Those bastards– proprietary formats rear their ugly heads again!

To finally take advantage of Home Media Option, I got a wireless adapter for my Tivo and I was so impressed with how fast and easy it was to just plug and play. I excitedly downloaded and set up the Tivo Desktop software, but when I went to listen to my new favorite song, “Diary” by Alicia Keys, my Tivo couldn’t find it. The problem? I had bought my legal copy of “Diary” on iTunes and Tivo doesn’t support AAC. Those bastards!

At first, I didn’t know who to be more annoyed at– Apple or Tivo. At first, I was annoyed at Tivo for not being able to play all of the music I had paid for. But then, I realized once again, I’m more annoyed at Apple in the long run. Hey, here’s fuckin’ idea– sell music in the standard mp3 format that the digital music has been using for years. This isn’t the first time the fact that iTunes sells files in the AAC format has been inconvenient for me. If it weren’t for the fact that I own an iPod (I have the old 5 GB one– oh God, please let it keep working), I’d really be screwed. Aside from the fact that now I can’t take advantage of a very cool feature of my Tivo, I’m always afraid that Apple, with its history of bad follow-through and committment to backwards compatibility, will just abandon the AAC format and/or iTunes for Windows (perhaps when Longhorn comes out) one day and I’m going to be stuck with legal, paid-for digital music that I can’t play. Of course, there’s always the burn to CD, rip from CD, encode to mp3 option, but it’s just so stinkin’ inconvenient and annoying. I mean, leave it to the entertainment industry to make cool technology annoying. The more ways I can listen to my legally purchased digital music, the more likely I am to buy digital music legally, dipshits. I paid for all this stuff– the Tivo, the wireless adapter, the music– and now that I want to take advantage of how all these things can be integrated into my space, my life, becoming an essential part of a higher quality life experience, you won’t let me. When did it become okay for companies to punish their customers?

Richard Posner

Richard Posner has been guest blogging over on Larry Lessig’s blog and he’s posting some really great stuff that I can barely keep up with (in terms of both quantity and richness of content). A judge of the US Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, he’s sounding off about everything from fair use and copyright to the CIA and the intelligence community to how technology lessons from “The Matrix” fit into our real world. With no disrespect to Lessig (God knows I love him and his work– if only he would look in his own backyard!), it’s great to get such candid, but still well-formed, articulate analysis on law and technology from a respected, experienced judge. If you haven’t already, definitely check him out!

Geek Girls, Part 2

In my continuous Microsoft stalking (hey, I’m not obsessed with them, it’s just that they run half the universe, they tend to come up), I found this interview with Sarah Revi Sterling, one of Microsoft’s program managers for University Relations. I found her as I did some follow up to the article about the challenges of attracting women into computer science. While I, of course, always want to applaud efforts to get more balanced demographic representation in any situation, I think it’s again strange that Sterling talks about, among other things, how first, girls around middle school age turn away from computer science and related fields because it’s considered “geeky.” Then, when they enter college, they turn away because their academic curriculums fail to deliver on the promise of giving them a way to change the world through computer science. As a result, efforts like those at Microsoft aim to “de-geekify” CS and add a more practical, “real world” side to academic curriculums.

While there’s some truth to these ideas (as is the case with most generalizations and stereotypes), it’s strange to think that these goals are pursued because we’re trying to recruit more women into CS. Aren’t these goals probably pretty positive objectives when it comes to recruiting in general? You think women are the only demographic that is turned away because CS is considered “too geeky” or because introductory classes focus on theory without giving some real world perspective?

I think one of the more specific problems in attracting women in CS and other engineering fields is in the socialization of women in our society. Let’s face it– engineering, CS or otherwise, is a pretty geeky field. No matter how much we might like to make it require more “social” skills, much of engineering is a solitary pursuit. Moreover, no matter how much we want to make it “cool” (a new generation of geek millionaires helps with this, no doubt), it will always be geeky because it involves a body of esoteric knowledge that a small group of people understand and focus on. In this vein, library sciences or quantum physics or 12th century Romanian poetry or any other esoteric field are seen as equally geeky. And in the end, those who are immersed in the field embrace the geekiness anyway and no matter how social we are amongst ourselves or even with the outside world, techies know that there’s something different about our temperament and personalities in addition to natural technical aptitude that lead us into the tech fields.

