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REBECCA: My name is Rebecca Shepply.
I'm a user experience researcher, or something like
that, we're still figuring out what our
name is, here at Google.
I'm delighted to present today, Dr. Cornelia Brunner.
Cornelia has entertained and informed via a previous
presentation at the Association of Science and
Technology Centers.
And I'm actually delighted to bring her here to contribute
to the conversation around gender and
technology at Google.
The questions around gender and technology shape who we
are, how we hire, products that we make, and how we think
about the people who use them.
So, she'll be speaking today on, "Girls, Boys and IT
Careers." Please give her a welcome.
[APPLAUSE]
CORNELIA BRUNNER: Thank you.
Thank you.
Boy it's a pleasure to be here.
It's gorgeous here.
I'm going to report to you on some research that we did
starting 20 years ago.
And I'm going to just tell you what we found then.
And then I'm going to want to have a conversation with you
all about whether any of this stuff still holds true.
OK?
We've been doing it ever since, so it's not
all 20 years old.
But, essentially, I work for a place, it's called The Center
For Children and Technology, and we were spawned at a
school of education, graduate school of education.
When the first micro-computers came out, there was a lot of
hoopla about how they were going to change everything.
How they were going to revolutionize education.
How our brains were going to be re-wired.
And this particular college of education, which was called
Bank Street College, that I worked at, decided to take a
critical look at all these claims about technology.
So, at the time, we got a lot of donations.
IBM, Apple, a lot of people were sending us equipment,
because we were trying out stuff.
And we noticed that our particular center--
we were maybe, I forget, 20, 30 people--
we were, maybe, 2/3 women.
And we noticed that when the big boxes came in from IBM or
from Apple with all the stuff, we noticed that there was an
interesting difference in how some of us responded to it.
Now, the people who were in charge of our technology were
women, so it wasn't about that.
But we noticed that when the boxes came in some people,
mostly guys, would like rip them open, would tear into
them, would start throwing around
stats, and talking stuff.
And many of us, who were equally technologically savvy,
would sort of sit back and say, when you've figured out
how this thing works, give me a call.
And I'll come and play with it.
So we thought there's something here that we ought
to look into.
Because it was very clear that it was not a matter of
knowledge or sophistication about technology.
But there was some other kind of attitudinal difference.
So we applied for some grants from the Spencer foundation
and others.
And we've been doing it ever since.
Looking more deeply into, not so much what gender and
technology, in the sense of what we know or do with, but
more about what we want from, and how we feel about, and how
we relate to technology, in some relationship to gender.
So the research I'm going tell you about is about that, OK?
First, however, my postmodern disclaimer, which is that
we're not talking about male and female.
I have been talking, for most of the time, about feminine
and masculine as the socially constructed notions that have
to do with gender, rather than about biology, OK?
Now this isn't working too well, because people are
confusing it again.
So I'm proposing that instead of talking about feminine and
masculine, we talk about butch-femme.
All of you know that there's a lot of, in my gay community,
there's a lot of femme men and there's a lot of butch women.
Some of you know less that there are just as many femme
women and butch men in my community.
But what we do know in my community is that those
concepts, butch and femme, are in no way related to sex.
That's where I want to get.
We tend to confuse them again.
We tend to talk about them as if all women were feminine and
all men were masculine.
So I just want to leave those words out.
And I just want to talk about butch-femme.
Does that make sens?
So that's what we're with.
So femme just means a perspective, a particular way
in which we've all been inculturated, that is
considered feminine by most people.
And butch really means a kind of perspective, a voice, or
attitude that is considered, or recognized as masculine by
most people.
And it is without question that there can be as many
butch men as women, and vice versa, OK?
All right.
So now, when I go into this stuff and when I, by mistake,
talk about girls, and boys, and men, and women, you know
that I'm making a mistake.
I don't mean it.
I'm old.
I forget.
But this is what actually I mean, OK?
All right.
So, we did a series of studies.
We had, I think, it must have been 80, 120, something like
that, high technology users at the time.
And I'm talking about the middle to late '80s, people
who were really using technology.
And we did very extensive interviews with them.
At the time, a book had just come out that was called,
Women's Ways of Knowing.
And we sort of used that as a starting point for the kind of
in-depth interviews that we conducted.
And we did a bunch of other stuff that
I'll tell you about.
I'm going to give you a nutshell, because I want this
to be more of a conversation.
And I talk fast anyhow.
So if I go too fast, just stop me.
We asked our respondents, which ranged from NASA
scientists, architects, filmmakers, all kinds of
programmers, and all kinds of folks- we asked them to tell
us the story of their careers.
And the first major findings that we had was that, it turns
out, that there is a butch and a femme way of telling the
story of your career.
The butch way of telling the story of your career is to
say, I was in kindergarten when I realized that I wanted
to be an engineer.
And ever since then I've been making a series of steady,
linear moves to achieve that goal.
I took the right courses, I did all the right things.
I had the right hobbies.
I did all the right stuff.
And here I am today.
The femme way of telling an analogous career story-- it
could be exactly the same career path-- is, well, I sort
of didn't know what I was going to do.
And then there was this person who said, well, maybe you
could help out.
And then I had a friend over there who needed me to--
And then I realized that there-- and, I don't
know, here I am.
I don't quite know how I got here.
But I kind of like it.
OK.
The same career.
Now, the implication of that, if you think about it, for
young women is that if you don't sound butch, if you
don't sound like you knew in kindergarten that you wanted
to be in the IT profession, it must mean that this is not the
right place for you.
That it takes that kind of mindset in order to find your
place in this technological universe.
