The end of male geekery

A conversation I was having with my girlfriend’s father sparked a thought about how computing structures can lead to gendered outcomes. He was an engineer in Germany, and for his undergraduate dissertation, he programmed a computer to play a game that sounds like a cross between connect-4 and Go. He did it on punch cards. We talked for ages about the virtues of Fortran versus machine code, C versus Pascal and other geeky things I pretended to understand.

I would describe myself as a novice programmer at best, but like many guys I know I spent significant portions of my youth in the 1980s tinkering with IBM compatible computers that mainly ran MS-DOS. The first thing the computer would show was not a friendly desktop with windows and icons, but a prompt:

c:\>

There is something about this blankness that means you have to begin to get under the hood of your computer, and have a dim idea of how the bits work and communicate with each other. And in fact it encourages you to tinker and tweak. I may have messed up my father’s computer so badly it needed an engineer to come over and spend half a day fixing it, but I learnt a lot. Now, this sort of thing is clearly gendered. The male brain loves getting stuck into machines and playing with them, whether these are cars, computers or bikes.

I am going to resort to purely anecdotal evidence, so if there are any ladygeeks out there who love to program and know their way around autoexec.bat, then apologies, but hopefully what I’m saying will still ring true to some extent. I didn’t know any girls in the 80s, but even since then, I can only think of one girl I have met who could (as far as I know) be remotely interested in the conversation I was having with my girlfriend’s father. For a long time computers and the concept of geekiness were organised around the idea that geeks could program, that they could code their way out of trouble and would take the time to run through system files tinkering and tweaking to accomplish what they wanted to do. And during that time, computer geekdom was a resolutely male domain, as it was largely men who actually enjoyed doing this sort of thing.

That began to change over a decade ago, when Windows 95 banished the C prompt to dire emergencies only. But emergencies still happen, and the traditional male geekiness is still called upon. However, the move towards cloud computing is going to strike another blow at this predominantly male domain. Processing power, programs and the problems they cause will no longer be stored locally, and will no longer be sorted out locally. Your laptop, like Belinda’s Eee PC, will not be a fully-featured powerhouse, but mainly a way of accessing the internet, where most of your computing needs will be met by a variety of services provided by Google, Amazon, Microsoft et al. With this model, there is so much less that can go wrong, and correspondingly less need for the male geek types.

And this unleashes productivity, too. Instead of spending countless hours fiddling with registry files and secretly enjoying it, the focus of computer wizardry shifts to the wonderful things that you can actually achieve with them, and this field is not gendered. Women are just as interested in technology as men, now that the technical fiddling is no longer required (most devices actively discourage you from opening them up and tinkering), and in every way, they are an equally important part of the technology marketplace. Mobile phones, content creation and social media are all areas where women are just as likely as men if not more so to participate and produce. These are also areas where the internal workings of the system are best hidden from its users.

The new geeks will be male and female, they will have no need to know how computers function internally, but they will be masters of manipulating symbols on screen and in the cloud, and the things they accomplish will be awesome.