But our society and culture views something less horrible about a male geek than we do about a female geek. For boys and later men, we’re more forgiving if they’re not as concerned with fashion and grooming and social networking and often times, many of the traits traditionally associated with geeky men– quiet, introspective, anti-social– are given a positive spin. They’re not anti-social, they’re “independent,” “loners.” They’re not quiet, they’re “reserved,” “mysterious.” Geeky men are considered eccentric and awkwardness is often found endearing, rather than repulsive. But for girls and later women, we’re a lot less forgiving. We’re expected to be interested in fashion and makeup and jewelry and we’re expected to spend a large percentage of time, whether we’re teenagers or adults, socializing with men as well as other women. More often than not, we’re defined by our social networks and our ability to socialize, rather than who we are. And with pop culture touting the virtues of the metrosexual man, we’re becoming more accepting of men who concern themselves with fashion and grooming, but we haven’t become that much more accepting of women who, for example, don’t wear makeup regularly or don’t wear “feminine” fashions.

Many comments on the above Channel 9 posting get into how it just doesn’t seem to be in women’s nature to sit in front of a computer for long periods of time. I think it’s more likely that we’ve been socialized to believe that and to believe that women shouldn’t sit in front of a computer all day long. Instead, we’re supposed to be talking to people, networking, making friends, meeting people, finding a husband, etc. To think that women are just naturally averse to spending large amounts of time doing tedious work is to forget the countless women who have worked through history (and continue to do so) in front of a sewing machine or on assembly lines or wherever else doing tedious, detail-oriented work for long periods of time. It may not be rocket science, but in many ways, it requires the same kind of temperament that crunching out code all day long requires.

But at the end of the day, what disappoints me the most is the tendency for us to make sweeping generalizations about men and women simply because at the heart of our arguments, we’re trying to do a good thing– even out the gender balance. We try to say that things are the way they are because women are this way and men are that way, but would we be so quick to make these kinds of statements if we were talking about, for example, racial imbalances? Would we say that there aren’t a lot of Asian people in the arts as compared to the sciences because Asian people are just inherently less creative and more analytical? Or that there are more professional Black athletes because they are naturally more athletic and less intellectual? In a rush to solve the problem, we end up doing more damage when we promote unfair and incorrect stereotypes.

Told you so: SP2 on campus

Looks like college campuses are facing serious problems with the horrible timing of SP2:

Windows XP SP2 Upgrade Causing Campus Headaches

This is exactly the problem I started to predict over a week ago:

Desperately Seeking SP2
Microsoft redeems itself…a little

While I can say “told you so,” it’s still going to suck for university IT workers everywhere. Especially considering Microsoft is only giving universities one CD for every 50 students and won’t let universities make their own copies for distribution. An average undergraduate dorm at Stanford has about 100 students, so that’s only 2 CDs per dorm. (We actually have a different deal, but let’s go with this basic deal.) Assuming that the average time to install SP2 is about 30 minutes to an hour (calculating in time between passing off the Microsoft-pressed CD to the next person, variable computer speed and performance, etc.) and that you could probably get people patching for a total of 8 hours spread throughout the day, you could get about 16 people upgraded a day. So, it would take about six or seven days to upgrade an entire dorm. Of course, this is a very optimistic estimate– calculate in the time that somebody just isn’t around for a few days and doesn’t pass on the CD in a timely manner or somebody’s computer is slow and it just takes a long time or somebody just loses the damn CD. It could be upwards of two to three weeks before everyone gets SP2 installed and that’s a lot of time during which a vulnerability and exploit can come out and wreak havoc.

The point is that schools will have to institute a mixed model of distributing CDs and installing over the network. But how do you do that when students are more preoccupied with meeting friends and roommates, buying books, picking and registering for classes, paying bills, going to Target to buy some extra-long twin sheets, etc.? Not to mention all of the community building activities Stanford’s Residential Education program pushes. How do you encourage students in a way that will a) get them to install an important security update in a timely manner and b) do it in a way that is evenly distributed over multiple channels? On one hand, you’ll have students who try to get the CD as soon as possible so that they can be patched and secure. Okay, in a dorm of 100 students, after the first two grab those CDs, what about the other 98? Well, they’re busy and they’ve got to go run errands and meet up with friends and talk to professors and whatever else they have to do, so they don’t have time to be waiting around to meet up with Joe down the hall so that they can get the CD. They’ll either run Windows Update themselves or wait until Automatic Update happens or never get patched at all. That’s not very good distribution.

