Guys and gals
There's been some discussion over the last couple of months on Peter Merholz's weblog (Peterme) about why there seem to still be so few women in science, technology and computing, a situation seemingly reflected in Chris McEvoy's Userati list and at a range of user experience and technology industry events. New UK web book publisher glasshaus reinforces this view, referring on its blog last month to Userati as a 'useful list of all the big guys in Usability'. And the gals? While I kind of accepted the Userati list 'as is', one comment posted to Peterme's blog started me thinking: '..if there's nobody to invite, can you blame the organizers?' The problem according to Anil, referring to two other events (computing & social software), is a lack of candidates.

How untrue. I began to realise how many significant women players in this field did not figure on the list, and don't get 'invited'. Yes, there are fewer women than men in such fields, for a range of reasons, but then the women that are there also seem strangely less visible.

I can think of a few reasons why this has come to be, and why women have such low visibility compared to men:

1. Parents: what your parents do does influence you, and the same goes for the other adults you know. How many girls have mothers in science etc right now? How about any 'hard' science (physics, chemistry), maths and IT teachers at school? Who hosts the popular science programmes on TV (apart from Susan Greenfield, in the UK). Who is profiled on the obits page of your heavyweight newspaper? Not too many women, huh? So what messages are presented in *your* culture to young women?

2. Schools: in the UK at least, there has been an increasing trend over recent decades away from single-sex and towards co-ed secondary schools. Paradoxically, in single-ex schools girls do more science to a higher level *and* go on to study more science at university (more science teachers and heads of dept. are women, so more role models, no 'unladylike' view of science re boys etc. etc.), so the trend towards same-sex may reduce the presence of girls in science. (In general, girls don't seem to benefit from co-ed education in the ways boys do.)

I went to an all-girls school, with women physics, chemistry and maths teachers (several had PhDs), from where many, many girls went on to study hard science at university. That's not generally what happens at mixed schools. Check out also the day-to-day, relentless language of the co-ed classroom: my experience in ICT teaching in London completely supports the findings of Dale Spender's classic works Man Made Language and The Schooling Scandal and Robin Lakoff's Language and Woman's Place.

3. Higher education: I can tell you it's really off-putting sitting in a lecture theatre of 150 unwashed geeky guys and two women. I speak from recent university experience in the UK. Who would undergo this voluntarily? Anyway, science books are really heavy ;-) Women in higher education also get propositioned by men who have significant influence over their results - how often does this happen to men?

4. Childcare: far, far more women than men are still responsible for this (proportions depending on culture e.g. compare Spain and Sweden) and many women drop out of research and jobs etc. during the crucial career-making years. This means they lose out in academia and in business on that relentless career ladder. Women end up being older for the same level of experience. Then this is counted against them.

Being a carer can result in some pretty strange forms of discrimination: a couple of years ago, I pointed out to the British Computer Society that they were charging more in membership fees to (mainly female) non-grant-aided child-carers in part-time degree courses (often the only ones open to them) than to either fully grant-aided full-time students (mostly male) or even well-paid graduates in full-time work following graduation (mostly male). I did not get what I consider to be a satisfactory response and nothing has changed.

5. Politicking: women seem to be less good at playing politics on the professional networks and in the workplace (they tend to concentrate on the job rather than jockeying for position), which is what you need to land the management jobs quickly and ascend the power hierarchy. Can you be a part of - and take advantage of - the 'old boys' network' when you are a woman? (When you don't 'piss in the same pot', so to speak)

6. Ethics: related to the previous point, women tend not to make a career out of 'using' their colleagues' work, something - in my experience - surprisingly frequent among men. I have come across so many parasitic men in my professional life over the years, and those who are prepared to do the dirty without compunction...but no women of the same inclination, strangely. They do this in many ways, perhaps suggesting - no, no, *insisting* with a barrage of communications - that unless they present your work at a particular conference - under their name or the name of their organisation - you will not have any professional profile to speak of. Or perhaps persuading you that you should not sign your name to an article - or ten - which enables them to conveniently take the credit for it in public at a later date. I've even had multiple male candidates angling to present the same material at the same conference, none of which they were responsible for, finally only backing off when informed of their the rival pretender's ambitions ;-). This seems to be the only thing that embarrasses them.

Men seem to have a much better eye for the main chance, an immediate idea of how to profit from others - in personal PR and financial terms - without lifting a finger (see also my point about George Olsen, in (9) below).

Another example: in some countries (I'm thinking particularly of the countries of southern Europe, where I worked for a number of years) it seems to be fairly standard practice for university lecturers in technology (usually men) to present their research students' (quite often women) work as their own at international conferences. I've heard enough accounts of such practices from postgrad women in southern European countries for me to believe that this is a consistent pattern.

A Dutch industrial psychologist of my acquaintance - who spends his life sorting out interpersonal problems in companies in Europe - once suggested that I should team up professionally with women rather than men: he'd seen it all so many times himself, it had become a cliche.

Maybe others have a different life experience, but the scientific literature is littered with cases of women who have come up with discoveries and research, only for those same ideas to be credited to others, invariably men.

I am not, or course, in this regard talking about people in the UE field here, but generally about how a proportion of men conduct their professional lives, both in industry and academia.

7. Two's a crowd when it comes to women, but not men. In a seminar of four speakers, one woman is considered 'enough', two 'quite enough', and three or four completely out of order (a 'gaggle of women' etc). How come four men out of four on a panel is still considered completely normal in any professional field? Well, it's justified by people saying stuff like 'there are no candidates', when there patently are.

