WIRED- MIT Report: Gender Still Matters

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MIT Computer Scientists Demonstrate the Hard Way That Gender Still Matters

• BY ELENA GLASSMAN, NEHA NARULA AND JEAN YANG  
 
• 12.19.14  |  
 
• 7:00 AM  |  
 
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An aerial view of the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts.   David L Ryan/The Boston Globe/Getty Images

“We’re 3 female computer scientists at MIT, here to answer questions about programming and academia. Ask us anything!” we wrote for our Reddit Ask Me Anything session last Friday. And then, boom:

“WHY DOES IT MATTER THAT YOU’RE FEMALE?”
“WHY DID YOU PUT GENDER IN THE TITLE?”
“WHY SHOULD YOUR GENDER MATTER IF YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT RESEARCH?”

Dozens of questions like these were interspersed with marriage proposals and requests to “make me a sandwich” in our AMA. We had intended for the AMA to be a chance to answer questions about what our lives are like as PhD students at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), and what we could do to get more young people excited about programming.

The AMA became, to borrow one Reddit commenter’s phrase, “a parody of what it’s actually like to be a woman working in a STEM field.”

Elena Glassman, Neha Narula and Jean Yang

Elena Glassman, Neha Narula
and Jean Yang are Computer Science PhD students at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL).

As computer science PhD students, we were interested in fielding questions about programming, academia, MIT CSAIL, and how we got interested in the subject in the first place. As three of the few women in our department and as supporters of women pursuing STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics], we also wanted to let people know that we were interested in answering questions about what it is like to be women in a male-dominated field. We decided to actively highlight the fact that we were three female computer scientists doing an AMA, to serve as role models in a field that’s less than 20 percent female.

As it turned out, people were extremely interested in our AMA, though some not for the reasons we expected. Within an hour, the thread had rocketed to the Reddit front page, with hundreds of thousands of pageviews and more than 4,700 comments. But to our surprise, the most common questions were about why our gender was relevant at all. Some people wondered why we did not simply present ourselves as “computer scientists.” Others questioned if calling attention to gender perpetuated sexism. Yet others felt that we were taking advantage of the fact that we were women to get more attention for our AMA.

TO READ MORE:

http://www.wired.com/2014/12/mit-scientists-on-women-in-stem/