Last year, before RPC hell and back, Stanford’s IT organization decided to cut back on costs and not distribute an Essential Stanford Software CD, a CD which, among other things, included anti-virus software and was traditionally given to all new students when they came to campus. But come late July, the RPC exploits began to hit and suddenly, everyone realized that the CD was a pretty good idea and that it would be the perfect way to get people patched before they got onto the network. So then, there was a mad rush to get CDs pressed and distributed to not just new students, but all 10,000 students living on campus. I wonder what will happen if an exploit hits around September 1 and suddenly it becomes critical to get students patched with SP2 before they connect to the network. Will Microsoft be willing to allow us to copy and distribute CDs then? Or will universities have to bear the burden of whatever new exploit as they are asked to pay for more CDs and wait for Microsoft to press and ship them out?

Who knows what will happen? I think many of us are just simply going to get the CDs out there and hold our breath, hoping that a new vulnerability and/or exploit doesn’t come out, that SP2 won’t break too many computers, and that it won’t make our networks not only sluggish, but just completely roll over during this important period where students– and university staff– are trying to get the school year started, a process of which the Internet has become a critical part. We have seen how much network usage and hits to central campus servers spike during this period and we’ve seen our mail servers slow to a crawl. We’ve seen how much network traffic is hit already with email and file-sharing viruses and spyware. We’ve seen the Windows Update site fail under the burden of users trying to patch their computers. I guess we’ll just have to see what happens when they are all put together.

Microsoft redeems itself… a little

Interestingly enough, especially after my recent rant about the timing of SP2 for Windows XP and my long-time rants about simple services Microsoft could provide to help out universities, it looks like Microsoft has finally listened. I heard through the grapevine that Microsoft is going to help Stanford out in the coming weeks as we prepare for fall student arrival by pressing SP2 CDs for us to distribute to RCCs and other technical support staff. (There’s even talk that they’ll make these CDs available for free to plain ol’ folk at brick and mortar locations.) We also have access to a CD image (that I’m download right now) if we want to burn our own CDs as well. The way in which SP2 is distributed over CD is tightly controlled– as is usually the case with anything from MegaCorp– and it unfortunately reduces our ability to also distribute a little configuration tool (< 500 KB) that will open up certain ports and change IE settings, addressing the inevitable issues that will come up specifically for Stanford users. Hopefully, we'll be able to distribute this little tool on our Essential Stanford Software CD that goes out to new students (if the CD hasn't already gone to press yet), but here's the amusing user support scenario that we came up with:

An incoming junior gets a new computer right around the end of August. Because most computer vendors aren’t installing SP2 yet on their drive images, his computer doesn’t have SP2 installed. But the student comes back to school and moves onto campus around September 26th and hooks his computer up to the network. Among other reasons, because he’s living off of the “free” electricity and high speed network available to him for only $10 per month, he leaves his computer on and connected to the network all the time. Now, hopefully, he’ll have automatic updates turned on or he’ll have listened to his RCC’s recommendations to install the latest OS patches or he’ll have installed Stanford’s new BigFix client to help with keeping his computer up-to-date. So, his computer gets SP2 pretty soon after he gets onto campus and he gets to, theoretically, take advantage of all the new security features that SP2 provides.

However, once SP2 is installed and the firewall is turned on, there are certain things that don’t work. Specifically, certain ports are blocked, so now he can’t log on using PC-Leland, Stanford’s desktop application that allows Kerberos single sign-on. Well, this is kind of annoying because most likely, he’s already configured his email client to use PC-Leland for accessing his Stanford email account, so his email probably doesn’t work now. Also, every time he tries to access anything on the Web behind Stanford WebAuth, including signing up for classes, accessing Coursework (Stanford’s course management system), etc., he has to login via the authentication page on the Web. But the problem is that there’s a known caching problem with the WebAuth page and if his browser’s not checking for new content every time he visits a page, he’ll go into an endless loop after authenticating and never be able to actually get to the page he was trying to access.

But no worries. He walks down the hallway and tells his RCC about his problem. The RCC is a little overwhelmed with beginning of the year computer problems or doesn’t want to confuse his not necessarily tech-savvy resident with complicated directions on how to open up ports, so he tells him to run the little SP2 configuration tool that has been put out by Stanford. Well, he’s not a new student, so he didn’t get a copy of this year’s CD, so he’ll have to go download the tool off of the Web site. Oh, but wait, that Web site is behind WebAuth, so he’ll run into the same caching problem. Okay, well, then the RCC will take some time out to help him fix that and then finally he’ll be able to get the configuration tool, get the right ports open, and get going.

