Woman's Hour - Late Night Woman's Hour: Women in Tech

Episode Date: September 26, 2017

Lauren Laverne talks to technology evangelist Dr Sue Black, Professor of New Technologies at Goldsmiths University Sarah Kember, and games scriptwriter Rhianna Pratchett about the challenges and opportunities currently facing women working in technology, and about the ways in which new technologies cater to women or fail to do so. Recorded with an audience at the British Science Festival in Brighton. Presenter: Lauren Laverne Producer: Laura Thomas.

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Welcome to this month's A Late Night Woman's Hour podcast, recorded at the British Science Festival. I'm talking about women in tech with the brilliant Dr Sue Black, Professor Sarah Kemba and Rhianna Pratchett. Just a little warning, it gets very passionate round about 47 minutes in, so if you want to skip over those bits, you can. It's only a second or so. Couple of four-letter words. FYI.

Enjoy. Thank you very much for that very warm welcome. Welcome to Late Night Woman's Hour. We're here at the British Science Festival for the very first time. Welcome to our audience and welcome to our guests. With me tonight, Sarahah kember she's a professor of new technologies of communication at goldsmiths university in london she recently published a feminist critique of smart media and is currently working on a book on future media she's also i hear in the process of writing her second novel a day in the life of janet. Is that Janet Smart as in smartphone, Sarah? It pretty much is smart as in smart everything, as in the new smart world.

And in academia, we've been telling ourselves for a long time that we really need to retell the sort of stories that the tech industry is offering. And I think all that's happened is I've taken it a bit literally. I can't wait to read it. That's right up my street. We have technology evangelist Dr Sue Black, who was awarded an OBE for services to technology in the 2016 Queen's New Year's Honours list.

She left home and school at 16, married at 20, and had three kids by the age of 23. A single parent at 25, she then went to university, gained a degree in computing, and then a PhD in software engineering. She set up the UK's first online network for women in tech called BCS Women. She runs a social enterprise called Tech Mums now and she led the campaign to save Bletchley Park.

I mean, it is just showing off, isn't it? So, do you get, free scones for life in the Bletchley Park Tea Room now? Yeah, sausage and mash forever. That sounds all right. Well, welcome to you. And we've also got Rhianna Pratchett, an award-winning scriptwriter and story designer. She's worked on titles such as Tomb Raider, Heavenly Sword,

Overlord and Mirror's Edge, currently working on a new game as well as two screenplays. That sounds like a very busy schedule, Rhianna. Thank you very much. Well, yeah, I'm a bit of an amphibious writer, so I like to kind of work on anything that will have me, basically. Fantastic. Well, thanks very much for squeezing us in when you've got so much on. So tonight we're going to be talking about women in tech and women and tech,

the new technologies which are changing the way we live, the way we communicate, enjoy culture and conduct our relationships. And also about the women who've got key roles as creators and influencers in all areas of the tech industry, writing code, designing apps, running companies, creating stories. Let's start by talking about what kind of time it is to be a woman in tech. Sue, your career started back in the 90s. What was it like then and how have the prospects of women in tech improved? Well, I guess I think the recent stats are that it's about 20% women in tech now. And when I started my degree in 89, it was about 20% women in tech then so in terms of statistics nothing much has changed um and so you know you said that I set up BCS women so I set up the UK's first online network for women in tech in 1998 and I did that because I was a PhD student then

going to conferences which were mainly guys, and trying as a young woman to chat to men about research, and they quite often got the wrong idea about why I was chatting to them. And, you know, there's nothing wrong with that, but it made me feel very insecure because I didn't actually understand what was going on at the time. I was trying to talk about my research, and then guys who I'd been been talking to just stare at me for

the whole rest of the conference and I would just think why are they staring at me I just couldn't work out what it was and it's only later that I realized what was going on but then I went to a women in science conference in Brussels and it was just such a completely different experience and it helped me to realize that being in the majority is so massively different to being in a minority in a in a group setting definitely and so you know that was one of the kind of real changing points in my life I think was going to this women in tech women in science conference was because I I just had such a great time and I thought that I hated conferences and they were really difficult for me but actually I loved conferences when I felt comfortable to talk to anybody um so I went home and uh and then set up a network for women in tech so they could all we could all chat to each other online because we

weren't meeting each other in person um so kind of from then when people when I set that group up people said why are you ghettoizing yourself you know setting up a group for women was just like a radical thing to do so the big change that I see now is that that's quite a normal thing to do now to set up a group for women and you don't get loads of people saying you know that's an awful thing to do or a strange thing to do because there are just hundreds of groups of women in tech so the change that I see is that it's become more normal to have groups support women in tech, but the stats are still the same. OK. Sarah, you're nodding as Sue's talking there.

