Surviving Prejudice as a Woman Programmer and Academic by Losing Yourself in Your Work

Today, we had our Isenberg School of Management PhD picnic in North Amherst on a cool and rainy Sunday afternoon.

I always feel that it is very important to show up to such events to support the doctoral students and, despite the weather, it was wonderful to see many of our students enjoying one another's company, conversing with the faculty who showed up (a few actually did), and huddling in the pavilion for some warmth.

This was a nice break, despite the unfortunate weather, since I had spent hours working on a plenary talk, Network Economics and the Internet, that I will be giving in Athens next month. I had been "in the flow" for hours,  consumed by the task at hand and had made great progress -- quite enjoyable and rewarding.

Upon my return from the picnic, I glanced over The New York Times, and became intrigued by the OpEd by Ellen Ullman, How to be a `Woman Programmer.'

I have written about working in industry as a computer programmer, while pursuing my Master's degree at Brown University in Applied Math (thanks to the companies that paid my way). and often write about how much I enjoy the research that I do, which necessarily requires algorithm development and implementation -- which means computer programming -- to solve problems that we build mathematical models for.

Ullman writes in her OpEd (and I concur with her) that The first requirement for programming is a passion for the work, a deep need to probe the mysterious space between human thoughts and what a machine can understand; between human desires and how machines might satisfy them.  The second requirement is a high tolerance for failure. programming is the art of algorithm design and the craft of debugging errant code. In the words of the great John Backus, inventor of the Fortran programming language: “You need the willingness to fail all the time. You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very hard only to discover that they don’t work. And you keep doing that over and over until you find one that does work.” 

Computer programmers are necessarily resilient!

Ullman writes of the challenges that she faced during 20 years as a programmer and how today women may be facing even more virulent discrimination and prejudice and the numbers reflect that women are underrepresented in the computer science fields and industry. She speaks of venture capitalists looking for those that resemble them to invest in.

Sad to say, I feel this prejudice even as a holder of a chaired professorship. Ullman speaks of the disregard and the invisibility and I can attest (colleagues can confirm) that requests for information at even a departmental level fall on deaf ears and no response is received, despite repeated attempts.

Ullman beautifully concludes her piece with the following:

What will save you is tacking into the love of the work, into the desire that brought you there in the first place. This creates a suspension of time, opens a spacious room of your own in which you can walk around and consider your response. Staring prejudice in the face imposes a cruel discipline: to structure your anger, to achieve a certain dignity, an angry dignity. 

Indeed, all we can do is to lose ourselves in our work and maybe that is what instills the strange responses, whether of silence or of disregard -- we can and will continue to lose ourselves in research that we truly believe in.

And with 3 female doctoral students, I have to serve as a role model.

The Tarnishing of the Ivory Tower

Now that graduations are over with and before another set of conferences begins, one can reflect on the academic year that has passed.

At times I wish that the ivory tower was, indeed, ivory to reflect an integrity that one expects of academics.

However, I continue to observe that, at various colleges and universities, it is increasingly not those who have worked the hardest and the most diligently that get the promotions and rewards, but, rather, it is those with the right "political" networks.

I am seeing more administrative appointments without searches; deserving faculty, whose promotions are delayed or stymied or outrightly denied because of egregious falsehoods, disregard to policy manuals, and errors that propagate up the chain of decision-making, and a deemphasis of diversity and equal opportunity.

I know of a teaching award winning faculty member, who is also a member of a minority, who was told to postpone his promotion and tenure decision year so that others could go through the process before him.

I am seeing more searches in which the finalists have no female representation even in areas in which females are well-represented.

I am witnessing rude public firings of directors by other administrators for no reason than to include substitutes that match more closely the one who did the firing.

I am seeing academic positions that are getting filled not by the best as according to the job description but by friends of those in so-called leadership positions.

I know of a female faculty member whose required course was made unrequired midyear and program graduation requirements altered to suit recently hired faculty with students not even being informed.

It appears that, in cases, it is the case that higher-level administrators are tacitly approving the misbehaviors and bullying of others by the lower level administrators.

As a colleague of mine told me recently at one of our graduation ceremonies, and I concurred, individuals know the paths that they have taken to reach their destinations/positions and they have to live with the choices made. I sometimes feel that some may just lack a conscience.

It takes a leader with courage to right the wrongs and I wonder where are the administrators who are up to this task?! Sometimes too much delegation without proper oversight and communications can completely destabilize what a school or college has taken years to build.