So it's very important to keep in mind that, a kind of, I
don't quite know, maybe, I'm not sure, somehow, that that
way of expressing your desire to work, doesn't mean you're
not really interested.
Doesn't mean you're not motivated.
Doesn't mean you're not going to work hard.
And doesn't mean that you're not passionate
about what you do.
It just means that you have a different relationship to what
the career means to you, is essentially what
it boils down to.
OK?
The other thing we asked folks about in these interviews,
which were long, was about what interested them most
about technology.
And the nutshell version of this is the butch relationship
to technology is all about the object, all about the machine,
all about the thing, its power, its speed, its
capability.
The femme relationship to this was very different.
It was all about, well, they had the
machines, they're useful.
But what really matters to me is their function.
I look right through the object to its purpose.
So I'm much less interested-- and I'm being femme about
this-- in the actual machine itself, and much more
interested in what it can actually do for me.
And that has a whole bunch of implications, for instance,
about education.
If we educate young people and we glorify the machine, we're
going to turn off femme thinkers.
We're going to turn off people who want to talk about the
social purpose of the thing, rather than the thing itself.
Then learning about the machine itself, OK, if you
have to, that makes sense.
But it is not the thing that attracts us.
OK?
We asked them about mentors and learning experiences.
And we discovered, which will come as no surprise, that they
were enormously important for everyone.
For women and men in our sample, having somebody who
said, I think you might like this, I think you're good at
this, I believe that you can do this,
was enormously important.
Women were much, much-- and I mean women
now, not femme thinkers--
women were much more aware of the kind of help that they got
along the way.
That's just a matter of gender acculturation.
That it is harder, in some sense, for us, first of all,
to claim that we did this on our own.
So we're more likely to give somebody else credit for our
own achievements.
And that it is less likely for a guy to admit that he was
helped along the way.
OK?
Then we asked them this question.
We asked them, what was it like--
what is it like to be a man, or woman, in your profession?
When we asked the men, what's it like to be a man in your
profession?
They went, huh?
That was it, end of interview.
When we asked the women, what's it like to be a woman
in your profession?
We usually ran out of tape.
Because they had a lot to say.
These were women in very, very high tech
professions, many of them.
So there was a whole lot of stuff that I can talk about a
little bit.
But, again, in a nutshell, what we're really talking
about is that the experience, at least 20 years ago, was
that being a woman in a high tech profession means that you
have to do something which we ended up labeling a kind of
compensatory dance, where you have to sort of find
a way to fit in.
Which means you have to leave a lot of the stuff that is
really you at home, out of the way.
You pre-screen it, you do stuff to sort of
fit into this world.
Because the world is clearly not designed for someone who
thinks and feels the way you do.
I don't know if that's still true.
You're going to have to tell me.
We asked them about the discourse at work.
What is it like in your profession?
What kind of talk actually goes on?
And we found that there was a very powerful difference.
That the kind of talk that, by and large, women like to do
combines personal and professional, integrates home
life with work life.
We like to talk about it all at once.
And that most of us feel that in a high tech profession that
is not legitimate discourse.
That what we have to learn to do, when we work in a place
which is largely populated by men and butch thinking-- which
are not the same--
what we find is that we have to find a
different way of talking.
And that a major portion of us has to somehow be left out.
And we have a desire, in some way, that is, we found that
it's quite different, it was a major gender difference, we
have a desire to integrate the two.
Whereas a lot of the men we talked to, actually said that
what they liked best is that they don't have
to integrate them.
That there really is a powerful, and to them,
meaningful, and possibly restful, separation between
all that stuff they have to deal with at home, which
includes all that emotional stuff, and the sort of cleaner
life at work, where you don't have to deal with
that kind of stuff.
It wasn't a universal gender difference,
but it was very powerful.
That really the very same thing that made women feel not
quite comfortable, because it wasn't quite real, made the
men feel like this is good.
This is what we want.
Another way we saw that was we asked them at some point
something about how technology, when they first
encountered technology, how they felt about it?
And we got these wonderful stories, which are exactly
parallel, where the guys were talking about, finally, now
that I have this powerful piece of technology, I can do
all of that stuff on my own.
I no longer have to rely on all these people who I used to
have to rely on to help me do it.
The computer, as it were, lets me do the
whole thing by myself.
And they loved that, and they thought it was very positive.
Whereas women wanted to--
felt afraid that the computer would isolate them.
And would somehow keep them from having those kinds of
collegial relationships.
I think all of that is quite different now from
the way it was then.
This was when the internet was really something that
university folks and military folks knew about, and nobody
else really did.
So I'm assuming that there is a change there.
But what I really want to tell you about is we did some
fantasy work with them.
We decided that what we really wanted to do was go below the
surface of knowledge, and really get at what people's
desires were in relation to technology.
So we did a bunch of exercises with them.
We made a little piece of software.
Because we knew that if you're going to ask people to spit
out their fantasies, chances are they'll be a little
inhibited if you're sitting there writing it down, right?
So we made a little interface at the time, which was very
playful, in which we asked them to spit their fantasies
directly into the computer which worked out pretty well.
Because we got some really interesting fantasies.
And we essentially asked them for these
three kinds of things.
We asked them to paint for us in words a formal portrait of
them posing with their machine, their work machine,
their technology.
And then think about it as the way, for instance, an art
historian might do 100 years from now.
So they're describing it in structural terms.
We also asked them to fantasize about what will be a
perfect extension of their current technology, a
futuristic machine that would do exactly what they would
want it to do.
And finally, we actually did- an eye movement,
we videotaped them--
we gave them a very complex looking object, which actually
was a Mexican orange peeler--
which if you've ever seen one, looks very complicated.
Nobody knew what it was.
