House of Eratosthenes

These girl geeks aren’t social misfits; their identities don’t hinge on outsider status. They may love all things sci-tech, but first and foremost they are girls—and they’ve made that part of their appeal. They’ve modeled themselves after icons such as Tina Fey, whose character on “30 Rock” is a “Star Wars”-loving, tech-obsessed, glasses-wearing geek, but who’s garnered mainstream appeal and a few fashion-magazine covers. Or on actress Danica McKellar, who coauthored a math theorem, wrote a book for girls called “Math Doesn’t Suck” and posed in a bikini for Stuff magazine. Or even Ellen Spertus, a Mills College professor and research scientist at Google—and the 2001 winner of the Silicon Valley “Sexiest Geek Alive” pageant. They tune in to shows like “GeekBrief.TV,” a daily Web series hosted by 26-year-old Cali Lewis, and meet friends at Girl Geek Dinners, the first of which drew more than 600 women. However they choose to geek out, they consciously tweak the two chief archetypes of geeks: that they’re unattractive outcasts, and that they’re male. “For a long time, there’s been this stereotype that either you’re ugly and smart or cute and not suited for careers in math, science or engineering,” says Annalee Newitz, the co-editor of “She’s Such a Geek!”, a 2006 anthology of women writing about math, tech and science. “One of the big differences between Generation X geeks and girls in their teens now is really just an attitude—an indication that they’re much more comfortable.”

Huh. Well, that’s still a good thing, I suppose. Maybe we’ve finally arrived at the point where boys and girls are no longer being bossed around by stuffy conventional protocol or by bitter angry feminists, and everybody just does what comes most naturally. And so we have some geek girls who take the time to be feminine after they’re done geeking-out.

And everybody’s stopped whining; hey, I can completely get behind that. Oopsie, no, we’re not quite there yet:

Yet there is still a dichotomy between the culture and the workplace. Forty years ago women made up just 3 percent of science and engineering jobs; now they make up about 20 percent. That sounds promising, until you consider that women earn 56 percent of the degrees in those fields. A recent Center for Work-Life Policy study found that 52 percent of women leave those jobs, with 63 percent saying they experienced workplace harassment and more than half believing they needed to “act like a man” in order to succeed.

Okay, so the whining hasn’t stopped. But at least society has begun to accept coolness and tech-wizardry in the same person, so long as that person is female.

Actually, that’s not new either now that I noodle it out a bit further. Action movies have had this going on for a very long time now. “Cracking a 256-bit twofish encryption code in your head” — hah — you can do that right after racing a motorcycle through a burning warehouse and then karate-chopping 50 bad guys in a row…and looking hot…if you’re a girl.

That’s quite alright, and has been for some time.

The male action hero hasn’t been allowed to do this, and to the best I can discern, is still not allowed to do this. If there’s a shoot-out and he’s busy hiding behind a car door, “covering” somebody by laying down about 70 shots from his six-shot .44 Ruger, and there’s a computer that has to be reprogrammed or unlocked or defeated in some way…it’s always been in the contract. He has to yell out “Do you think you can disarm that thing?” to his plucky sidekick. Said plucky sidekick being a gorgeous babe or an ugly whelp. There is, just to cite one example of the classic trend, Bond, James Bond. He can fight and drive fast cars and shoot guns and is supposed to be sexy as all get-out, but he doesn’t understand the computers, he needs his co-star to figure them out. I guess she was a Nerd 2.0 Girl before they were cool. The bad guy is a secret agent who can do everything Bond can do — he can’t figure the computers out, either. When a satellite has to be locked on to a city, he needs to rely on his dorky wimpy male sidekick who can’t shoot guns, flinches from a firefight, and seems to be working pretty hard to avoid looking the least bit sexy.

That’s a very old tradition, and a male-only tradition. We’ve lately done some work nibbling around the edges of it. Indiana Jones, I see, knows a gazillion languages, which is the kind of proficiency I might expect from a college professor who’s been globetrotting in search of archeological relics for eighty years. Hugh Jackman was allowed to break encryption keys in his head and still be a sexy dude — so long as the fighting was left to others.

So now, our expectation could be summed up as: Beating up bad guys; looking sexy; doing geek stuff. Girls, you can have all three; guys, pick any two.

