a researcher than to be the student to help a new advisor pioneer a new avenue of research. The latter might get you glory if it works out—or else lead to a world of frustration if it doesn’t. I didn’t know that one advisor managing two graduate students working on a single project is a very tricky situation, even if one of the students isn’t feeling a little paranoid about whether or not she belongs in graduate school since she can’t make even the least bit of headway in getting her part of the project to work even after a year and a half of effort. (Note to advisors who choose to tread into the dangerous 3-person dynamic—always make sure all three people are present whenever any change in the project is decided upon so that everyone can buy in to it. Decisions made in casual meetings of two people without informing the third are sure to breed suspicion.)

There’s lots of mistakes I made—and I’m sure many others have done as well—which are obvious to savvier people. But how savvy about the scientific world can you be in your early 20s—or teens? That’s where sugar-free books like She’s Such a Geek come in. Even though I didn’t get the physics career that once upon a time I had my heart set on—and though it took a while to get deprogrammed, now I see how leaving physics after my Ph.D. was the best decision for me—I still thought it would be important to tell my story. Because some young women may come up some of the same setbacks that I did, but at least I don’t want them to make my same mistakes.

Mine is not the happiest, most inspirational story, but I think it’s a necessary one for a bright, eager young woman: just because your math and science classes have been smooth sailing so far doesn’t mean that some weird political situation or other misstep couldn’t happen to you. And it can befall at any time: a good friend of mine who stayed in physics ten years longer than I did recently quit an industrial research job which from the outside looked quite enviable. But she wasn’t allowed to work on projects that she proposed and had the background to do, was ordered to launch a new research program in a field in which she had very little experience, and wasn’t given the resources to attack this in any meaningful way. And since the guy running the lab is a Very Big Name in the field, she didn’t have any recourse. If you were in the lab, who would you want to be aligned with—Marginalized Female Scientist or Very Big Name? And I don’t know what her chances are for getting hired elsewhere as a mid-career scientist in her specialty without Very Big Name’s letter of recommendation. This is how it can be in physics, my friends—and this isn’t the only story of that ilk that I personally know of, either.

And that’s why I participated in the discussion further down in the comments on Zuska’s post, when a poster named Carpenter mentioned how it was sad to read the essays in the book about the women who left academia (this includes mine). I responded to Carpenter that most everyone who enters physics, male or female, winds up leaving academia, because there are more prospective physicists than there are eventual jobs for them. Until people know this, plenty more will get sucked in to physics by the beauty, elegance, and intellectual cachet, only for an inevitable exit. Just like lemmings over the cliff.

I’m not saying women can’t do physics—I did, and I did so respectably well, getting two papers into the journal Physical Review B (and I was a single author on one). If you are disciplined and willing to do the work, you don’t have to be a genius to earn a physics Ph.D. at a good school. But I want all those bright young people—I’m talking to guys, too—to answer for themselves why they would want to go into a shrinking field. And I hope that the sort-of downer essays like mine help to give a more rounded picture of what to consider that goes beyond the sales pitch you’ll probably get at any physics department desperate for the next wave of warm bodies to do the grunt work in their labs.

(P.S. Just so you know, I still love science and technology. But I’m a lot more cynical about the system.)