And we told them that they should pretend they were
archaeologists in the future.
And that they had just uncovered this artifact.
And they should describe--
they should try to figure out what it might possibly be.
And we actually videotaped them, and checked out eye
movement stuff.
Exactly how they deconstructed this complex looking
mechanical object.
From all of this stuff, what we were really looking for,
the codes that we used to analyze the data that we got
from here, we looked for how people talked about this whole
issue of integration.
Of integrating public and private work-life, homelife,
et cetera, integrating technology into life.
We looked for what relationship they seemed to
see between technology and nature.
We looked for a relationship, if any, if we could see one,
between technology and the body.
And finally, something about technology and
creativity and creation.
Now, you have to remember, 20 years ago the creative
potential of these technologies were much less
obvious than they are now.
And finally, we looked at the relationship between
technology and communication which, again, at the time, was
not an obvious connection.
OK?
So that's what we looked for.
Now I'm going to give you a nutshell version of what we
found, so that we can talk.
Here's the butch version: magic wands-- if you see a pun
there, it's intended--
technology that makes you bionic, allows you to
transcend all limitations of time, space, and the body.
That is the single most potent, or powerful fantasy
that we got from butch thinkers.
Who, by the way, in this particular study were really,
really, largely men.
In most gender studies, you get a serious overlap.
So you don't get a completely clear relationship between sex
and gender.
But we got a very powerful relationship
between sex and gender.
And that could have shifted by now.
But, anyhow, so we got a lot of men thinking like that.
Now, here's the other one.
Digital amulets, little, tiny wearable devices, which at the
time was like--
portable computers at the time were this big, right?
So little, tiny, digital amulets.
Small flexible object that can be worn.
That are multi-functional.
That allow you to communicate, connect, share ideas.
We had one respondent, talked about a flute, for instance, a
little tiny flute.
That you could use to make music.
But you could also use it to somehow
communicate with somebody.
Or you could use it to share a picture.
Cell phones, none of that stuff existed.
So the idea that you could have a little, tiny object
that could do many things, most of them communicative, or
even creative, was like a really far-out idea.
OK?
So that, in a nutshell, was the major, powerful difference
that we found.
Now the discourse around technology that we had heard
then, and, I think, we still continue to hear, breaks down
in this way: That the sort of butch discourse is all about
stretching the envelope.
And it is based on a faith that whatever problems are
created by current technology will be solved by the next
generation of either that technology or another one.
But that it is possible to overcome whatever limitations
you see, whether it's in the world or in the technology,
through stretching the envelope, pushing further,
designing more, better stuff.
The femme version of this is a kind of more
conservative, making do.
Because it is based on a worry that we don't know what the
unintended consequences of dropping a new technology into
the natural, human, social surround.
We don't quite know what's going to happen to the fabric
of life if we put a new invention in there.
And that concern is a very powerful one.
You could say, because in the end, women are the ones who
have to clean up the mess.
Or you could just say that it's built into a different
way of thinking, a more holistic way of thinking.
For instance, when we did the orange peeler thing, we found
that what, by and large, what the men did with it was they
identified parts.
And they said, oh, this part sort of looks like a lathe.
So this must have this function.
And they came awfully close to figuring out what this thing
might actually be.
We had, by and large, the women who looked at it, looked
at it, didn't do that.
Looked it all over.
And then invented these beautiful narratives about how
people might have used this object.
But the relationship between the actual structure of the
object and this gorgeous story about how it might have been
useful wasn't all that clear.
Because you really can't quite get there holistically.
You really do have to identify pieces to decipher
an object like that.
But the difference, whether or not they were looking
holistically and trying to understand the function of
this thing in the world, or whether or not they were
looking only at the object, and seeing what its function
might be, was very powerful.
OK, so, this is in a nutshell, a summary of what we found.
Every time I show this to anyone, it always sounds like
I'm being--
it sounds like propaganda, is what it sounds like, OK?
It sounds like I'm making it up.
But this is what we found.
We found that in this femme voice, a feminine voice, women
talked about using technology as a medium.
The butch version is to see it as a product.
The femme perspective is to see it as a tool.
And the butch perspective is to see it as a weapon.
Communication versus control.
Creativity, being able to use it to make
stuff versus the power.
So, for instance, one of the differences
we found was that--
I'll give you an example.
I like cappuccinos.
And before cappuccino makers were in evidence everywhere,
my son, who was then 17, went to Europe for the first time.
And he knew I like cappuccinos.
And while he was gone, I bought myself a little milk
steamer which was a beautiful Italian design.
And it's this little silver thing.
It's gorgeous, and has this very curvy,
beautiful little spout.
And then you hold a little cup underneath it.
And if you do everything just right, and you don't burn your
hand, you get steamed milk.
But you have to hold it just right.
And cleaning the thing is a ***, because it's curved and
little, and--
But it worked.
It was beautifully designed.
When my son came home from Holland, I think, he brought
home a little tiny flat sieve with a handle.
What you do is, you put a pot on the stove.
You put a little milk in it.
And you go like this.
And it aerates the milk, and you got steamed milk.
The difference, to me, is this gender difference.
That it doesn't do the work for you, you still do this
with your hand.
The tool aids in making the steamed milk, but it doesn't
do it for you That was one of the major gender
difference we found.
That the butch perspective wants the tool to take over,
do all the work.
They wanted brain implants that would allow them to blink
an eye, and mountains would grow.
The very same idea, many of the men who actually responded
said it was also a nightmare.
They understood the dangers.
It wasn't that they didn't get it.
But that's what they really wanted from the technology, to
be bionic, to be godlike.
The femme perspective is much more, tools that are sort of
small, helpful.