8. Specialisation: even when they are around, women seem to be less visible than men through being involved in what are deemed to be more specialised activities or research.

Take one example, women in usability-related fields who don't appear on the Userati list: Lucy Suchman, Diana Forsythe (sadly died), Rosalind Picard, Bonnie Nardi, Elizabeth Churchill, Diane Laurillard, Geraldine Fitzpatrick, Abigail Sellen, Susan Dray etc. (to mention a few, off the top of my head) plus Gitta Salomon, Karen Holtzblatt, Deborah Mayhew, Janice Redish, Pattie Maes, Gitte Lindgaard - a few more that came to mind after an email exchange with David Crow - have had and continue to have a high profile within the 'HCI/user experience' profession (in its broadest sense), and a host of other women in the UK have a profile here too, such as Barbara McManus, Angela Sasse, Ann Blandford, Rose Luckin...., but generally in fairly distinct, self-contained parts of it, particularly in certain areas of university research. None appear on Userati (Chris?). There are *some* women's names on the list: Brenda Laurel, Jenny Preece, Allison Druin, Beth Mazur, Christina Wodtke and Lucy Lockwood, for example, in total a mere 19 from a total of 93), not too many considering how many female seriously *heavy punchers* there are in this field.

It could be argued (I'm sure it will be), "Oh, they're not usability, they're CSCW/interactive learning/workplace ethnography/medical informatics/contextual design/digital libraries/affective computing" etc etc. And damn good they are at it too.

9. Blowing your own trumpet, aka bumptiousness or even arrogance: nor are these women I mention writing in to the BBC to massage their press coverage ("One of the leading figures in the web industry, Nielsen, contacted dot.life after reading one of our stories in which his views had been given very short shrift", quote from BBC News dot.life column, February 2002.)

Ann Light is on Userati primarily through being editor of Usability News (looking at the Google stats). She also just happens to have a PhD and postgraduate teaching in the field too, together with wide commercial experience, and she's written a fair amount of academic papers, some of which appear very high in the popularity rankings. But without that UN visibility she would probably be in the same boat as the rest (i.e. not there).

Yvonne Rogers is a long-time researcher and high-profile person in this field and has written some of the major books too (with Jenny Preece), but did not appear on Chris's list until I suggested her name. Nobody had thought of her, yet she has masses of excellent publications and considerable professional stature, and what's more she has been instrumental in expanding research funding for the user experience field right across the UK. Perhaps she doesn't shout as loudly as some....

The point is that none of these women are brash, self-promotional, total-picture people, readly to opine on anything and everything for the press - or in their blog - regardless of their expertise or lack of it. Unlike some men with far more modest credentials.

But when women do behave in a self-promotional way, they are viewed as 'unattractive' by both men and women (though the same behaviour seems to be deemed 'attractive' - or at least not 'unattractive' - in men).

10. Recognition: Men - who dominate in terms of numbers and positions of power - seem more able or more willing to recognise other men. Put your hand up as a woman in some forums, and you stand a small chance of getting heard, whilst in others you will not be referred to by name, even when the moderator knows your name. You are a 'woman', period. Men in such circumstances seem to get noticed more, selected more, and named more, even when they know nothing about the subject.

I too have tried to pipe up about rubbish that certain men have spoken at conferences (one male panel speaker pontificating at a recent conference referred to bank staff as being 'the users of bank ATMs'), but moderators generally defer to men and not women in the audience. Just as happens in the co-ed classroom, those in charge perhaps react to the greater repercussions involved in 'ignoring' men. It all adds up to more professional visibility for men.

Try to imagine for a moment the response Chris would have received from the man concerned should one of those high-profile guys have been missed off the Userati list by accident (Nielsen or whoever). I think women don't kick up a stink so much, which means they're far more likely to get sidelined.

In London, meanwhile, recent 'spokespeople' on the usability scene have included Martyn Perks and James Woudhuysen. Neither has any expertise in the subject from the professional perspective, but it is they who are now sometimes deemed 'experts', invited along to institutional functions to speak about the subject, or to write national press articles about it, rather than those actually involved in the field.

Why? Perhaps because both of them are prepared to make complete fools of themselves by expressing controversial opinions (the latter with humour, it has to be said) at seminars and in the press, and are quite into being shouted at too. Women just don't seem to do that so much. If at all. Perhaps women just haven't cottoned on to - or are not interested in - what George Olsen refers to on Usability News as 'playing the game', so they 'get pushed aside by those who do'. Or perhaps they don't have a sufficiently high quotient of entertainment value.

In conclusion

I'm not in favour of a guru-dominated UX/IA etc profession, or a male-dominated one. Perhaps I think we all need to think about why we spend so much time talking to each other rather than to all those other people out there who need to know this stuff, and what I'd like to see is some attempt at finding ways of helping the whole profession develop a broader and deeper public profile that is inclusive (and not leave it to those who speak the loudest).

Without a firm basis in solid research in a whole range of relevant fields (some of which I mentioned above), and visibility for the structure that underpins the profession, there is every danger that the whole enterprise will be taken over by the marketeers. And will the public really care if it is?

Footnote:
Medley via Peterme: There's some more stuff in Ellen Spertus' paper "Why are there so few female computer scientists", an MIT report. She also suggests reading Virginia Valian's book, Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women.
Liz (Elizabeth Lane Lawley) via Peterme: Unlocking the Clubhouse, a book that came out of a women and computing project at Carnegie Mellon.