Guest Post: “Hacking the Boy’s Club” by amberella
[Last week, I frantically begged amberella to send me a bit of info about the Last H.O.P.E. Conference in NYC. Luckily for me, she did! Here is a special guest post for .51 from amberella about her experiences at the Last H.O.P.E. Be sure to visit her website at http://idiosyncratic-routine.com/ as well!]
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First, let’s answer the question on most readers’ minds: Yes, there were women at The Last HOPE, even “attractive” ones! Some were your requisite, old-school geeks, some goth chicks, some professors, some militant/cyberpunks, some “normals,” etc., etc., etc… but yes, they (we) rolled in all shapes and sizes and were clearly interested in every aspect of the conference. I didn’t notice a particular skewing of female attendees towards one style of talk or another, nor see them disenfranchised from asking questions or gaining access to workspace. Remarkably enough, people treated each other like… people. It was, in a word: Refreshing.
This bowl-o-cherries sentiment isn’t without its caveats. On the one hand, I generally find that in professional (i.e. regulated or accountability-imposed) IT-focused environments, when women seem smart, competent, and unapologetic, men are usually reasonably comfortable conversing with them as “just one of the boys,” or as I’ve noted above, “a person.” Most interactions at HOPE were of this type, and therefore not all that surprising. Several presenters even mentioned the desire to include women in their area of interest, which was outright encouraging. Other interactions of a more social nature, though, constituted a veritable theater of the absurd.
Case in point: HOPE set aside part of the mezzanine for lounging in hammocks and watching video streamed from the talks for those who wanted a break or who were overflow from packed conference rooms. Across the bottom of this video was a scrolling marquee of comments pulled from a specially rigged up internal URL. This meant the crowd could watch and participate in a real-time chat, anonymously, with other people in the room. I happened to walk into the rest area looking to take a much needed nap during Steven Rambam’s presentation, glanced at the screen, and saw the message trolling news-ticker style:
Then: “Who’s the new girl in the red shirt?“ Look down at self: I was wearing a red shirt.
A few seconds later: “I like her more than the other girl in the red shirt.“ Uh, what?
Then: “I’m faithful to Red Shirt Girl #1 … I’ll take you on long walks on the beach and……” You get the picture.
I laughed and brushed it off and found a hammock. After failing to elicit a response from the women in the room (there was also “Gray Tank Top Girl” and later “Necktie Girl” in addition to me and my other red shirt counterpart) the intensity of the messages increased. I’ll spare you the details of the ensuing message thread, most of which was LOL-worthy in a purely adolescent and self deprecating way, but I will say that some of it was downright vulgar. I’m not one to flinch at vulgarity or abstain from [frequent] obscenity, but when still no women took the bait, there was an eventual message of “You won’t say anything until I rape you and then you will cry.“ I assume it was meant as a joke or incitement, but I think we all know that making rape funny is right up there with making Hitler funny: Imminent Fail. Rather than be outraged, I ignored the comment and eventually joined in the conversation, since I can make quips with the best of them and I rarely give up an opportunity to make a crowd laugh. I guess I won over the audience, since at some point the message scrolled “Red Shirt Girl #2 was epic.“ …Pretty high praise from that crowd.
I document this conversation in grueling detail because it was indicative, to me, of the problems male-female interactions take on when hardcore-geek guys settle into their comfort zone. Add in a layer of anonymity and many of them revert to aggressive behavior they would never enact in a face-to-face or professional setting. The “Lamest Post” award from the scrolling message incident has to be awarded to the statement “Are you female? Are you an attention whore? Go to HOPE!” as though any woman at the conference was dying to be the object of the message sender’s affections. I admit, I took the bait and replied, “Are you at HOPE? Are you female? Prepare to receive undue amounts of attention for breathing!” It was no surprise that after calling out the ridiculousness of said statement, the chatter subtly shifted back to Steve Rambam’s speech, which offered no shortage of fodder for hilarity.
