Earlier this spring, our research group met in Malmö to work collaboratively on manuscripts-in-progress, but also to look at transcripts of interviews with data that we had not analysed before. One of these stood out for us, because it differed a lot from what we have found in the project so far. In what follows, Andreas Ottemo reflects on this interview.
The interview mentioned above was conducted with a Swedish female programmer with roots in the middle east. Going through it in Malmö, it soon became evident that this interview turns some of the assumptions that have guided our research so far on their head. For instance, the geek stereotype that we are investigating and have assumed plays a significant role in the gendering and racialisation of technology is almost unknown to her. The fact that computer engineering education in Sweden is heavily male dominated is also news to her. This is not because she isn’t interested in making the programming profession inclusive. Quite the contrary, she strikes us as quite the activist in this regard. Her concerns and objectives are, however, formulated differently than we are used to, and the interview with her is, in part, marked by challenges and communication breakdown. This is not surprising given that the assumptions that guide much gender and technology research have been shown to be quite Eurocentric. For example, Roli Varma has shown how the geek stereotype works less as a threat to women from ethnic minorities than to white women in the US, because many minority women chose their educational path based on practical reasons rather than their identity. Similarly, Namrata Gupta has discussed how the gendered character of the mind/body split, often assumed rather than investigated as such in anglophone research, can play out quite differently in non-Western settings. In the Indian context that Gupta researches, that a job in computers and IT is “mind-based” makes it more gender inclusive, because it can be handled from within the confines of an office.
One theme of the interview, however, resonates with arguments that we have repeatedly come into contact with in Western literature, namely the way that our informant reasons about programming. In their canonical text from 1990, Sherry Turkle and Seymour Papert argue for a form of “epistemological pluralism” in programming. They demonstrate that there is merit to different styles of programming and argue for a stronger recognition of the value of concrete and relational forms of thinking embodied in a “bricolage style”. This is in contrast to the traditionally valued abstract, distanced and formalised style. Such recognition is important to Turkle and Papert, not only because both styles can be useful and fruitful, but because there is also a gender dimension to this dichotomy, where they find that many girls and women tend to orient towards relational and concrete styles. These women, they argue, are not so much excluded from computer culture but rather find that what dominates this culture is “ways of thinking that make them reluctant to join in”.
Generalising their line of reasoning, research on gender and STEM that followed in Turkle and Papert’s footsteps has similarly argued for a “revaluation of the concrete”, and in particular, discussed how women tend to prefer “connected” forms of knowledge and problem solving with an eye to context and relationality. While a lot of such lines of reasoning can be critiqued for being essentialising (see for instance our own critique here), it is interesting to see how these lines of reasoning pop up in the interview with our middle eastern informant. For her, programming is not so much about commanding or controlling a computer or about gaining prestige and a well-paying job. Instead, her choice to do programming is relationally situated. She describes how after failing to acquire the merits needed to become a researcher, she discussed with her family how to continue forward and how the choice to study computer engineering was a decision that emerged collectively in her family. As such, she positions her choice as an expression of her siblings care for her, symbolising a connection to them and manifesting her trust in them. She also situates the skills you acquire as a programmer in her everyday life. As such, these skills do not appear very “abstract” but instead contextually and practically useful in, for instance, thinking differently about social encounters and the everyday racism that she has to face:
Like I told you, programming thinks about stuff in other ways. … I can give a small example. Sometimes if I meet my neighbour, he may not greet me or greet me in other ways. Sometimes I say: “Aha! He means that”. But now through programming I can give to him different, or I can think of different reasons why he did it. Sometimes we always think of this choice that we have in our hands, but maybe there are other choices that have other explanations that you don’t think about. And that, programming, somehow can help you think in different ways. It makes our lives easier. It becomes easier after, or we don’t worry when we feel that: “Ah, maybe because it happened. Okay, then there’s still hope”. … Yes, that’s how I think about it.
There is much to unpack here, and the interview is filled with passages like this, that we do not immediately know what to make of. Rather than putting the interview to one side as a “difficult interview” that we do not know how to approach, we have decided to engage with it more thoroughly. Tracing how this female informant’s way of conceptualizing programming might represent a form of epistemological pluralism in Turkle and Papert’s sense will be one path. Following Varma and Gupta, letting her voice challenge some of the founding assumptions of this project will be another. We do not know where this will take us, but if you as a reader have suggestions for more readings to continue our journey, please let us know in the comments below!