They don't take over.
They don't do everything.
But they make it little easier to do what you need to do.
And a lot of making do.
A lot of figuring out how to use something in another way,
because it works reasonably well.
It may not be the best, or most powerful, or most
efficient way to do it.
But it works, so why invent a new thing?
Those are very, very different attitudes.
So, in the end, when we go down to the bottom here, we
had a lot of people talking about, women talking about,
how the technology is empowering them.
They liked it.
But what they meant by empowerment was it enabled
them to do more things in a slightly different way.
Not that they no longer had to do the work.
Men talked about transcendence.
About the tools themselves allowing them to transcend all
the limitations that were irking them, about having to
actually do the work.
So that was a very powerful difference.
And, this is the last one, which I already mentioned, the
fascination.
That the butch perspective talks about the fascination
with the object itself, with its features, capabilities,
with getting your hands on it, with looking inside it, is not
shared by femme thinkers.
Who look right through the object, it's transparent to
them, for its function.
That's a very, very different way to approach technology.
And it has enormous implications for how we teach
kids about technology.
Now, I want to get to kids, just a little bit.
We asked them to fantasize.
Yes?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE PHASE]
list, do you think it's accurate?
Do you think the incrementalist sort of
approach on the femme side of evolutionary
[UNINTELLIGIBLE PHASE]
make real changes that empower, as opposed to
revolutionary [INAUDIBLE PHASE]?
CORNELIA BRUNNER: That would be a fitting metaphor.
Yes, I think that's true.
AUDIENCE: Can you [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHASE]
sorry.
CORNELIA BRUNNER: The difference between an
evolutionary perspective, where you want little things
that make incremental changes, as opposed to a revolutionary
idea, where you build something that completely
changes the way you do things, and everything.
Right?
That's a reasonable metaphor for this very same thing.
All right.
So we did this stuff with kids, kids from ages eight,
nine, up to college age.
We asked them to imagine a machine, fantastical machine
that they would like to be able to invent.
And this is pretty much what we got from a lot of boys.
We got some kind of vehicle that would allow them to
transcend time and space.
And that, when we asked them to draw the inside, would
include such things, triangle windshield, moon seats, twin
valve seven rotor 9 class booster rocket, hidden turbo
jets, and a snack bar.
[LAUGHTER]
CORNELIA BRUNNER: That's it, that's what we got a lot of.
So here comes the femme version.
A little tiny object, little tiny [HUMS]
multi-functional.
So, for instance-- this is a little hard to read, so--
this very same thing.
When the snow comes up, it turns into a shovel, so that
you can shovel snow.
When the leaves fall down, it turns into a rake, so you can
rake the leaves.
Now you know, if this had been done by a boy, there
would not be a rake.
There would be a raygun that would
pulverize the leaves, right?
An umbrella that senses when the sun comes out, and then
this turns into a seat--
it's a perfect example of a little tiny multi-functional
object that doesn't do the work for you.
But that allows you to do the work that needs to be done.
Then, we asked lately, this must be now, four, five years
ago, we went back to a whole bunch of kids, and we asked
them to draw the internet, which by then had become
ubiquitous.
This is what we've got.
The butch version of the internet, then.
And I don't know if it's so different now.
This is hard to see.
This is a browser.
This shows you all the stuff you can get on the internet.
All the information, all the goods, that's what the
internet is for them.
Now here comes the femme version.
Web that connects people so they
communicate and share, right?
So we find these differences in kids.
And we find that they hold even now, when
technology has changed.
And when, in fact, technology now really is, in many ways,
the very thing that both the butch and femme thinkers in
our sample back there were asking for.
You can do all of those things now that they were asking for
20 years ago.
So, what this all means for the real reason I'm talking
about all this is the pipeline.
There is, as most of you know, a dearth of young women going
into these professions, going into technology professions
and IT professions.
And what I think we have to think about is that most of
the time the pipeline really means that you're taking
things directly out of boy culture.
And that you're promising young people that they will be
able to play with that stuff, and think like that, and play
like that in these professions.
When we talk about inducting young women into this
universe, we tend to talk about finding the kinds of
girls who are able to think in butch ways, who are interested
in thinking like that.
And we want to make it possible for them to feel
comfortable and invited into this world.
And that's OK.
That makes a lot of sense.
The missing piece is this, is really inducting femme
thinkers into this very same universe.
And we were talking about it a little bit at lunch.
There are so many IT professional needs now that
privilege, and require, the very feminine kinds of skills
and predilections that are traditionally associated with
feminine thinking.
We need them now.
But very, very few young women out there actually understand,
or young men who are femme in this way, actually understand
that there's room for them in this world.
They really don't know that it doesn't mean you have to love
to get your hands inside a machine to work in a place
like Google.
So the missing link, I think, is that, is really recognizing
that girl culture, femme culture also has to be
addressed in some way.
And that we have to make it clear to young people that you
can love Barbie and actually work here.
It is possible, because there are things that make you love
Barbie that are also called for here.
And I think that is a very serious error that we make.
Now, I'm not going to go on much longer.
But at the center where I work, we have a lot of
projects that are designed to help K-12 school kids think
about technology differently, learn with it
differently, et cetera.
And a series of different kinds of projects have been
based directly on this gender work.
The one that we've been working on for a while, now,
which is directly related to this is, we tried to figure
out a way, how do we make it possible for young women to
understand that what they like to do is
necessary in this world?
So we sort of divided the IT professions
into these five layers.
Something about networking, about connecting people,
letting people talk to each other.
Something about writing code, cracking code, understanding
secret code language, stuff like that.
Something about information or data management, really being
able to find things, and put things together.