How much of what she's describing do you recognise about the tech landscape and the changes that have gone on? Yeah, well, I recognise the stats, obviously, and that's really desperately disappointing. I guess I look at it more from someone outside of the actual tech industries in terms of the way that women are represented, in terms of the way that technologies themselves get gendered. You know, we used to talk about the gender difference

between white technologies and black technologies in the home, you know, fridges and TVs. Who got to have the TV remote? Who gets to play with the fridge and the cooker. You know, I talk to students about it and they're kind of like, really? You know, but prams and cars, you know, differently kind of gendered kind of technologies.

And I think if you look at that and I think if you look at the way in which technology currently also reorders gender or gender differences and gender relations describe that a little bit to us well that you know one of the contexts that i'm interested in is the kind of wonderful new slightly futuristic world of smart yeah so uh you know surely this is progress you know we're going to live in smart homes we're going to live in smart cities and then one of the things i found was that the way in which the industry promotes those kinds of visions,

incredibly conservative and regressive, particularly in terms of gender. So if you look on YouTube, people, for Microsoft's promotional video for its prototype future home, it looks remarkably similar to Monsanto's promotional video for its prototype future home of the 1950s. And I think there is something weird and slightly not wonderful going on about that.

So there's a kind of Stepford quality to it. Like a Truman Show kind of vibe? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of emphasis on the heterosexual nuclear family. There's a lot of emphasis on kind of very traditional gender roles. So with the Monsanto video, you see this kind of nuclear family going's a lot of emphasis on kind of very traditional gender roles so with the monsanto video you see this kind of nuclear family going into it was a disneyland attraction of kind of epic proportions apparently um father goes into the front room and plays with the gramophone

mother goes where she goes into the kitchen and plays with a lot of melamine stuff and yeah you know plastic was the new material of the 1950s and now we have smart glass augmented reality enabled you know glass mirrors and and all the rest of it um and you know the scenarios are almost exactly repeated in contemporary sort of visualizations so you get janet in her smart kitchen being offered help with her baking i might add uh and she walks in because it's you, it can talk. So you get a speech-enabled kitchen worktop that's very kind of glassy. And it says to her, it says, Janet, do you want some help with your baking?

And she says, yes, I'd love some. And so she's encouraged to put a bag of flour down on a hot spot and then op-pups this recipe for focaccia bread. And then it had to be focaccia bread. And then, you know, you've got cameras in the ceiling reading the tags on her medicine bottle reminding her when to take her pills which for me is a scene from Mad Men it's Betty isn't it?

She isn't shooting pigeons on the lawn at any point is she? I mean that's the ill effects The iconic Betty Draper moment So the kind of gilded cage thing It's a gilded cage thing it's a gilded cage and it's kind of just you know you can pick on these examples and you can say they're quite trivial actually I think these kind of viral videos are really potent forms of storytelling

and they're quite widespread I mean there are other companies Corning for example has this story out there called a day made of glass and in its you know it's always white heterosexual women and they usually have names beginning with J, and I've never really worked out why that is. But Microsoft have Janet and Corning have Jennifer. And poor Jennifer, I mean, she's still in her pyjamas. She hasn't brushed her teeth. And the augmented reality bathroom mirror is saying,

look, you know, here's the news, here's a load of information, here's the current state of your house. Each room, the ambient temperature's probably not right, you to adjust it and by the way your seven o'clock meeting is now at five a.m is that all right yeah yeah kind of i can manage so now i think i get the sense of where your new character janet smart that's exactly where she comes from yeah i'm going down that rabbit hole okay i see rihanna what's your experience of this i mean you know we're talking about the being a woman in tech now and a general feel for the landscape. You have a very particular experience, obviously, here as a writer.

Yeah, I mean, I started out in about 98 as a games journalist. And back then there really weren't many women doing that. But I'd been a gamer since I was six years old and I was an only child so I had no brothers or sisters to kind of tell me what my gender should or shouldn't like so I just tried everything that interests me so I had a My Little Pony and a Zoid, I had you know Murdoch from the A-Team and a Barbie and so I so I just... Dream couple, by the way, can I just say? My father played a lot of games and was into robotics and I just was interested in what he was interested in.

So I learnt about games through that and I used to play games with a little girl that lived next door. I was 11 and she was 8 and we would play Leisure Suit Larry, which was back then... It was sort of vaguely coded as an 18, although there weren't proper age ratings then. But the way they sort of gatekeepered the 18-ness was to ask you questions,

usually about the American political process. So it was quite educational in some ways, and also, more importantly, it taught us the word prophylactic, which is good for young women to know and it that actually wasn't the only word i learned from games i learned the word falafel from conquest of camelot um and for a young girl living in the deepest darkest somerset her falafel seemed a a marvelous wonderful exotic thing that they probably had down in london and then when i had went to went to London and had a real falafel,

it was quite a disappointment to me. So, yeah, I've always grown up with games. I've always been immersed in them. So I started as a games journalist and then sort of slowly moved into the development side of things. And, as I say, I was one of the few women doing stuff in games at the time that's got a lot better there are far more female voices out there in games journalism