That’s rather typical of our mindset, both in the cinema and outside of it, and it’s endured across generations: Girls can have all, dudes must choose. And I don’t see how the females have ever been shoehorned into anything, or out of anything, by it. Ever. On the school playground, I know girls can be meaner to each other than boys ever can be, but I don’t recall any anecdotal information about girls having been physically abused for their geekiness, whereas on the male side of the line this is a time-honored ritual.

So I guess what the article is trying to tell me, is that there is a new fashion trend rising up here in which it has become the hot new thing to mentor an up-and-coming female nerd. Well, since the Y2K computer bug, technology seems to have gone into a deep slumber, nobody seems to have gathered a benefit from that, so any nerd-mentoring that takes place is a good thing in my book.

But let’s not call this a groundbreaking trend. If 56 percent of engineering degrees are being earned by the ladies, that would indicate they’re already being mentored plenty well enough thankyew, so this isn’t quite so much blazing a new trail as climbing onto a bandwagon…we have a tendency to forget those are two different things. But whatever. We desperately need a technical renaissance, and if tech-skills are looking sexy, even if it’s only in the girls — and we’re pretending this is something new when it’s anything-but — this could be what a technical renaissance looks like, when it’s just getting started.

But you know what we need more than anything? We need what we had about twenty-five to forty-five years ago: Technology that exists solely for the purpose of making other technology possible. From where I’m sitting, and from what I know, the last great innovation in that department would have been…SSL 3.0. By itself, it doesn’t do anything impressive and is nearly impossible to explain to the “layman,” but it made truly secure e-commerce something worth developing, and had an influential impact on the financial world. A positive one, for a little while.

So passages like this have a tendency to temper my optimism:

In 2007, girls won both the team and the individual categories of the Siemens Competition for high-school students in math, science and technology for the first time in the competition’s history. A recent Pew Internet & American Life project found that among users 12 to 17, girls dominate the blogosphere and social networking sites; they’re also beating boys when it comes to creating Web sites of their own. Even women gamers far outnumber men ages 25 to 34, according to a 2006 study by the Consumer Electronics Association.

Winning a competition is something you do for the attention. Actually, it is not so much a measurable achievement, as reaching an opinionated achievement…an achievement in the opinion of one or several observers. Writing for a blog or participating in a social networking site, is the essence of showing off. Creating a web site is a process of presentation. And gaming is just goofing off. If girls are outnumbering boys in gaming, that’s just another example of them borrowing our worst habits.

So that concerns me a little. This “laying of railroad track” brand of technology, which we badly need now, is not being served by any new generation of hot stylish geek, regardless of which gender is involved. And it is highly unlikely to be served by anyone who’s entered the tech field out of any personal passions that have anything to do with getting attention. What we really need to have mentored, are some Dr. Frankensteins — folks, male or female, who lock themselves up in laboratories that are neat-or-messy, maybe equal parts of both, and just grind away at stuff without any concern for the kudos they get when they show it to someone. That has nothing to do with blogging, nothing to do with building web pages, and nothing to do with gaming; those are decidedly closed-end technologies.

But there will be more substantial cause for hope, in my lifetime, I’m sure. Technology has always moved in a feast-and-famine cycle. This is a famine, there’s no mistaking that. One of these decades, Microsoft will release an operating system that isn’t a bloated albatross…or someone else will. Or we’ll get some other home appliance that’s open-ended, maybe something some guy built in his garage, and go through the technological boom of the eighties and early nineties all over again. Maybe one of those geek girls will pull that off — become sort of a Joan of Ark of technical wizardry. If that’s the future, I’m pullin’ for her, and it can’t happen soon enough.

You know what will really make that all the more likely? Is if we separate geekdom from fashion. That way, we’ll be ready to accept whatever is ready to be offered. These preconceived notions about who’s going to build the next great widget — and, out of necessity, who will not — are marginally dangerous, and not very helpful to anyone. They impress me as a process of exchanging one crude stereotype for another one.

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Finally, Nerds Have Sex AppealMonday, June 23rd, 2008

Finally, Nerds Have Sex Appeal
Monday, June 23rd, 2008