Something about web design, being able to make beautiful
stuff that other people can read.
And something about helping people
deal with their equipment.
So if we have those five layers of the IT profession,
we can make inroads.
We can show young women that in each one of these layers
there is a call for the kind of skills that they actually
bring to this kind of stuff.
We ended up trying to make two kinds of games, that are the
exactly identical gameplay, but that have a butch-femme
narratives surround.
So this would be the butch surround, right?
So that you're using these machines to--
there's a guy who has some kind of secret device, which
you see there.
And you've got a track him down and find him.
And you've got to open up the device and decipher what it
is, so that he doesn't blow up the whole world, or something.
We did this around 9/11, so we've changed the storyline
since then, because this won't work anymore.
It's too scary now, because it's too realistic, right?
But something like that would be the butch version.
And here's the femme version, of the identical game.
The team of people has to--
this little girl arrives on the island.
She's wearing a mysterious device which you have to
somehow decipher in order to reunite her with her family.
It's exactly the same game play, exactly the same stuff.
The only difference is that, in this case we're featuring
the people.
And in the other case we were featuring the machines.
So it's just a little tiny example of how understanding
something about these gender differences could actually
inform the way in which you present what you do, what is
necessary, and what this universe is actually about.
I want to stop, because I actually wanted to have more
of a conversation.
We have done a bunch of other things that may come up that
are relevant to this whole issue.
But my final parting shot is this, if you want to induct
young women into this world, showing them role
models that say, yes.
women can do it, we're just as good, it's a good idea.
But it's not going to do the trick, because what it doesn't
do is take into consideration the genuine, valuable worries
that we bring.
The worries about whether or not the technology will have
unintended consequences that will mess up the earth.
The worries that something about human interactions is
changed in some way that we don't know how to manage.
The worry that you won't be able to combine private and
public life, social life and a professional life.
Those worries are legitimate.
They're the worries that young women we were then talking
about, about not being able to talk about personal stuff,
those kinds of worries may still be legitimate.
I don't know, because I don't work in a
place like this anymore.
But if we don't address them, if we don't let young women
know that it is OK.
Not only is it OK to worry, but it's actually a good idea.
That somebody needs to worry.
And that if the butch attitude is, yes, we'll make a bigger,
better, faster, harder machine that will allow us to do
things that we haven't even dreamt of, then the femme
version of this, which is like, well, wait a second,
let's just see what might happen and how we can manage
or cope with what's going to happen is also necessary.
Otherwise we have runaway technology, right?
So all I'm really saying is that what we need to do is not
choose, but is really legitimate that other voice,
that femme voice, in this world.
Rather than making young women feel as they
do now, by and large.
The AAUW did a study, the American Association of
University Women, did a study not very long ago, that we
were part of, where young women now talk about, yeah,
they could do that.
They can do anything.
That's true.
Women can do anything.
But I just don't want to.
So that attitude, which, I think, is really about this
underlying stuff, is the one we have to deal with.
And that attitude requires that we legitimate those
worries, that we legitimate that career path, rather than
that we leave them with the impression that unless you're
a dedicated geek, who loves machines, there's no room for
you in this world.
That's it.
[APPLAUSE]
CORNELIA BRUNNER: No, I have to stay here.
So?
AUDIENCE: So, me again.
And me again later.
So a lot of people have identified that the stage in
the pipeline that went dry is 5th through 8th grade, when
girls sort of drop out of being interested in math,
science, et cetera, for various, usually identified as
social reasons.
And it doesn't seem to me that that's addressed by this
notion of the femme side of things, a more holistic view,
[UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE], or anything that's
femme versus butch.
So, if they drop out then [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]?
CORNELIA BRUNNER: [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]
Oh, jesus.
I'm very bad at this.
And there is a mic there, isn't there.
It's whether or not, when the pipeline first dries up, which
is in middle school, none of that problem is addressed, in
a certain sense, by this business that I was just
talking about, about legitimating a more femme
perspective, except that the notion, at age 13, that you
have to be a dedicated geek in order to fit into this world,
means, at that age, that nobody is going to ask you
out, you will never have sex, as long as you live, right?
And that, moreover, it will somehow transform you into a
person who always wears a lab coat and glasses, right?
AUDIENCE: No.
CORNELIA BRUNNER: That sort of--
No.
It's true.
That notion, that you have to choose between appealing,
being a 14 year old glamour girl, a Barbie, and this world
that it's a completely unrelated set of worlds is
still very much around.
And what we have to do to overcome it is to help them
recognize that those very same ambitions and goals, wanting
to help people, wanting to rescue, et cetera, that there
is room for them in this world.
And that you don't have to be a geek in order to be
meaningfully employed in this universe.
And they don't know that.
AUDIENCE: I guess my [UNINTELLIGIBLE] with that is
just that, [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]
at that point, it doesn't seem to me that the choice is
between being Barbie and joining this world.
The choice is between being Barbie and being Barbie who
happens to enjoy math and science.
CORNELIA BRUNNER: Oh, I see what you're saying.
Yes.
About Barbie--
OK.
Math, and science, and technology education, by and
large, does not address the femme way of thinking.
It, by and large, presents the subject
matter in a butch fashion.
It by and large, especially technology
education, we teach--
girls don't take programming courses.
Because we did a little a project in which we made a
little flash application in which what you have to do is
put together an ice skating routine.
You have a little game.
And there's a little ice skater.
And you have to put together an ice skating routine.
You have like 10 different steps
that you can put together.
And if you do it, and you ask, for instance to make an
elegant figure eight, the steps don't
quite do the trick.
You have to do something to change them.