The presenter of “From Black Hat to Black Suit: How to Climb the Corporate Security Ladder without Losing Your Soul,” Myrcurial, made more than one plea for women to enter the CISO (Corporate Information Security Officer) career track. He also explained how important it is for all CISO hopefuls to keep up with technology on their own time and participate in the community. Aye, here lies the rub. Time and again I have found that the more heavily male-dominated or niche oriented the topic, the more hostile the atmosphere in which said topic is discussed. The more hostile the atmosphere, the more women are dissuaded from joining the conversation and becoming valued contributors. Rinse and repeat.
How is it that as an increasing number of women graduate with Computer Engineering and other technical or hard science degrees and girl-geek culture explodes thanks to New Media™, that there is not a commensurate increase in women’s contributions to the hardcore techie and hacker community? It’s no longer difficult to find women espousing their love of iPhone apps and digg.com – the problem is finding those that want to infiltrate the realms of bug trackers, penetration testers, and the corporate suites reserved for CTOs and CISOs. The culture continues to be one where all but the most serious, “thick-skinned” women, even those with enough drive to end up working in a professional IT capacity, find an existence that can be highly technology driven, but that stops short of membership in the elite circles that evolve or hack that tech.
As demonstrated on a very small scale by my eventual acceptance into the “scrolling message quip makers club” at HOPE, it’s possible to muscle into the boys’ club with tenacity, spunk, and a heavy dose of ignore-the-troll. Women who seek out these communities, though, have to be prepared to fight for the chance to “prove their mettle,” as my grandmother would say. The women at HOPE have already jumped the largest hurdles to inclusion and the majority of male attendees respect them for it, regardless of childish message board antics.
I can think of no quick fix, only that a growing number of tech communities geared towards women offer some refuge and an estuary environment to grow one’s confidence before trying to conquer the “real world,” and that historically, female creep into male dominated realms has been steady, unrelenting, and eventually accepted. In the short term, this offers little consolation.
A spot of hope (no pun intended) for this dreary state of affairs? More than once during the conference I heard the statement, “Women make the best social engineers.”
Related posts:
- Part 2: How Far Have We Evolved Past This? - By Gloria W.
- Seattle Girl Geek Dinners, launched and scheduled!
- Women Technicians at WomenTechWorld
- The last word on the Last H.O.P.E. (Hackers On Planet Earth)
- Rikki Kite: Open Source Business Resource Guest Editor
July 24th, 2008 at 7:25 am
Thank you very much for attending my talk - it’s nice to know that someone was paying sufficient attention as to be able to discuss it after the fact.
In retrospect (how many times can one person critique their own behaviour), I should’ve elucidated my comment on women in technology to be something more than just a base plea.
As I said, I’ve only worked with two women in Infosec. Both were demonstrably better at their jobs that I am at mine. I could not have done as high quality work as I did without their involvement.
The best way that I can describe it is similar to the statement at the end of your article: Women are better at these topics than men, despite the current balance of male vs. female in the workforce. It’s cliche and yet true - women are better natural intuitives than men and that intuition seems to be one of the critical gaps in organizations that fail to do a good job of information security.
I hope that you took my plea in the positive light it was meant (rather than as a “gee, I’d like something nice to look at” — which is the predominating sentiment amongst male IT workers) and consider the track as one where success is only a few short steps away.
On a completely different note: Interesting that the main room for talks was “Hopper”. There’s stories in there that we should be teaching our daughters. Really important stories.
July 24th, 2008 at 9:17 am
Hey myrcurial! I see you got to my article before I even let you know about it. =D Twitter is all broken today and deleted you from my list for the moment.
I actually had written in a significantly larger shoutout-slash-praise for your talk, which I loved, but decided to incorporated elsewhere as you can see the length here was bordering on epic for the blogging world. I work at a huge bank / hedge fund and was right in there with everything you were saying.
