by, for, and about women in science, technology, engineering, & math

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Mamealoney posted about Computer Engineering Barbie earlier, and now she’s real!

Of course, like any news item about women and technology, the launch of Computer Engineering Barbie has set off a flurry of hand-wringing about how there must be something wrong with this. In this case, it’s the idea that this Barbie is too femme to be a geek — if she’s wearing pink and has long hair, she can’t be a “real coder”.

Wired’s Geek Dad blog posts a tongue-in-cheek “5 Ideas to Make Computer Engineer Barbie Realistic” (because, of course, she doesn’t look realistic as is), and one of the first commenters reposts a tweet that “If new Barbie was a real coder, she would be wearing a Three Wolf Moon t-shirt.”¹ Another Wired blog, GadgetLab, elicits the wonderful comment “News flash, they put the hot chicks in front desk answering the phone, or they have them on the sales staff. The hot ones or even remotely attractive ones never work in IT/IS.” (Eww! Maybe consider comment moderation, Wired?) And a woman quoted in the BBC’s article about the doll describes Barbie’s hairstyle as “really impractical… you [would] spend half the time pulling it back from your face.”

There have been a lot of great discussions about this on some of the mailing lists I’m on (the LinuxChix, DevChix, and Systers mailing lists are great, if you’re not already on them!), and someone there made the key point: if a geeky woman presents as femme/takes care in her appearance/is attractive, she’s considered not much of a geek, but if she doesn’t care about her appearance, she’s considered not much of a woman. You can’t win.

In my opinion, Computer Engineering Barbie is great, and it’s ridiculous to say that her “girly” presentation makes her unrealistic as a geek. Real geeks come in all shapes, sizes, genders, colors, levels of attractiveness, and styles of dress — it’s what you do and how you think that makes you geeky, not what you wear. Asserting that “real coders” don’t care about their appearance is just one more in the barrage of cultural memes that pigeonhole programmers into one narrow stereotype — it’s bad for coders (who may or may not fit the stereotype), it’s bad for potential coders (who decide not to go into programming because they don’t fit the stereotype), and it’s bad for everyone who benefits from computer technology (which could be even better if so many people weren’t turned away from the field by this stupid idea).

This is part of why Ada Lovelace Day is so needed — as last year’s many posts showed, when you’re actually profiling real women in technology and not some imagined stereotype, you can see that “geek vs. femme” (or “geek vs. woman”, or “geek vs. [anything else]”) is a pretty pointless distinction. (And I hope you’ll join us this year and help us showcase the vast diversity of women in science/tech we have right here on Stemming!)

1. not that there’s anything wrong with a three wolf moon t-shirt!