Now girls bring with them, as do boys, a lot of prior
knowledge about ice skating, what with the Olympics and
everything.
So the whole enterprise makes sense to them, why you would
have to change them.
Slowly, as you begin to realize that the steps you
have available don't quite do it, you have to start to think
about variables and what you might have to change to make
it possible to make a figure eight.
And after you've done that, and it still doesn't quite
work, you unpeel it even more.
And you actually look at the code.
And you actually change some of the
Javascript underlying it.
That process, which starts in a meaningful enterprise, that
makes sense, a function.
And then slowly you learn to look at what you need to do in
order to make that work even better, that makes sense.
So we had 6th graders up to 10th graders learning the kind
of programming concepts that are tested on the AP test in
high school, but it's because we turned that whole
thing on its head.
Instead of teaching them about code, and giving them the
building blocks, that eventually lead to something
meaningful.
We started out with something meaningful, a function that
makes sense, and then slowly allowed them to investigate
just what they need in order to be able to do that.
That's a very different approach to teaching
programming.
That's what we need to do more of in order to invite the 14
year olds to take the programming class.
Same is true in science, same is true in math.
That the whole enterprise has to somehow be meaningful,
rather than that you learn a lot of stuff which you're told
someday will be meaningful.
REBECCA S: Can I get-- can I try?
Is this working?
It is working?
It's not working?
MALE SPEAKER: [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE].
REBECCA S: Oh, so this does go to the video?
OK.
So--
CORNELIA BRUNNER: So I should wear this instead of this one?
REBECCA S: Oh, you have that one?
CORNELIA BRUNNER: I've got one on.
REBECCA S: You've got one on.
I'm so sorry.
I didn't mean to interrupt.
I was just trying to get audience and give you some
more freedom to roam.
MALE SPEAKER: [INAUDIBLE PHRASE].
REBECCA S: Does the mic not work?
That one works.
So, if you want to ask questions, a little bit
towards the back we can do that.
AUDIENCE: Are you [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]
that we need to change the story that we tell girls, but
that we also need to change the values of the
IT culture as well?
Because, I sort of feel like some of the values aren't
quite-- you asked if it's still like this-- and I sort
of feel like some of the values aren't quite there yet,
with the femme side.
REBECCA S: [INAUDIBLE PHRASE].
CORNELIA BRUNNER: You're asking me whether or not what
I'm saying is that we have to change the story we tell young
women, or the values that actually are
inherent in this world?
Changing the values is not an enterprise that I know
anything much about.
But I'm assuming that a place like Google, which is clearly
deeply invested in somehow living up to its values, is a
place where you could fruitfully think about, what
does it mean to really make people feel welcome?
So you guys would be at the front lines of
figuring that one out.
The other one is the story.
How do we tell the story?
So if each one of you were interviewed.
And you were to tell the story of how you ended up here, what
would this story look like?
And if every story sounds like a butch story, by age 10 I
knew, it would be discouraging.
If some of your stories, men and women, sounded like, you
know, I really had no idea what I was going to do.
And I sort of like didn't find my passion until I was like--
And then I got this job and then I
realized, oh, this is cool.
If some of the stories sounded like that, it would be very
encouraging.
Most of the role models we parade in front of young women
don't admit this degree of ambivalence and uncertainty.
Most of them sound, even if they are women, as if they
were born to do this.
And that, I think, means that we do young people, young men
and young women, a disservice.
Because we don't sort of own up to the fact that many of us
discover that we like working in this kind of environment,
rather than we knew it going in.
AUDIENCE: I told a butch story [INAUDIBLE PHRASE].
CORNELIA BRUNNER: Most of us do.
All right.
AUDIENCE: So, I'm involved in middle school [UNINTELLIGIBLE]
robotics, and [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]
suggests to me that we have a long way to go to get that
[UNINTELLIGIBLE] on the femme side.
CORNELIA BRUNNER: Yeah, Say, that again, I
couldn't hear it.
AUDIENCE: Oh, sorry.
So, given this inventory and I think about, ah, well, I'll
just go into middle school and give an
elective on LEGO robotics.
That seems to me, it's not going to have the kind of
appeal to the femme side, if it's all about
[UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE].
CORNELIA BRUNNER: Yes.
OK, so here's my LEGO story-- which I already sort of told
at lunch-- when they first did LEGO/Logo at MIT, and they
tried it out with kids.
You could build a vehicle and you could follow a path and
see [UNINTELLIGIBLE], et cetera, and the boys thought
it was great.
The girls thought it was kind of boring.
Because who wants to just build a vehicle that can
follow a path?
What they wanted was LEGOs that could
interact with each other.
Eventually, based on that research, they built the
second version of this, where the bricks actually have some
intelligence built in.
And you can, indeed, make things that
relate to each other.
It was a more sophisticated technology, but they did it.
And those kinds of LEGO bricks that you can now do things
with, are more attractive to girls than the
original ones were.
So robotics itself, if it's all about a robot being able
to do something, it's interesting.
But if you look at this the eyeball soccer league, and all
that kind of stuff, where you have robots interacting with
each other, that's interesting.
If you are allowed to anthropomorphize a little bit,
it's even more interesting.
In other words, if the metaphors that you are allowed
to use to understand what the robots do--
the metaphors are allowed to be anthropomorphizing, you are
allowed to talk about feelings, and moods, and
things like that.
Rather than being told that that's illegitimate, but
sports metaphors are legitimate.
That's another way of legitimating it.
So, the way we started this whole research is that many,
many years ago, remember?
When you wanted to get the computer to do something, you
could do one of two things.
You could issue a command, or you could pick
something from a menu.
Issue a command is a butch thing to do, it scares the
bejesus out of some of us.
