Posted by Recently, I was analysing 2024 and my year in blogposts looking for the story in the stats and saw that in third place was Maslow’s hierarchy for women?, which is a blogpost I wrote in March 2020 as I tried to figure out if Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, first proposed in 1943, and still cited in management circles, reflects women in society.
The image on that Maslow blog page is a photograph of a diagram I drew in my notebook when I was thinking about the question: Does it include or represent women? For Maslow picked out 44 people, only two women, on which to model his hierarchy, which has always put me in mind of the ancient Hindu Chakra system. I always intended to replace the image so when the stats jogged my memory, I asked ChatGPT to draw me an image.
ChatGPT drew Maslow’s Hierarchy upside down and put physiological needs at the top where transcendence normally is. It also misspelt many of the words as it often does in pictures, but somehow, in a Gestaltian way, the sum is greater than its parts and it works and sums up Maslow’s Hierarchy of women, complete with question mark, which is why I have put this here.
For when we talk about women in society, we are talking about all of it, including women in technology, and women in STEM. I have a Phd in HCI and AI for big data in smart structures and it was awarded by the Engineering Department of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and I spent a lot of time on bridges to get it. The men working on the bridges would follow me about because it was so unusual to see a female engineer engaged in an equally unusual activity of attaching fibre optic cables to the steel which would prestress the concrete so that we could take measurements of local deformation so that we could uld interpret the measurements to explain how the concrete was behaving. It would seem that nothing much has changed in terms of the parity of gender in these fields, all these years later.
I did a plastering course a couple of years ago and there was me and one other woman. I am so sorry to say that even though it was full of young men, there was a toxic masculinity which was completely unwelcoming and whilst these lads were nice, I just don’t think it occurred to them to listen to they way they spoke. They were so lacking in self-awareness, and yet they were raised by women to speak about other women in that way. This included the 30-year old teacher, who made comments about how plaster, dabbed on either side of a wall edge to hold beading in place, looks like a vagina. At which point I told him to get himself down the Vagina Museum, if he was that excited. And, the other woman said that there was nothing half as exciting or attractive about penises. Basically, shut up and teach us how to do this beading.
Technology behaves like a mirror to society. It is extension of us, not something outside of us and yet we create it and let it have sway over us, instead of recognising it as the tool it is. And, so when we talk about women in tech, women in STEM, we are talking about women in society and life.
I have written at least 35 blogposts about women as a mother to daughters, I ponder the question of women in society and in technology, and I firmly believe that the only way to encourage more young women to get into STEM and alter the gender parity is to change the culture of these fields. And, in order to change the culture of these fields, we need to change society.
To get more young women into technology we need to change the field to make it more welcoming. And to do that, we first need to change society, as technology is a reflection of society.
Dr Ruth Stalker-Firth
Recently, I have been visiting Sixth Form Colleges with my youngest who wants to study Biology, Chemistry, Physics and Maths at A level, so me and her (she and I) spent time hanging about the labs where I got to ask lots of questions of the multitude of young women demonstrating various science experiments. She also encouraged me to go into the Computing labs to ask questions (Go on, I know you want to…) about the young women’s hopes and aspirations in there as well.
It was fabulous to see all these young women loving on STEM. But how far will they be able to go being women in society in the culture we currently have?
For it is women who do the triple shift 1: women go to work, are responsible for the home and hold families together and do the emotional heavy lifting in every situation. They are take responsibility for the energy in any given situation in a way that men rarely do.
And it is women, to whom the burden of childcaring falls and consequently, are constantly expected to be on their phones as the personal assistant to everyone else in their family, especially in this co-dependent, tech-dependent society in which we now live. I am forced by society to have apps on my phone about my children’s lives: hospitals, schools, Sixth Form applications. When are we going to allow young people to start taking responsibility for themselves? Instead of forcing them to continue to be babied which includes education until the age of 18. How long is this going to continue? Worryingly, I saw an advert for lecturing job yesterday which said:
What?
This is what has happened here, they have decided that there is a 90% submission rate, and instead of asking why students do not meet it, they make someone responsible, the lecturer. And, reading between the lines the lecturer will end up doing the assessments too, all to chase a data point and claim that they have 90% submissions. They have created a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It is the same as being a parent which is often short hand for being a woman. I am responsible for their attendance and everything, even though I regularly argue with the school and my local MP about the ridiculous 100% attendance rule which is just ableist. No one cares or asks if it is unreasonable, it just has to be met regardless of the circumstances with software endlessly nagging us to do so. The medium became the message and everyone is committed to doing extra admin on top of everything else and no one stopped to ask: Is this progress? Is this useful? Is this a target we should be aiming for? Or should we be paying more attention and study what is really going on?
Designing software is a political act for it changes the way we work, rest and play, and we need to design love and empathy into our systems. The only way to do that is to have an equal balance of genders at the technology table. Currently it is packed full of men who take no responsibility for anything they say and do and live in a world designed for them. From the top shelves in supermarkets I cannot reach, or the chairs I cannot sit on without my feet dangling, the world is based on data collected about them from the way their bodies work so that we can accurately predict and prevent their heart attacks, to the test crash dummies which are designed to save them in an accident.
