When I was a young girl and learned about Lady Lovelace, the first computer programmer, I found it deliciously ironic that someone who defied gender stereotypes would have such an absurdly feminine and alliterative name.
The name “Lady Lovelace” was similar to that of a 80s cartoon character I liked when I was younger, “Lady Lovely Locks”. Lady Lovely Locks was beautiful because she had long, blonde hair, and the wicked villain was a girl with black hair. (As an Asian girl with short, black hair, Lady Lovely Locks was only one example of children’s media that communicated to me over and over again that blondes were more beautiful, and that I was ugly.) I amused myself by imagining that Lady Lovelace looked like how her name sounded, having long, flowing, blonde hair and wearing lacy dresses with heart designs, while computer programming.
What is interesting is that even at a young age, I was already aware of the stereotype that computer programming was a male domain. Some people who offer hypotheses about why fewer women go into computer science treat 18-year-old adult women like tabula rasae who have never been exposed to the idea that computer programming is for men, and attempt interventions right when women choose their university majors or accuse such late interventions of being “social engineering”.
Unfortunately, even as a young Asian girl, I was constantly worried that I might be biologically incapable of understanding computers due to the mental limitations of my sex. When I first tried programming, I showed a natural aptitude for it without any prior knowledge—it is like logic—yet I felt burdened by the stereotype of the “computer whiz” being a male genius. Being too young and undereducated to understand basic genetics, I was more easily swayed by the possibility that there may be a “computer whiz” gene that existed only in males, and which I did not have.
Male privilege protects male geek children from seeing the “computer whiz” stereotype in a gendered way. Adult cisgender male geeks can look back to their childhood and not see a barrage of cultural messages suggesting that they had hard-wired mental limitations due to their sex. When they look back on their childhood experiences, they perceive these years of gendered cultural messages as mountains of evidence showing that girls cannot be good with computers.
- Ada Lovelace short film for kids (BrainPOP via BoingBoing) – Closed Caption option available (via flash interface)
- Lovelace – The Origin – A web comic.
- What is Ada Lovelace Day? And who is Ada Lovelace? (Finding Ada)
- Blondes are sexier, because all children are white? by Restructure!