Because we have visions of armies dying.
Picking something from a menu, hey, you picked the wrong
thing, you pick another one, right?
Big deal.
That's a femme way of thinking about the same thing.
Some of it is in the metaphors we use.
Some of it is in the language.
and some of it is just in the narrative that we spin around
doing this stuff.
So robotics has to have more of a narrative than just, I
can get a machine to do something.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE PHRASE]
we have LEGOs and you have to play with them
[UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]?
CORNELIA BRUNNER: Yes, it is unappealing already.
Yes.
AUDIENCE: I was wondering if you are familiar with Wired
magazine, there's regular feature called "Japanese
Schoolgirl Watch"?
CORNELIA BRUNNER: My, my, I should have known
[UNINTELLIGIBLE]?
AUDIENCE: It's usually just a little 1/4 of a page in a
giant magazine.
But they will highlight a new, fun technology.
And, it is sort of a girl thing, because it's often
about communicating with people.
And I'm wondering why we don't have more
of that in US society?
CORNELIA BRUNNER: Good question.
I don't know.
But that would be a very good idea.
The research that we do know is that girls are using
technology every bit as much as boys do.
They use it to communicate, they do a lot of texting, they
do a lot of talking to each other.
So cool technologies is a concept that works for girls.
It didn't used to work for girls 20 years ago.
The words "cool technology," by definition,
meant a butch thing.
So, I, for instance, am a gadget queen.
I love gadgets.
But the idea that you could be a gadget queen, didn't make
all that much sense.
Now, it makes a lot of sense.
So cool technology by now is meaningful.
And it usually is the kind of technology that allows us to
connect, to communicate, to share ideas, and to do all of
those femmie things.
Yes, I wish we had more.
AUDIENCE: I had another question.
I noticed that in the drawing, where you did separate the IT
into those categories, that Support was represented at the
bottom, which is actually the way I've seen it in the
hierarchy of things [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]
not as a bias, but that's the way-- that's the general value
we put on it in our organization.
And, yet, that is probably where we have the highest
proportion of women.
CORNELIA BRUNNER: Yes.
AUDIENCE: Which I find upsetting.
CORNELIA BRUNNER: Yes, and that is not accidental.
AUDIENCE: Why?
CORNELIA BRUNNER: That entire hierarchy was not accidental.
Because it isn't, because it's true.
I mean there are very few young women who find
themselves deeply interested in the notion of what we now
call networking.
Even though the idea of networking makes a lot of
femme sense, right?
But that's not what we think about when we listen to the
guys we have to talk to when the thing is down again and we
can't communicate, right?
So translating that into something else will be very
interesting.
But it is true that that hierarchy is-- the more
techie, the more esoteric techie, from our perspective,
the higher up in the hierarchy.
And the people who actually deal with
people are on the bottom.
AUDIENCE: I have to say one thing I find really
interesting about the networking, [UNINTELLIGIBLE]
about when you have to deal with somebody telling you
about your networking, it's very frustrating, because I do
networking.
I have to deal with [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]
IT all the time, right?
And whenever I'm on the phone, they're always
[UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE] talking to me.
[UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE] trying to confuse me.
And they're trying to pretend that, as woman, I have no idea
what's going on.
And if they use the wrong word, I'll eat it, I'll shut
up [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE].
CORNELIA BRUNNER: [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE].
AUDIENCE: So that's another question I have, you're
talking about all sorts of lower levels of education,
like high school and middle school, or even about higher
education, because when I was in college, I had the thought
[UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE] computer science for a major.
But, in college, if you didn't start out in your very first
semester in you freshman year, there was no way
you could do it.
You were an outcast, how dare you want to
be in computer science.
CORNELIA BRUNNER: [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]
right?
AUDIENCE: Yeah, so you actually have to start in
middle school is when they started having
[UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE].
AUDIENCE: That is the impression we leave young
women with, and we know it's not really true.
Carnegie Mellon did a whole thing, and I gather that
Lenore Blum was here talking.
AUDIENCE: [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE] and
they were awful about that.
CORNELIA BRUNNER: They were awful about that.
Was it a while ago?
AUDIENCE: '99.
CORNELIA BRUNNER: They say now that they have changed around
their recruitment policies and their whole program to be more
inviting to young women.
And Lenore Blum said, and as a result of that they're getting
what they consider a better class of male
programmers as well.
Because it is a more holistic, or a different approach to
programming.
I can't vouch for the fact that that's true.
That's what she says.
But at least theoretically, it makes a lot of sense.
If you make the thing more inviting to young women who
may not have been thinking since middle school that they
want to do this, that you get a more interesting, more
creative mix of people.
And at least that's what they claim has happened.
AUDIENCE: I have two questions.
One is you seem to have a lot of focus on communication as
expressing what a femme [UNINTELLIGIBLE]
and, to me, it's much more usability.
What can I do with this?
Why is it important?
[UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE].
It's making something that is actually useful.
[UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]
who cares if it all goes away it doesn't matter.
It's not useful.
And so that might be a piece to focus one.
CORNELIA BRUNNER: That is the femme thing that I meant by,
we look right through the object to its function.
That we really want to see what makes it useful.
And that that's what matters more, than whether it's the
most efficient, or most powerful way to do it.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, but--
Part of it is there's introverts, there's
extroverts.
There are femme introverts.
[UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE] don't to talk to people.
They still want to solve problems. And being in an
environment where they're told that I must be worshipped and
[UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]
or you have to talk to everyone all the time.
I can't.
I'm an extrovert and I can't talk with
everyone all the time.
It's appalling.
So, having things that work towards that.