I did understand where you were coming from - the sincere recruitment plea was exactly the point; somewhere between girls having the interest to getting the degree/developing those skills to an employable level to either publishing / becoming a leader / going into management /etc- there is a non-trivial dropoff in follow-through that isn’t [always] because the doors are closed at the top. I work with several female developers, which is strange in and of itself, but again, zero are tracked for CTO/CISO/CIO. I’m a BA… I don’t even know what that tracks for.
July 24th, 2008 at 11:42 am
Despite the male to female ratio being far from equal, I was pretty happy to see as many girs at HOPE as I did. I was kind of expecting to be an even smaller minority, based on what my local 2600/Linux users group/etc is like. I come from a town where the overall interest in technology is extra low, let alone female interest in technology. It took a lot of work to make it through any computer courses in highschool without being made a spectacle of purely for being a girl, and the majority of the girls in my classes lost interest right at the highschool level. I think that’s obviously a pretty big problem right there, assuming that other places are the same way. I have no idea how anyone is supposed to educate teenage boys on not being jerks though!
It sucks that girls in geeky scenarios still get the “we tease you because we like you” treatment (I like to hope that that’s all it is, and not “we tease you because we really do think girls are lame”). As technology works its way deeper and deeper into being a huge part of every single industry that there is though, I don’t think our female counterparts of the future will have to endure it forever.
July 27th, 2008 at 6:29 am
The scroller shenanigans have caught the attention of the hope core organizers in the post-con wrapup. You’re not the only person to have made note of it within “earshot” of us (although noone did it during the con, at least to any coremember, infodesk, or security).
The person who ran the scroller project soon added IP addresses to any message with the word “girl” in it, and apparently it helped some. I’m not sure what else could have done in this situation other than turn the thing off.
What should we consider doing next con? Moderation? Registration? Turn it off? Ignore it? (and then what do we do with OLPC bashing… its a problem all around.)
July 27th, 2008 at 10:28 pm
I didn’t think any moderation is required. Regulation goes against everything the con stands for, really. Let me reiterate, I was not upset or offended - just drawing a parallel between discourse I would commonly see in a male dominated IRC channel and the scrolling chat. It’s important to notice the behavior and let people know where etiquette boundaries for any public communication forum lie (there were some little kiddies around), but I would hate to see the concept go away in the future. The freedom to be “who we are” in a forum such as HOPE is important; I simply wish that the girls in the room had become more assertive and imposed their own boundaries. Top down regulation should be the choice of last resort, IMO.
July 28th, 2008 at 5:04 am
Thats more or less where we’re ending up.
July 28th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
Hi there, I’m one of the Orange Shirt Girls (meaning security team) from Last Hope. There were at least 4 girls on the security team, although I only saw 3 of them do any work. This was my second HOPE, but I can tell you that over the past 3, the male to female mix has become almost equal! Actually, HOPE is becoming a couple’s event too (My boyfriend and I worked security together). I saw twice as many couples as I did at HOPE 6. And lots of hacker babies!
Let’s hear it for Hackers being equal opportunity persons!
Also, on the rape comment, there’s always one socially dysfunctional person who takes it too far.
September 18th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
@amberella: without wishing to seem blue-nosed, aren’t those “girls” actually women? “Girl” is one of those terms that, as a man, I have to cede to the opposite sex - a bit like how African Americans can use the “n” word to each other, but it would be disrespectful of me to do the same.
I am very happy to read this report of gender integration at HOPE. The Python world has recently been focusing on diversity issues, and we want to encourage a better ratio of the sexes at PyCon. It’s difficult to know how, but we are currently working on a diversity statement that I hope will at least express the fact that the issues have been discussed and considered.
Some have been worried that attention to diversity might ruin the conferences, which up until now have been notable for light-hearted fun as well as excellent technical content. It’s good to have a blog post to point to that shows how these issues can be addressed without introducing too much discord.
Also, this was an enjoyable read: your skills as a writer are considerable.