A possible addendum to this scenario: if this student had installed the BigFix client when he got onto campus, at the recommendation of ITSS, he might have gotten SP2 pushed out to him through this system rather than Automatic Update (since it’s not clear how quickly someone would get SP2 pushed out to them over AU even with constant high speed network connectivity). But the second SP2 is successfully installed, BigFix would not work thereafter since the port it uses to push out patches is now blocked with the firewall. So, BigFix was able to push out SP2, but if there are new vulnerabilities and additional critical updates (which there most certainly will be), BigFix will not be able to push those out. We’ll have to hope that the student will be able to open up the correct ports soon or have Automatic Update running so that he can get his computer patched. Ironically, BigFix could end up shooting itself in the foot– an issue outside of the major concerns we had about this new system.

Of course, many of the user support issues here are not all the fault of Microsoft or even Stanford and in the end, a large OS upgrade like this will cause user support issues no matter what (although let’s not even get into the weird conflicts SP2 causes with popular antivirus software). And in the end, I give credit to Microsoft for actually listening to the one suggestion we gave them last year after RPC Hell– to give us resources to easily put critical patches and updates onto a CD and get users patched without having to put them on the network. I have to say, after over a year of constant struggles with security, privacy, and copyright, this little victory is both surprising and welcomed.

Bridging the Digital Divide: right intentions, wrong solution, Part 2

I just wanted to respond to a comment on my previous post on the PCtvt. I don’t mean any ill will towards the PCtvt people, including Raj Reddy, but the way the NY Times article reported on the device is really what set me off on my rant. Commenter Prasanna (and btw, thank you for commenting– I get very few legitimate comments) notes that after a three-year study in rural India, the PCtvt team came up with the device to help these rural communities get connectivity with the rest of the world and specifically, learn about important services, funds, etc. they could get from their government. While I still don’t necessarily think that the PCtvt is the best answer to this problem, I do agree that this problem of communication is a key component of the digital divide. The nature of the digital divide is, obviously, different in different communities– rural versus urban, American versus European versus Asian, etc. In urban US areas– where much American media attention focuses– the issue isn’t that people don’t know about valuable government services (those who pooh-pooh welfare might say they know too much about government services), but that there are much larger, systemic problems that can’t be solved by a device like the PCtvt.

But the NY Times correctly reports that the PCtvt is intended for people around the world who live on less than $2000 a year– certainly not the demographic of most Americans on the either side of the digital divide. And yes, I haven’t spent three years in rural India doing field research, so let’s say that communicating with these communities is a core problem. Then that’s what news coverage of the PCtvt should have focused on, instead of Reddy talking about how he can “find a market” among these populations and that he believes people would be willing to pay more than five, ten percent of their annual income for a device like this. And the effort to sell the idea of the PCtvt shouldn’t focus on its merits as an entertainment center– Berkeley’s Tom Kalil’s soundbite that includes the phrase “Entertainment is the killer app” just seems insensitive to the problems these communities face and diminishes the value that a device like the PCtvt could provide.

But at the end of the day, my problem with the whole concept of the digital divide is that we’re all trying to oversimplify the problem. Too many of us think that getting all of this technology out to those on the other side of the digital divide will somehow make up for years, decades, generations worth of living behind the curve. Of discrimination, of prejudice, of just pure disadvantage and poverty. Even if a computer is so easy to use that you don’t have to know how to read, we still need to teach people how to read. In fact, we have to teach them how to read well so that one day, using a computer– a medium that relies on the ability to read well– is not a burden. We have to teach people how to read, write, and countless other things, from the most basic to the most complex, so that they can not only participate in the industrialized and digital world, but also live longer and better.

As a technophile, I understand the great things that can be done with today’s technology– including things like using computers to improve farming techniques and increase production or bringing essentials like water, power, transportation, and more faster and easier to places that have been beyond our reach for so long. But I also believe that there are still very basic, very real problems that won’t be solved by technology and that just because we’re so excited about technology and this digital age doesn’t mean that everything should and must be seen through the window of computers. There were very real social problems before computers and there will continue to be social problems after them. Perhaps even more.