but I was also fighting another battle as well and what seemed to me a bigger battle and that was about narrative in games which is something that has been sort of traditionally left left by the wayside in some degree and I sort of called myself a narrative paramedic because I would often be called in very late in the day to help patch up a story that had been put together with no kind of regard for good storytelling or no one had paid attention to it or it was written by a designer or a producer or

literally anyone who had the time or an inclination to do it and it's it's really started to evolve in the last decade I would say we're seeing a lot more women coming in women writers emerging and creative directors and you know it's become a very emerging field and the whole industry is taking narrative a lot more seriously we've still got a long way to go but I've been very lucky in that I've worked on three female-led titles and you know as you mentioned Tomb Raider and Lara Croft was probably the biggest one I've worked on I didn't set out to do that it just sort of happened that way but when I when I started out in games I never really thought too much about being a woman and then as I started progressing through the industry suddenly kind of people wanted to talk about being a woman and I

was very oh I don't I don't want to be labeled I just want to do the work and everyone that's worked in games as a player or a journalist or a developer has been asked to contribute to the you know women in games articles and look girls are playing games too that just gets recycled every few years and so I didn't really talk about it until I worked with Lara Croft and Tomb Raider and I kind of realised that although being female wasn't necessarily hugely important to me, it was very important to the young women coming up

and I started to... Actually, my friends joked that I was coming out as a woman. I started speaking at girls' schools more, I started being more open about talking about women in games but also talking about the work as well um you know that's always been the most important thing to me but I do acknowledge that getting out there being seen talking to people letting you know young people know about the opportunities with the industry has been very important it's a very interesting symmetry between you and Sue there,

I think, what you're both saying. So, Leigh, I just want to take a little bit of time to deal with some of the big news stories at the moment. I think the Google memorandum row is possibly one we should start with. What does the controversy around that disgruntled employee's memo tell us? Sarah? Well, you see, i'm a glass half empty kind of gal and um you know i do you know i i don't disagree with the you know with anything

that sue and rihanna are saying i think it's terribly important that those sort of changes are made i also think that there's a price to pay at the moment for for that for for more um measures of progress if you like of, of equality, of diversification. So the memo was a kind of reaction, and I think it's quite a characteristic one at the moment. I mean, you know, Gamergate would be similar for me against these measures. Could you just kind of thumbnail that? Gamergate? Well, I mean, I guess these guys talk to it but better than me but it's isn't it a a very very uh conservative reaction to increasing numbers of women involved in games and particularly uh

feminist critiques and and you know uh i'm thinking of anita sarkeesian's work on feminist frequency that you know that's very critical of the way in which women are featured in video game narratives as kind of victims and you know casually sprawled across the backdrop with you know wounds etc um you know you dare to speak out and we know this from trolling as well you dare to speak out and there's you know there is a reaction to that and it's a it's a it's an odd one in that i think you know there's always some sense that when when things start to change and open out for women, in a lot of ways in society, there might be a kind of tendency to retreat somewhat from that. But I think this is more particular. And I see it as a kind of, you know, it's kind of like the revenge of the nerds, isn't it i mean uh there is a school of thought isn't there that there's a relationship between gamergate and the development of what's being called the alt-right there's a school of

thought that i think uh the phrase in the article iso said described gamergate as the canary in the mine of um the alt-right i mean how much stock do you do put in that well i think there are there's there's the argument that i've heard is that there are specific connections between people like Steve Bannon and Yiannopoulos, who, you know, generated something of a Twitter following. So Steve Bannon of Breitbart and Milo Yiannopoulos. Milo Yiannopoulos, you know, generating a Twitter following for himself by supporting Gay McGay.

And then there's the sense that Breitbart kind of really goes with, you know, helps to fuel this kind of anti-feminist, anti-justice type of movement, which, you know, helps to fuel this kind of anti-feminist, anti-justice type of movement, which, you know, is arguably shutting down dissent in ways that are really quite familiar by claiming itself as a victim, right? Or by accusing the critics, the feminazis or whatever it is, of, what a phrase, exaggerating or making stuff up

or a sense of humour failure, because after all this is just banter or a bit of a joke and we're all oppressed equally and, you know, all of that. Really? So you're saying that the Google memo not good is... Google memo not good in a general sense. I think that we are seeing, for me, a bit of a reaction against equality and diversity measures.

Again, it's read as discrimination and sexism is read as a bit of a joke and not good in the sense that it very particularly goes to very, very essentialist ways of reading technology. So, you know, back to my argument about fridges and TVs, you know, that guy characterized tech itself as masculine, right? You know, men are naturally suited to engineering and women, on the other hand, do all the stuff that supports and surrounds it, all that kind of people-centred communicative... That was his argument in the memoranda. And it's a very old argument. It's a very, very old argument that goes back to sociobiology

and all of those kind of nice developments that were really about using nature to precisely pin down the status quo and preclude change. Sue, what did you make of that story when you read about it? I'm just in love with James Damel, really. I just... That's his name, right? Yeah. Yeah, no, it was very interesting, in quotes.