These men practice social exclusion, often unconsciously, in the real world and in the technological one. Everything has shifted online, people with lower income, the older generation, and those who want a more nature based way of life, to name but a few, are left behind. It is nigh on impossible now to live a life without a smartphone and it is only getting worse.
Creating an equitable, respectful society for everyone
Until we actually look at women in society and at large and recognise the contributions they make, so that we can adjust society accordingly, we will never create an equitable, respectful society for everyone. And, this starts by educating and socialising young boys to behave in responsible ways. Feminism starts at home and in education and thinking about our language which is masculine based and male-centric.
When I was lecturing at Birkbeck, University College of London, I used to attend lunchtime seminars given by the TRIGGER project members. TRIGGER was a European funded project about equality in academia: 2 and I really enjoyed listening to their ideas to balance up the gender gap. Once a young man began shouting and mansplaining how women should behave during the session on how there were no archetypes of women in the workplace. One panel member gave the example of the mum archetype who went around hugging everyone. I rolled my eyes 10 times whilst still appreciating what they were trying to achieve. They were trying to have a discussion about how women could show up in society, but it’s work we are talking about. I don’t want to show up as someone’s mum especially if they weren’t raised by me to give me the respect I deserve and they treat their own mother like a general dogsbody.
Ironically, I was lecturing in the evenings at Birkbeck on those zero hours contracts to make it easier for childcare purposes because I love lecturing and after a break for childcare, I was no longer part of the desired candidate list. I was told on more than one occasion that I did not have the skills for lecturing human-computer interaction (HCI), in spite of the fact I had many years experience practising and teaching HCI before having babies. All they saw was the gap on my CV.
When I asked by the man heading up the Athena Swan initiative for computing if I would I sit on his committee on certain afternoons, as he didn’t have enough women to actually meet the basic requirements, I told him that he would need to pay for my time at the meeting and how long it took me to travel there and back, so that I in turn could cover childcare to last for the time I was in there.
He said he would give me the cost of one hour of a zero contract person’s time. He had a target to meet, and ironically, he wasn’t interested in why he was meeting it. It wouldn’t even occur to him to have to manage those things because in his house someone else took care of all that business!
I stepped back from teaching when my mother was dying, so they asked me if I could do some supervision of final year projects during the day instead. I wanted to but I just didn’t have the capacity, as I had young children and I had to go visit my mum as often as I could. I explained this but they terminated my contract via email as I was no longer of use to them. On that same day, a real member of the staff was leaving and I got an email inviting to cake and drinks to celebrate his departure and all he had done. I got to keep my library card until the end of the calendar year so that I could finish my research but a thank you for me too might also have been nice.
And, this is not atypical of the way women are treated as they take the second class citizen job so that they can look after their family young and old, sandwiched between the generations whilst try to maintain some semblance of a career.
The alternative is to be a superwoman and do everything. In reality, this means, like several women I have met working in academia, going back to work two weeks after giving birth and someone else looks after their children. Their reward is to be invited to sit on every single committee and panel the university has set up to prove that they are looking at equality. Yes, that’s right, their work load is significantly increased as that one woman is now representative of all women to hit that data point. They are all women, superwomen!
We pay lip service to an equal society but we do not implement it by say, paying that extra hour for childcare or making the working day more flexible so both parents could take turns picking up the kids from school and then work from home for the rest of the day. Or disbanding that committee because you will not have the women to sit on it until you make positive changes in your company or institution and then you will deserve the award your committee is currently trying to fudge the facts to get the badge. Not to make your institution better which is indeed the point of the badge.
A quick Google tells me that, according to the most recent UK consensus of 2021, there are 30.1 million women and girls in England and Wales, which means that they make up 51% of the population 3. In spite of this, only 21% of IT specialists in the UK are female 4, and yet the UK government has spent millions on encouraging girls and women to enter STEM professions, but it is not succeeding.
In technology, as in life, we need more:
- Female role models – we are not taught them as part of the history of computing.
- Female tribes – research shows that women are more likely to show up on forums to discuss technical solutions if there are already other women present.
- Female stories which make it seem worthwhile, there are just loads of stories about women being harassed ‘cos of their gender or excluded because of male-group think. This is not encouraging.
- Female rewards – research shows that women are systematically penalised if they take time out to continue the human race.
- Equal pay for women.
- Respect for women. Women have justify themselves over and over and over again.
And if we need to legislate for that so be it. We need to create a society which recognises that people have children who go to school for far shorter periods than their parents and so we should make it more flexible for all the parents, not just the women, and not let the burden fall on those at work who don’t have children.
To get young women into STEM, we need to change society, legislate for equality and tell women’s stories. I want women to have the legitimacy of belonging that men automatically feel in the workplace, because women too are right there in the middle of history seeing it and being it. I want everyone regardless of gender to feel safe and right at home where they work because it reflects a society which is designed for all of the people in it, not just the 49% and everyone has been raised self-aware enough to think about their behaviour and their speech and the impact their energy is having on everyone else.
It will take a bit of work, but it starts with society, not STEM.