Digital Dental

I had an emergency root canal today (when is a root canal not an emergency?). I had been experiencing pain for about a week now and at first, I figured it was just my usual stress-related jaw clenching and teeth grinding. But despite my fervent attempts to relax my jaw, relax my jaw, relax my jaw, the pain still didn’t go away and I finally went to the dentist. “Tap, tap, tap, does this hurt? How about this? Here’s a tiny piece of ice. Does this hurt? How about now?” And soon I was off to the endodontist (there’s a new word I learned today) to get a root canal.

As scary as a root canal sounds, it’s actually not that bad. Maybe it was because we caught this very early on (the x-ray didn’t even show anything wrong really), but the whole thing was over in like 20 minutes. I went in, the endodontist tapped around my tooth again and then before I knew it, he was breaking out the novacaine. You think he would have eased me into it, but 20 minutes (and $1200) later, I was off on my way home. I’ll admit that when I was younger, I didn’t really take care of my teeth and have had my fair share of cavities and subsequent fillings, so I still have this associated nervousness with dental procedures. But with all the cool things they have now– including the little cotton swab to apply topical anesthetic so you don’t even feel the needle go in– it’s all become a lot less painful. Modern medicine! (Granted that whole side of my mouth is sore now and it hurts to bite down on that side, but still.)

Weirdly enough though, I had to bring my x-ray along with my referral to the endodontist’s office. Between the dentist appointment and endodontist appointment, I stopped into work and we spent a few minutes peering at the x-ray with the help of my high-powered desk lamp, trying to make sense of it. And as part of my photo archiving project, I had this strange desire to scan it in and preserve it for all time. What is it about pictures of our insides that fascinate us so much?

Bridging the Digital Divide: right intentions, wrong solution

I probably shouldn’t criticize Raj Reddy before I even get started at CMU, but TechDirt picked up on a NY Times article on his new PCtvt, “a $250 wirelessly networked personal computer intended for the four billion people around the world who live on less than $2,000 a year.” While I admire people who want to help less fortunate people around the world, the PCtvt is just another example of how misguided the effort to bridge the digital divide is. The popular approach to addressing the digital divide is this:

Problem: poor people, usually those who are traditionally disadvantaged because of race or ethnicity, can’t afford computers and therefore, can’t compete in today’s job market or digital world in general.

Solution: give computers to said poor people or make cheaper computers/make computers cheaper so poor people can afford them.

Case in point: the PCtvt. (Let’s put aside for the moment that a $250 computer for a person making, at the most, $2000 per year is still over ten percent of his annual income.) By bundling television, DVD player, telephone and videophone capabilities into this computer, Reddy hopes to finally bring “computing and communications to populations that until now have been excluded from the digital world.” That’s all fine and good– he’s admirably trying to bring three decades worth of technology to these communities all at once– but the thing that really drives home my point is something he points out himself: because it can be controlled by a simple remote control, it will be beneficial particularly in places with large populations of people who cannot read. Reddy says he thought about what somebody on the other side of the digital divide would really want and the answer he came up with was entertainment.

Doesn’t anybody else see how messed up this is? Hello, have you met some people on the other side of the digital divide? They may want entertainment and be willing to pay more than five percent of their annual income to get it, but is this really where we want to be putting our money and effort when it comes to helping those less fortunate? There are large populations of people who can’t read and our biggest concern right now is providing them with cheap home entertainment centers? Instead of trying to bridge the digital divide, how about bridging this reading divide? And while we’re at it, why don’t we bridge the math divide, the housing divide, the health care divide, the food divide? Why don’t we help people get better housing, have better schools, live healthier? Maybe then they can have both the time and the money to own and use computers and participate in the digital world. Even if people are giving away computers to disadvantaged communities– as some are as part of their effort to bridge this gap– it doesn’t really help the fact that I’m worried about buying food next week or paying my rent. Even if I have a computer– PCtvt or Dell Dimension– it doesn’t really help me because I can’t eat it, wear it or live in it.

You want to bridge the digital divide? Bridge all of those more basic divides and you’ll see the digital divide grow smaller all by itself.

Desperately seeking SP2

We’ve been hearing about SP2 for Windows XP for so long and frankly, dreading it. I know that Microsoft has been trying to address these concerns, but a big software release/upgrade like this is going to undoubtedly create a large user support issue. And considering that’s a huge chunk of my department’s business, we’re all a little worried.

