Posts for 2019

With increased awareness due to the internet and Social Media, the advent of females in the tech industry has never been under greater scrutiny. There are companies who advocate Affirmative Action policies and publications that glorify the presence of women in this industry.

Editor's Note: Interestingly, International Women's Day arrives in a two days. I swear it's a coincidence - I only learned about it after writing this two-parter.

Before I get into that, however, I'd like to introduce a little concept known as Prototype Bias. Simply put, that's when something is rejected because it doesn't look or sound like preconceived notions of what it should look and sound like. For instance, a short basketball player. A fat supermodel. Or a heavily-tattooed pastor.

Here's a little activity. Which groups of women below look like they could be engineers, software developers or simply part of the tech industry?

If you went with Group A...

Get outta here, you stereotyping piece of monkey shit. What the hell is wrong with you?

But seriously, your guess is as good as mine. I took those pictures off a stock photo site. They could be engineers, and merely posing for photos as a side hustle.

If your guess was Group B...

That's closer to the truth. Well done.


China's Naomi Wu, otherwise known as Sexy Cyborg, is a hardware geek who has a day job as a Ruby On Rails developer. Look past the big-ass plastic tits, that gorgeous face and the Barbie-doll figure and you'll see a girl who can code and work a soldiering iron. Her stuff is all over YouTube. Check it out! It's really fascinating. Despite those porn-star proportions, she's not coquettish at all and instead comes across as really earnest.

In the past, Naomi Wu has encountered Prototype Bias because she was so pretty no one believed that was really her doing all the tech stuff.



Singapore's Grace Quek. This name might not ring a bell. How about Anabel Chong? That's right, the 90s porn star who once broke the world record with a 255-man gang bang. Quek went on to become a web developer in San Francisco and currently her job title is "engineer".

The only memory I have of Grace Quek was during guard duty in the Republic of Singapore Navy. Someone had smuggled in some VCDs (Yes, that was the tech back then. Amazing, huh?) and started to play them. Being a really tired 20-year old fresh off his shift, I fell asleep while the screen was showing a close-up of her Anabel Chong's anus being lubed up. Twenty minutes later, I woke up and they were still showing close-ups of that anus. I guess you could say I'm better acquainted with Quek's ass than her face.

The point is, even a woman who did so much porn can still turn out to be a successful engineer. Amazing, eh?


Another exhibit from Singapore. This is Krystal Choo, tech entrepreneur and co-founder of Tickle. She's spoken before on how she gets targeted in tech because she's a woman.

I've actually met Choo before. And while she's not butt-ugly, she's nowhere as insanely hot as her photos might suggest. (FFS, that picture above looks like a young Coco Lee!) No, she's pretty much one of the crowd, and I never even suspected she was this super-formidable entrepreneur until I read a few articles.

But what was the real answer?

Why, all of the above. Women from both groups are likely to be techies no matter what they look like. That's because software developers are people. And people come in all shapes and sizes. Group A pandered to the stereotype that all techies are geeks, and that tech girls have to be geeky and unattractive. Group B demolishes the stereotype that pretty girls can't code. But the fact is, all of them, attractive or not, could be techies. Some of them actually are.

I recall the case of the unfortunately-named Isis Anchalee Wenger, a software engineer currently working in Uber. Back then, she worked in OneLogin and had participated in an ad campaign.


And guess what? Plenty of guys felt that she couldn't possibly really be an engineer because she looked too hot. Go figure.

Sometimes guys in tech don't handle the presence of women well. They appear to take it as a challenge to their dominance or some crap like that. Their reactions seem to pretty much stem from resentment. "She's hot, sexy and she can code, perhaps even better than me. It's not fair!" Again, developers are people. People come in all shapes and sizes. Thus, developers come in all shapes and sizes. Leave your Prototype Bias behind.


Also, who said life was fair in the first place? A female developer can have big boobs, look way hotter than you, get laid more often than you and code better than you. Suck it up, buttercup!

But it's true! Women just aren't as good as men at tech...

Buddy, let me stop you right there. There are plenty of perfectly good hills to die on, so you might want to give this one a pass.

I'm not part of any kind of feminist movement, or some wannabe white knight. I am a software developer, and while I may not be a master of my craft, I understand the history of my own industry enough to say this: women can code; it's an objective fact.

Did you know that the first ever computer algorithm was written by a woman? I shit you not; there's even a programming language named after her.

When's the last time you used an ATM? 95% of these worldwide are still powered by COBOL. Guess who was largely responsible for COBOL's development roughly six decades ago? That's right - a woman. Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, to be exact.

And before the above-mentioned woman asserted her belief that code should be written in something close to English (like all the fancy programming languages you and I use today), people were still dealing with machine language and assembly. Guess what the vast majority of them were? Yep - friggin' women.

So yeah, let's have no more rubbish about how women can't code, OK?

Programming is about logic. And women are creatures of emotion, not logic...

Seriously, arguments like these are not helpful. So are people claiming that women are more detail-oriented and intuitive, and more suited than men for task x and job y. If you're going around saying things like that, you may think you're complimenting women, but in reality you're part of the problem.

Even if it's true that women are more x and men are more y, nobody with any ounce of professional pride wants to compete in terms of gender. If we start hiring based on gender (women for QA and men for programming or whatnot), a great deal of talent will remain untapped. And in a world where the demand for tech talent far outstrips the supply, this is not a good thing.

But there are more men than women in Silicon Valley!

Yes, that's true. Men outnumber women by a ratio of maybe five to one. But understand this - capability has nothing to do with it. Programming isn't some rocket science reserved for the intellectually endowed, though as with all disciplines that require logic and thinking, a high I.Q can't hurt.


No, software development is as much about temperament as it is about anything else. Not everyone wants to code for a living. It takes a certain kind of personality to want to do this professionally. And, for some reason or other, women seem to want the life of a software developer less than men.

Not just men

Sadly enough, that bias is not restricted to men. Women, too, subscribe to the stereotype that other women generally aren't as technically gifted as men. Take this conversation I had with a friend a couple years back.


She listed the accomplishments of the colleague above, and when I did not appear impressed enough, tried to compound it with an added accolade - "she's a girl". Now, that's pretty insulting. I understand that my friend didn't mean to be derogatory, and she was genuine in her admiration. However, compliments like these do more harm than good.

Achievements are praiseworthy on their own. Achievements don't magically become extra deserving of praise simply because they were done by "a girl". That is like saying women, by default, are inferior to men, and therefore if they achieve anything, their achievement deserves more admiration. That's sexist and counter-productive. Not to mention condescending!

Conclusion

That's why we shouldn't glorify women in tech. Glorification of the idea that women can code, is giving credence to the Prototype Bias that women can't. I get it, people who do this have (probably) good intentions and are trying to help. But no, they're really not helping.

Because there is nothing to glorify. Women can code. They've been able to code even before I was born, and somehow people seem to have forgotten that when they get all excited over it like it's some new and special phenomenon.

It's not supposed to be special. It's supposed to be normal. It shouldn't be a big deal because it isn't. All of us - men and women - need to stop thinking of tech as a male or female profession. It's a profession, period.