I think it's funny being, so now being like a middle-aged woman, I started off from a position of thinking society's reasonably equal. We've all got equal opportunities. And the older you get, the more you see how that is so completely wrong. And so I think James Damel was speaking from a position of white male privilege uh he just and and just he's just so arrogant for for the age I can't remember exactly how old he is but he's like early 20s to be someone of that age and think that you've got the right to to send something around to that many people which is you

expressing your opinion to me is just ridiculous arrogance. And I don't actually know if it was right for Google to sack him because I think that, you know, I think these feelings have been there ever since. That's, you know, our society, I think, is misogynist, racist, you name it. And we're kind of all brought up in that society. And it affects some of us more than others. And so for someone like that,

with the sort of privileged background that he's had, to then make these kind of sweeping, inaccurate statements about half the population, really, being very negative and very small-minded, to me, it's just kind of indicative of the fact that that feeling has been there in a certain section of society forever. And do you see it, as Sarah does, as a reaction to change that's happening yeah absolutely yeah i think it's it's coming to the fore because we've now got the internet we've now got social media

we've now got people being able to see what everyone else is thinking and saying all over the world that's got access to the internet and so those people so as we i think women are becoming more empowered. We've got great movements like the Black Lives Matter, you know, the Arab Spring, that are able to happen because we can connect together, but with the positive, there's also the negative. And so we've got people who, to me, are the sort of people that I don't like,

but, you know, they can all join together in a way and meet up with each other and talk to each other online and share their ideas and become a movement as well. I mean, Sarah mentioned trolling too. And, you know, the real world consequences of that sort of thing are beginning to be acknowledged more often. I think there's this new CPS guideline, which says that inciting people to harass others online and they're calling it virtual mobbing could result in court action you know maybe it might be a crime one day do you think that enough is being done to to kind of get rid of the old idea that whatever happens online is quotes not real yeah i mean that should be speeded up dramatically. And we should have lots of resources put into just getting that up to date with the world as it is now.

Because it's, you know, years, all of that stuff is all years out of date. And we've got women having horrific experiences all over the world. And, you know, they need to be protected. What do you think about that, Sarah? I think one of the things that's happened with the rise of social media is there hasn't been enough responsibility for the content that's put up there. And I think that kind of immunity from responsibility

is currently enshrined in US law, I believe. And there's a US senator, a woman called Claire McCaskill, I think, who's trying to challenge that at the moment. And I think that is really, really important in terms of, you know, what's gone on, in terms of really violent verbal forms of sexism and racism i also think it's really important in terms of fake news and i think that culture is kind of the same essentially the same one um you know we've really abdicated

responsibility for for what we post um online and uh you know, especially now when people are able to write algorithms or, you know, that can perpetuate fake news faster than the tech companies, they're just relying on complaints from users as their screen. There is no kind of editorial decision making going on. So I think actually some of these changes need to be regulatory changes and I think that's a tough ask I whether that succeeds or not I don't know these are very very powerful industries. Rihanna what do you think about about this I mean obviously Gamergate you know began in in the world of games journalism and it's one that you know well and as a female writer there was it something that that you knew about what was what was your experience of it i started as a journalist but um then moved into the kind of

develop uh developer side i think um on development i think we were a bit surprised about it and and probably the development community didn't react fast enough to to kind of really stamp stamp down on it um i don't put my name to a list of developers condemning harassment early on but i i think it took us a bit by surprise and we weren't quite sure how to deal with it um but you know the and and it actually caused a lot of mini posts and things like that which were you know precursors to the google memo expressing kind of similar sentiments um but it actually made me realize how many female voice it actually brought a lot of female voices out as well so i'm i'm desperately looking for some sort of silver lining there so i actually learned that you know there are a lot more female developers out there

than i thought there are a lot more female voices they were sort of rising up and there was that that kind of good side to it um a very light silver lining um i mean i think it was just sort of embarrassed embarrassing for everyone i mean games are often um portrayed as this kind of boogeyman and you know they're the things that are killing our kids and it's very kind of fashionable to kind of dig at games with no real understanding about how they work and the the connection between the game and the player and that you know so many games are not about shooting people and that so many games are not 18 rated games and that they are there are 18 rated games and that they are, there are 18 rated games and they're 18 rated games for a reason. So there was, I think game and game brought a lot of issues to the forefront.

And they were definitely things that need needed talking about. Diversity in games has been a big issue and it's one that I found myself talking about a lot. I kind of hashtag didn't you? I mean, tell me about the one reason to be hashtag. Yeah, so there was a hashtag, this predates Gamergate actually, called One Reason Why.