The other piece that I wanted to comment on, is your putting
Support as the only interacting with people, or
one of the primary interacting with people.
I think in your classification, you're missing
a whole set of, oh, product requirements, user--
you know, the definition of what functionality is supposed
to be, getting groups together, understanding how to
phrase [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]
there's a whole lot of teamwork and management stuff
that has to go on [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE].
And if people don't know what that is, they're not going to
realize that the jobs that exist. And then you get, the
current scenario.
CORNELIA BRUNNER: You're absolutely right.
I think we should include that.
I think you're absolutely right.
I also want to say that, at least in my community, we know
that every single human individual has a complex mix
of butch and femme characteristics, so that we
don't end up with stereotypes.
So you don't have to be a butch who's always butch or a
femme who's always femme, right?
That's very important.
But I think you're absolutely right about the other stuff.
And the support category does need to be widened to include
the very kind of stuff you're talking about.
Absolutely.
AUDIENCE: [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]
those aren't good status jobs.
And that's important too.
CORNELIA BRUNNER: That's important, absolutely.
AUDIENCE: [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE]?
CORNELIA BRUNNER: There are many different ways of
thinking about that.
One of them is that you shouldn't have
to do anything special.
That it's OK for only some girls to be interested in
that, and to go that way.
As long as you also legitimate, as the previous
young woman just said, those other kinds of jobs.
The other way to think about it is, that if you really
think hard about what you do in the cell group, it's
conceivable that the boys are creating an atmosphere that is
more butch than it needs to be.
It's very often the case that you can femme things up, if
you just think about it a little bit harder.
You can also butch things up, if you think
a little bit harder.
But butching things up almost comes with the territory of
having guys in there.
Because they're so determined not to be considered femme.
It's still such anathema to be considered femme if you're a
guy that they're very determined to show whatever
butch thing could be happening there.
So it requires usually a sort of extra effort to
femme things up.
Which usually means legitimating certain other
ways of thinking about things, certain other interests.
It's usually doesn't mean changing the whole program.
It just means being a model for that way of thinking, as
well as for the actual work.
But there's no simple answer to that.
AUDIENCE: [UNINTELLIGIBLE]?
CORNELIA BRUNNER: If the woman mentor is willing to be
somewhat femme about it, yes.
It can be a male who is willing to be femme about it.
I don't think that sex is nearly as
important as the attitude.
AUDIENCE: So, in the 10, 12 years that I've been in the
computer industry, what I've seen is more a broadening of
the types of roles that are to be played in an IT company
than I've seen people with sort of femme persuasions
taking butch roles.
That doesn't happen very much.
And I'm wondering if there are some roles that they're a lost
cause to make them appeal to somebody with the opposite
[UNINTELLIGIBLE]?
And if maybe what you're saying and what's really
possible is to broaden the goals and re-define the roles
and make a little more flexibility for the company as
a whole, rather than spending a lot of time trying to
convince people with femme bias to be data center
engineers, for instance.
CORNELIA BRUNNER: Yes.
I think you're absolutely right.
And I think, the missing piece, however, is that as is
historically always the case, if you have a lot of women
doing something, it tends to be undervalued.
So the other part of that is to also make sure that you
highly value and legitimate those other more
femme kinds of jobs.
And we very often neglect that part.
So there's the old story about how in the Soviet Union
medicine became a less valued profession because a whole
bunch of women went into it, right?
So that is always a danger, and you always
have to look for that.
But I think it's absolutely true that there are certain
kinds of jobs that require a butch attitude and a butch set
of predilections and interests.
And then, if you find women with that set
of interests, great.
If you don't, forget it.
But we tend to value those professions far more than we
do the other ones, which are more like social work.
And that's the part we can change.
REBECCA S: I want to thank everybody for coming.
I want to ask actually ask Cornelia one last question to
sort of wrap up.
I wanted to ask if you had any specific thoughts or
suggestions about Google's approach to recruiting and
hiring and interviewing.
I know that you don't know all the details, but maybe you
have some suggestions for us that can take into account
some of the things you've suggested today.
CORNELIA BRUNNER: I don't actually know anything
whatsoever about this, so, of course, I will now continue to
answer your question.
I think Google because what the general public
knows you do, OK?
is that you make it possible for people to find out stuff.
Essentially, that's what the public knows you do, right?
That's femme.
That's OK.
That's interesting.
It's useful.
There's nothing wrong with it, right?
The fact that there's computers, and equipment, and
machines, and stuff involved, but that's OK, you know that
[UNINTELLIGIBLE].
I think as a place, as a profession, it's very
different from a company where people are expected to spend
all day in a lab like making chips.
It's very hard to interest young women in making chips.
But Google is a different place.
So, if you have a recruitment policy that says, we help the
world to deal with all kinds of important issues, because
we help people find stuff out that they need to know, I
don't think it's a hard sell.
Then you have to make sure that they understand what the
difference--
what you were saying about really understanding all the
different roles that are necessary to make this thing
that the most of us just know as a site that you go to find
*** out, right?
That's the part that's missing.
So, if you do that.
If you go into high schools and middle schools and it's
clear to young women that there are all these
interesting jobs that you can do that support that
enterprise, I think you would get young women interested.
Then you have to make sure that when you interview them,
you don't listen for the butch passion.
If you're listening for the butch passion, I want to work
and grrr, you're not going to hear it.
Or you're going to find only those young
women who have that.
If you listen for different ways of sort of talking about
the same kind of stuff, but that has never really been
connected with technology in the same way before.
You may find that there are certain kinds of talents that
you're particularly interested in, but that have never been
expressed in relation to technology before.
That's the best I can do with that question.
REBECCA S: Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]