But even after they announced that the code was finalized (no more release candidate teases), SP2’s still not available for individual computers. Granted, it’s available for IT professionals as a huge download, but the Microsoft TechNet site emphatically tells you not to use it for individual computers. Making it available earlier for IT professionals is helpful because we get a slight taste of what’s to come, but we’re not worried about our centrally managed computers breaking. It’s easy to just re-image them and apply a fix. No, we’re worried about thousands of students out there in the dorms installing SP2 on their individual computers all with their own configurations, setups, and quirks. And even if solving people’s problems are just simple preference and setting changes, it’s a huge user education and support issue. So, I desperately want to go through what an individual computer upgrade/install scenario would be like, but They. Just. Won’t. Let. Me. And honestly, I don’t want to get it through a special download (i.e., I want the go through the experience as close to the way students will experience it as possible), but it doesn’t really help matters when Microsoft squashes Downhill Battle’s attempts to share SP2 over P2P. Microsoft could have really won some major cool points by letting sp2torrent.com continue– it not only demonstrated a great way to use P2P networks, but also ease the burden of distributing a free upgrade that’s supposed to deliver improved quality of service for Microsoft customers.

But the thing that really just hurts my feelings is that the release for individual computers is scheduled for August 25. That’s right in the middle of the major fall back-to-school time for most universities. Even at a quarter-system school like Stanford, you start getting students trickling in right around that date and then the move-in numbers increase through the end of September with two major bursts– one for incoming freshmen and other new students and one for everyone else. And Microsoft might think they’re being smart by encouraging people to turn on Automatic Update so that they can break up the distribution and keep people off of Windows Update, but after the RPC vulnerabilities from last summer, lots of schools might require SP2 before allowing student computers on the network. So, despite their tricky Automatic Update plan, there’s a good chance that lots of students are going to actively pull SP2 from Windows Update rather than waiting for it to be pushed out to them over Automatic Update.

Well, I guess we’ll just have to brace ourselves for the inevitable Windows headache that happens every fall. You know, I really do like Microsoft and Windows most of the time, but their sensitivity to universities and the higher education community is just… well, stupid.

Geek Girls

Someone posted on Slashdot about an article in US News & World Report about the age-old numbers problem when it comes to gender distribution in computer science. That is to say, there’s a lot of dudes and not a lot of chicks. Well, duh.

As a woman engineer or a woman in computer science or whatever you want to call me, I always find it interesting (read: stupid) how most people look at this problem. First of all, it’s just kind of mean that the primary motivating factor for tech firms to solve this problem is that, simply put, they’re running out of guys. Restrictions because of homeland security issues and growing hiring needs in general because of the tech boom are leaving an increasingly smaller pool of people to pick from when it comes to filling tech positions. So, let me get this straight: you can’t fill your tech jobs with foreign nationals anymore and you’re running out of guys in the US, so now you decide that hey, there’s a whole half of the population that we haven’t tapped. This is like when men were sent off to war, there was suddenly a workforce shortage so they decided to get women to work in factories and the like. It’s like they’re saying, “Uh, the boys have been doing all the heavy lifting lately when it comes to computers, but we’ve got a lot of work to do, so you ladies better start pulling your own weight.” Gee, I thought that having a workforce in tech more representative of the general population– at least when it comes to gender– would be a good thing for tech no matter what. Or that it might just generally be important to show impressionable young women that girls can do anything that boys can do and that having a vagina doesn’t disqualify you from being part of one of the most important, influential, not to mention lucrative, industries ever.

But even if we put aside the somewhat selfish motivation for trying to attract women to CS, most of the programs put into place seem like things men came up with because that’s what they think women want or need. Because they think that the issue is how women feel rather than what women know. Yes, although I never took advantage of groups like these while I was at Stanford, these “support groups” (how fucking sad to call it that– is it a disorder to be a woman in CS?) and mentorship programs might be helpful to many women because they feel more comfortable being around other women. But like I’ve said a thousand times, “separate, but equal” is rarely ever actually equal and getting women in CS together to make them feel better about being women in CS doesn’t solve the big picture problem.