And it was predominantly female game developers sharing their experience of sexism in the games industry. And I sort of added, you know, I was adding my two pennies to it and I thought you know what I'm not sure this is helping um and so I started a another hashtag called um one reason to be and there I encourage women to talk about why they got into games why they love games why they they they love their work and why it's a great industry to work in and it wasn't to suppress the previous hashtag but to to kind of balance it because I firmly believe that it is important to shine a light into the

dark corners of the world and show the fight that's going on but just as important you've got to show what what's worth fighting for and that seemed to kind of capture people's imagination it actually became a regular panel at GDC at the game developer conference where women would kind of share what they loved about their job what they wanted to kind of see change and that opened up from not just women but other diverse groups that wouldn't necessarily get a platform to speak so you know I'm being sort of quietly proud of how that's developed really. Yeah Sue I mean you know Rhianna's been very positive there about opportunities for women in tech and you're a great example of someone whose life has been changed by it. Let's just

talk about 25 year old Sue, single parent, three kids in a very tough position. Why did you choose the world of tech at that point and how did it change things for you? Well, I guess, so I ended up being, yeah, like a single parent living on a council set in Brixton. I left school with five O-levels. So if I went out to get a job, I wouldn't have been able to earn enough money to pay for child care even so that just wasn't an option so I just thought what else can I do

um to bring up my kids in the way that I want to and I just well just education kind of came into my mind um I loved maths at school it was my favourite subject so I thought I need to do a maths course at college and then see what happens so i went along to the local college said i wanted to do a maths course and signed up for a course there which um luckily they had a maths course which was six hours a week to get the equivalent of two a levels like a fast track kind of course so i did that and that's quite funny i just remember walking into the first class and like I was then I don't know like 25 26 sort of my dms and I had a big bushy hair biker jacket um and a mini skirt and I walked into this like room full of guys in suits and I just basically thought oh shit what have I done I was absolutely petrified I was even like scared just to walk through the

classroom. But I spotted one woman at the back of the class. So I just like went and sat next to her. And we became great friends, actually. And actually, everyone was great. I had a really great time. I really enjoyed the course. And I sort of went from a position then of being extremely underconfident to then Lorna and I, my friend came top of the joint top of the class at the end of the year so we were sort of you know it was a big boost to our confidence and then applied to go to uni and I had to choose between maths and computing so I just thought computing is the future that's what I want to do so so that's why I did computing I mean absolutely incredible so it it really changed everything for you and have you

seen it do that for other people people that you've worked with yeah well so um I guess um not specifically well I guess like you know it's been quite interesting so like you know I became so I did my degree then I did a PhD and I became a full-time lecturer uh during my PhD and so then I was teaching so that's from I don't know like 20 something years ago um so it's been quite interesting for me again you know like as you get older you get more perspective on on the effect of things that you're doing on other people and uh you know so people that I had as students 20 years ago are now sort of senior managers in Microsoft and stuff like that so it's really cool to have been part of you know I mean I just love education I think and

university's not for everybody but for me it worked out really well and it's been lovely for me to see other people do really well that I've had some input into I guess and then kind of grassroots wise I mean obviously you're kind of bringing computers and technology in a quite a straightforward way into women's lives with your organization Tech Mums yeah yeah so I was going to say and so now kind of with Tech Mums so I think I kind of got to um 50 I probably had a midlife crisis a few years ago. And I'm 35. So how does that work out? My older daughter's 33. So I can't say I'm 35 anymore. So I think I had a midlife crisis. But anyway, I just thought I need to start. Maybe I was connecting back into who I was at 25. I don't know. But I just started thinking I've got to do something to give back and help people to realize that technology is an amazing thing because

throughout most of my career it was portrayed in the media as a very negative thing you know like big government IT systems failing and costing loads of money or you know more recently people having Facebook parties and their houses getting trashed. It's always just negative, negative, negative. And I really wanted to show a positive side that I see to technology and just all the opportunities that it opens up for people. And so I just started thinking about that, thinking about the fact that I really wanted to empower women and also there's, for quite a few years, I haven't actually seen it recently, there's this thing, it's so easy your mum can do it.

Like people writing blog posts and whatever online, mainly American guys, I have to say, saying it's so easy your mum can do it. And that just really drives me. Give birth to you. Just drives me insane. So I really wanted to do something for mums, to empower mums with technology, with the idea that we could empower the mums, and then, of course, the mums in general, not in every family,

but mums are quite often bringing up the kids, so then we can, you know, change the home environment for the kids, make it more tech-savvy, so then the kids are more likely to do computing at uni because we need more kids going into tech jobs and more women going into tech jobs and more women going into tech jobs and so i set up a program which is stuff like basic it skills but also app design web

design social media staying safe online coding and python uh put that all together into a program got it accredited by e-skills um so so that is like a program that we've been running for five years now and we just got funding to run that with 500 young mums 16 to 24 around the country from nominate trust so that's what we're working on at the moment fantastic i like the way that you say things like they're just a list so we did that and then we did that just like it's sure of course you did yeah um so ada love ada lovelace days coming up on the 10th of October and that's an international celebration of women in STEM and named in honour of the great mathematician, of course.

