DAMNEDIF YOU READ DAMNED
IF YOU CODE
stem or humanities, women can’t win by Zoe Ferguson In America, there is a rampant version of sexism directed towards women who, in one way or another, try to break the boundary between their prescribed academic interests and the evolving—and profitable—world of digital technology. Though male leaders like President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden encourage women to pursue scientific fields through the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the White House Council on Women and Girls, the environment is both overtly and covertly hostile. Take, for example, the Gamergate fiasco, in which thousands of men online converged to attack and threaten a few feminist gamers and women in tech, like Brianna Wu and Anita Sarkeesian. The problem, as one student from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas wrote in the college’s online publication The Rebel Yell, is the perception that “men are from STEM [science, technology, engineering, mathematics], women are from humanities.” According to Ben Schmidt, associate professor of history at Northeastern, almost half of bachelor degrees granted to women in liberal arts fields were in the humanities in 1965. That number has decreased to about 25 percent. But the women who have left the humanities are not entering tech: instead, more and more are studying social sciences like psychology, economics, and political science. And a huge number of women are earning pre-professional degrees— more than half of these degrees are conferred to women. Why are the humanities dwindling in popularity? New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks writes that there is a simple economic explanation: “Accounting majors get jobs. Lit majors don’t.” But there is more to it than that, he says: the humanities are less popular because they just seem irrelevant. It’s true that students are pursuing “practical” majors to be employed after the Great Recession. But this pattern is older than the 2008 economic crisis, so we have to ask: to
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what extent is the perceived irrelevance of the humanities predicated on the field’s association with women? As the American Association of University Women (AAUW) wrote in a 2013 report, “Most people associate science and math fields with ‘male,’ and humanities and arts fields with ‘female.’” This wasn’t always the case: back in the Renaissance, a man who was an expert in all fields, especially the humanities, prevailed. When novels first came on the scene with Daniel Defoe’s 1719 work Robinson Crusoe and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, they were hailed as original works of genius. But by the time Mary Ann Evans—who went by the male pen name George Eliot—wrote The Mill on the Floss in 1860, novels were considered an inferior literary form because women, who did not have day jobs, liked to read them and had even begun to write them. “Silly novels by Lady Novelists are a genus with many species, determined by the particular quality of silliness that predominates in them,” Evans wrote in a mocking 1856 essay entitled “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.” Since then, the trend has stayed the same. Even as men dominate the literary world, “silly novels by lady novelists” have become “chick lit.” What makes the pursuit of literary knowledge a feminine one, even today, while computer science has become the hot field for men? What accounts for the lack of a female presence in computer science, when every other scientific field has seen an increase in women enrolled? The AAUW’s research shows that while the percentage of bachelor’s degrees earned by women in the life sciences and even physics and engineering have risen dramatically in the last 50 years, the percentage of women in computer science is barely greater than it was in 1965 and has dropped significantly in the last 30 years. Last spring, here at Cornell, the college of engineering had 107 women computer science majors, compared to 311 men. That means almost 75 percent of Cornell’s CS majors are still men. So, what gives?