Any type of gap like this starts at a much earlier stage– before entering the workforce, before college, before high school. It starts on the very first day people around you begin to shape your learning, inside and outside of the classroom. Ten, fifteen years ago, we all recognized that boys tended to be more interested in and excel more at math and science because they were simply encouraged to do so and girls were explicity discouraged. This naturally extends to CS. Just because kids today are digital natives– they don’t know a world without computers and the Internet– doesn’t mean that girls and boys have the same interaction with computers. You know why women feel so insecure and inadequate when they take programming classes in college? You know why women feel like they’re always behind and they’re just not as good at it as everyone else? Because we’re not as good at it as everyone else (at least at that point). And you know why that is? Because we haven’t been doing it our whole fucking lives. Just because someone grew up using computers her whole life doesn’t mean she knows anything about, has ever been exposed to anything that’s actually remotely related to computer science. How many male CS students already know how to program when they come to college? How many male CS students breeze through introductory classes because they’ve been programming in C or C++ for years and have already been exposed to some engineering fundamentals? Women who feel like they’re drowning even in introductory CS classes feel that way because they are drowning– they’re playing catch up and with the rigor of most engineering programs, it’s not an easy thing to do. Support groups might make women feel better because they realize that other women feel insecure too, but it doesn’t really solve the problem of why they feel insecure in the first place. If an overweight person feels insecure because he’s overweight, it might help to have him be around other overweight people so that he doesn’t feel alone, but you know what? He’s still overweight and that’s something that still needs to be addressed.

And on top of that, women miss out on all the random, but valuable things you learn on the side from talking tech with your friends. When a bunch of CS guys are together, they’ll talk about everything geeky, from programming languages to gaming to operating system choices to new technologies (ahem, e.g., file-sharing). I don’t know if it’s the estrogen in the air or the breasts that throw them off, but when a girl comes around, even if she is a CS girl, suddenly the conversation changes. Maybe CS guys think that a girl wouldn’t want to talk about these things. Maybe they think that they can impress her by trying to show her that they’re not just CS geeks. Maybe so, maybe not, but the gender gap isn’t going to get any smaller if both men and women don’t start getting their acts together– men need to start actively including women in their old boys network and women need to stop shying away from all-male geek circles and just get in there and learn. Get involved.

Case in point: my department did some brown bag lunch sessions with the Society of Women Engineers at Stanford and we started with a free-for-all “what do you want to learn about?” session. Now, here’s a group of about forty or fifty Stanford engineering majors– not a group to be taken lightly– and what do they want to learn about? How to FTP, how to set up a Web server, how to make a Web page. Shit like that. These are things that aren’t taught in class, but that most CS students know how to do– you know why? Because they sit around and learn how to do it on their own or pick it up from their friends. I realized that I knew how to do all these things because I was lucky enough to find a circle of friends freshman year that happened to be male CS students and more importantly, weren’t afraid to talk tech in front of me, with me. And when I didn’t know something, I, being the fearless young woman I am, would ask and they would tell me all about it. They would show me. And without being condescending about it! At the end of the day, so much is learned from just interacting with your peers and if you set CS women off to one side because you think that it will make them feel better, they’re never going to be exposed to the valuable things they can learn from being around CS men and they’re never going to be able to pass on those things to other women. The gender gap will never get smaller.

Ever notice that girls who grow up with lots of brothers often have (among other interests) traditionally “boy” interests? Like playing or following sports? It’s because they’re exposed to it growing up. And they’re not afraid to talk about sports or play sports with men later in life because they are confident about they’re own knowledge and abilities. You don’t create a divide between girls and boys and later in life, you don’t have a divide between men and women. You can see it with the digital divide too– giving a kid from a traditionally disadvantaged background a computer when he gets to high school might help the situation a little bit, but the real solution is not to simply donate some computers, but to close the math divide, the reading divide, the food divide, the housing divide. You empower them early so that they do not fall behind later.

You won’t be able to truly, effectively close the CS gender gap unless we work to close the gender gap in general, unless we work to encourage all types of learning equally among boys and girls from an early age. We won’t have to have mentorship programs or have to actively recruit women into computer science– women will naturally be attracted to CS because they will have been exposed to it early on and been able to cultivate that ability and interest as they grew up. And when they get to college, they won’t feel insecure or like they’re catching up because they won’t be catching up. They’ll know just as much as their male counterparts and have had the same opportunities to have the proper preparation for a CS curriculum. They won’t need a support group because they’ll be able to support themselves. They won’t need to find female CS role models because their gender will no longer separate them. To borrow from affirmative action, it will level the playing field and by providing equal opportunity, we’ll come closer to having equal results.