I wondered if our panel will be getting involved or if they will be thinking of any particular women heroes in this world on Ada Lovelace Day this year. Sarah? Well, I think these two are my heroes now, actually. I mean, you know, not least because we did this and then we had to do this and then we had to do this and then we had to do this.

I mean, you know, I think they're literally kind of pioneering and they're doing really, really important work. I think I'm a little bit, you know, kind of worried about how much onus is put on women, you know, going into tech and having to change everything and how much they have to offset, actually, when, you know, going into tech and having to change everything and how much they have to offset, actually, when, you know, I'm more distant, I'm more outside of that immediate sphere,

and I'm seeing the kind of landscape of media and technology and how, you know, I hesitate to how little difference it's making on that level at present. It's not just the stats, you know, 20% of the workforce, of the tech workforce being women. It is the imagery. It is the kind of stories that are out there.

It is the kind of onus being placed on women in a very particular way in relationship to visibility, in social media, you know, this kind of scrutiny that we subject ourselves to. I'm thinking of like the health apps, the fitness trackers. So the kind of ritualistic counting and tracking everything about ourselves. Tracking everything, which often makes me wonder, where does this end, actually?

I mean, what do we not measure at the moment? And, you know, there is a novel that's a particular favourite of mine by Beckett. I tend towards the absurd, OK, and the sort of slightly dark and funny, in which he kind of eulogises about self-knowledge through numbers and then counts the number of his own farts and concludes that, to be sure, he hardly farts at all.

There's probably not for that, isn't there? Well, this is my point. I mean, I don't have it, obviously, because I'm a lady. I would be kind of surprised if there wasn't. But, you know, where does this fit in this kind of slightly more kind of sexist or regressive environment? And, you know, isn't that in a sense a form in which we have to become kind of efficient and optimal and healthy and productive and all of those kinds of things?

But you're also describing a corporate mentality there. It's not necessarily just gendered, is it? It's a kind of breaking us down into our constituent parts and and ascribing our value to the sum sum thereof it is but i think i think it i think it may well fall on women in quite particular ways in as far as kind of i don't know the history of science and technology for me has always been a little bit about technology stepping into correct for perceived sort of failures ine inefficiencies in, you know, women's productive lives, whether it be through work, in the domestic environment, you know, the need for something called domestic science, so that we all had very, very clean Pyrex. Do you know what I mean? I do. I remember my last domestic science lesson that I attended and the teacher said,

you're going to learn to sweep up today. And I said, I don't think so. She said, if you don't, when you get married, you'll do it for your husband. And I thought, oh, I think I can skive off this lesson without getting told off by my mum too badly. And I was right. I mean, Rihanna, we're talking about narratives here.

And obviously that's something very, very close to your heart. What do you see? I mean, that diversity of narrative. Do you agree with what Sarah's saying, or do you think that more is changing under the surface than it might appear? I think it's both, really. I mean, certainly for my part,

I've become more active in being out there and being seen because I've sort of realised that that's meaningful. And it is about more than just me. And it is about encouraging the next generation of women coming into the industry. And I did a little bit of work with a organisation called Little Miss Geek. And they would go into girls schools and they would run um you know design courses and programming courses and they'd also do a lot of research with the girls about their their preconceived ideas about the games industry and who works in games um and you know they they thought that you know you'd only work in games if you liked hard maths and science um and they had no real idea that there were writers in games and

artists and you know producers musicians and when they kind of realized that the possibilities that are out there it's like they've been you know sent through the wardrobe into Narnia it you can see something lighting up inside them you can see the flame starting to burn. And that's kind of wonderful to see, and I think that's very important. And getting more women in is what's going to change the industry, and that's one of the reasons why I did the One Reason To Be hashtag, because I wanted to show that there was great reasons to be in there. With games, it feels very much like we're on the crest of a wave. We still only scratch the surface of the power of games

to be able to immerse you, to create empathy. And narrative is a big part of that. And the fact that the industry is taking it a lot more seriously now and we're seeing these kind of wonderful stories coming out. For example, Hellblade was a recent game by Ninja Theory who I work with on Heavenly Sword and that involves mental illness a lot. The protagonist has psychosis and she hears voices and the game is all about her kind of navigating that and it does a few clever things to make the player feel

a little bit of what it is like to have those conditions. And the game sort of lies to you and the voices lie to you and they did that in conjunction with the Wellcome Trust who are also supporting games now that have a kind of a scientific or medical angle to them and you know we've seen the indie scene in games really flourish in the last kind of five to eight years in particular we've seen your wonderful personal games come out like that dragon cancer which was made by a couple who's who lost their child to cancer and it was about that experience

so there's been a lot of interesting things happening from different angles. We have got a long way to go, but we are heading in the right direction. Tending towards the light, as they say. Sarah, what... I hate to be optimistic, but that does... That actually does sound really, really important to me.

And I think it's really different from what you hear in other... Can I say gamification? In other kind of contexts of gamification where you're tending to see people coming up with ideas about games fixing social problems. So you can come up, you know, the idea that there is this kind of quick technical or engineering fix for ongoing, fairly massive,

fairly rooted issues around economics, around social inequality and the rest of it. But what you're talking about is interesting to me because I think it's a way of kind of, rather than seeing games as a way of fixing problems seeing them as a way of engaging with problems including the problem perhaps of game's own history and the way it relates to other kind of social issues and i think that for me the promise if you like of inclusion and diversity in tech has to do with something more like that.

For me, that also has to do with, yes, bringing girls and women into the tech industries, bringing them into games, et cetera, but also thinking with them about what games are and what they do in society, what media are and what they do in society. Not the effects that they have, positive or negative, but the fact that they're incredibly

embedded and actually they can reach out and engage rather than you know be a symptom or a fix for anything so that's really thinking a lot harder about what is the relationship between technology and and the social and i think that if in as far as we are starting to do that that i really feel nervous i mean it's a good thing i might need a drink so um you know we've talked a little bit about um role models and and you know being a role model and you're one yourself i mean who have you looked up to and who's inspired you in your progress in in tech i thought stephanie shirley might be a name that came up yeah absolutely i mean i don't know if you um know dame stephanie shirley but she's just such an amazing woman um check out her ted talk if you want to know more about her

but she came over uh to the uk at the age of six with a kinder transport and um ended up going into technology in the 50s i think um. And she's known as Steve Shirley because when she was applying for jobs, she was applying as Stephanie Shirley because that was her name, and not getting interviews. And her husband suggested that she put Steve Shirley on the CV and she found that then she did get interviews.

So, you know, just even that simple thing. So, and she's had an amazing career so she set up one of the uh world's first software houses and employed almost only women um i think in the early 60s and uh they were made they were mainly women working from home as programmers and if they think if they didn't know how to program she would teach them or someone would teach them. So I think she had hundreds of women working from home, which is like, that's 50 years ahead of its time, that company, because we still haven't really got that now, but we should have. And developed the company, F International, into a massive company. They wrote the black box flight recorder for concord um so they were doing

like really top-notch uh projects and she sold the company for i think about 150 million in the 70s and she's now one of the uk's major philanthropists so she funded like the oxford internet institute for like 10 million quid i think i think her talk that you mentioned is called why do successful women have flat heads and spoiler it's because they're patted on the head throughout their I think her talk that you mentioned is called Why Do Successful Women Have Flat Heads? And spoiler, it's because they're patterned on the head throughout their career. She's incredible. And she's my first great mentor, Professor Wendy Hall's mentor. So she's like my grand mentor, grandmother mentor. Grand mentor. I love that idea.

OK, well, since we have some very inspiring women on stage right now, I think we should throw out two questions from our audience. We have a roving microphone. So if you've got a question, please raise your hand and we'll get to you. Yes, lady down the frontier. Straight up there. Confident. Love that.

Hi. I work quite closely with the technology division in my job. And after recently presenting one of our project managers with some evidence on why I disagreed with him, Hi. I work quite closely with the technology division in my job, and after recently presenting one of our project managers with some evidence on why I disagreed with him, he told me I was being horrible to him. Did he start crying? He then went on to say that I was being a nightmare. How can young women assert themselves in the workplace

in the same way that men do without being judged? Who wants to feel this way? That sounds like one for me doesn't it one at a time please well you know i'm i'm it goes back to what i was saying earlier on i think that you know it's it's sometimes very hard to be a woman in a tech workforce and it's hard it's made sometimes impossibly hard to do your job and then one of the things i've become more aware of recently is that, you know, then you have the glass ceiling issues and you have the, you know, there was some sociological research done recently

talking about how, at least in science and tech, and I suspect across the humanities as well, in academia and elsewhere, you know, to get the citations, to get the references, to get the, you know, to get the citations, to get the references, to get the, you know, the promotions, women probably have to work approximately two and a half times harder, be two and a half times more productive, and then try to change the environment within which you work. So I mean, you know, yeah, it's a very, very tough ask on individuals. And I think individuals do get shut down.

And that's why I think we do have to try to not see this as something that individuals can... You know, it's very important that we have our role models. It's very important that we have our figures. But you want to address the structures that underline structures. And that they become more visible. But we really need to think about the infrastructures, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, and not to deny that kind of structural

the existence of the structures that you're talking about but you know just from a very practical point of view sue how would you have dealt with that or what advice would you give to the lady who asked that question um uh well it's late night it's late night, Sue. It's late night, Sue. So if you want to swear, that's OK. Really? I can feel you thinking it. Are you sure? Yeah. OK.

Well, I would tell him to fuck right off. Thank you. Can't believe I just... Is that really going to be a radio poll? Let's find out. We've said it now. OK, so got that? And tell him... Tell him that that was what Dr Sue Black, OBE, says, yeah?

I'll come with you. Any more for any more? Next question, please. Brilliant. We've got one just behind there. Young lady. Hello. An excellent point was made earlier about how being an only child can influence doing whatever you want because there's nobody telling you otherwise. And I can say from personal experience, my dad has always said, you know, I don't care what you do as long as you're the best at what you do. No pressure.

Thanks, Dad. My siblings and I, because I have a brother and sister, we were always encouraged to do whatever we want as long as we had an interest in it and we were passionate about it and my sister is in university and she's currently studying physics and I'm starting medical school in a couple weeks time and you know women's pay is still an issue and how women are treated in the workforce but I can say on my behalf in medicine there's a lot more women in medicine in that side of science same with biology and biomedics and all of that kind whereas on my sister's side there's only four girls in her entire physics class and I think about seven in her entire year and that's a record for her university why do you think that there's so much more prejudice when it comes to maths and physics and computing and that type of science

in comparison to biology and neuroscience and for women in stem it's a really interesting question i mean so what do you think about that answer um well the short answer is i don't know um i don't know because it's not the same in every country right so if we look at i mean i suppose i know more about the issues in technology than i do like kind of across the sciences but i i do know things like for example in uh india and well like singapore i've just been in singapore in in lots of countries there's it's like kind of 50 50 in lots of subjects which is not the same here and there was some research done a few years ago trying to work out why that was why is it like 15 to 20 percent uh women in tech in the uk the us and why in other countries that's not an issue at all it's kind of 50 50

and what they found there was that um and they didn't like the results, the researchers, was that it was because if you were middle class in those countries, you would have a housekeeper. So you wouldn't have to really look after the kids or do the domestic chores. And so you could actually choose what sort of career you wanted. So that doesn't answer your question at all. But that's the only thing that I can think of that's related to it that I actually know about it's a really interesting question I think we might we might need to to put it on file and then address it in a program where we have some actual physicists and people from that branch of the scientists but it is it's an absolutely fascinating question congratulations to you on getting to medical school good luck with it that's brilliant

um can we have another one please we've got lots of hands going up madam there yes you're reaching forward in what looks like a khaki shirt very stylish hi it slightly follows on from that question and i was thinking about the 20 figure you're quoting and also the i think it was a bbc series recently about uh children at the age of seven they ran a two-part series on gender bias in the classroom and found that At the age of seven, they ran a two-part series on gender bias in the classroom and found that at the age of seven, girls are already consistently underestimating how well they will perform in maths and sciences, whereas the boys were consistently overestimating how good they were. And so I'm just wondering if that's where the attention should be going at children that age, actually, and addressing that.

And they also looked at, they did a blind study with toddlers where they changed the toddler, the boy toddler, into girls' clothes and vice versa. And people came in and had a range of toys. And when they thought it was a girl, they picked out the fluffy toys and the dolls. And when they thought it was a boy, they picked out the cars and the robots so even from that time you know really young age we're assuming that boys are more interested in things that move and turn and spin and girls in fluffy toys and I'm just wondering if that's where we should be putting more attention I think we have to pay attention all the way through yeah I mean like I was saying I think our culture is misogynist and racist and that's none of our faults we and we were brought up in it so it's quite hard for us to see where that's happening

but as time's going on we're noticing those things more and more and we're discussing them and you know maybe 50 years ago we just couldn't have had this conversation because it wouldn't have made sense so we are kind of moving towards being more aware and trying to be more objective but because we're brought up in this society we this society, we can't see all of that stuff. But I think we need to address that all the way through from before birth onwards. I think those questions are even more important, you know, because it relates, precisely because it relates

to what the Google memo was about, which is that boys and men are inherently more interested in things and girls and women are inherently more interested in things and girls and women are inherently more interested in people so you know without having to kind of rehearse like tired arguments around nature and nurture which you know frankly when you when you resort to those kind of arguments more scientism it's more a kind ofisation of kind of bad science to justify sexist and racist and class-based discrimination. You know, so you have to go in for that stuff pretty hard. I think especially when, you know, you're getting this kind of current culture of a recourse to nature.

But also when those differences are being hardwired into algorithms, for example. You know, as we know that they are in image recognition software, you know, which will associate kitchens with women. I'm not letting the Janet in the kitchen thing go. You know, because that's its training set. That's its database, right? Same thing with face recognition technology, which uses this horrible gender estimation algorithm because it's really incredibly hard to pick your

face out from a crowd right so what we do is we sort you into into types into stereotypes into categories so that a system can recognize a face that's male or female in only quite a stereotype way and the same algorithm will work for black and white and it will work for old and young now those are operative and we tend to believe that, you know, technological systems are more objective and so they become amplified and so they become ossified. So, you know, to offset, you know, it's not just this, you know, teaching people that coding and programming

is a form of social history, actually, is a form of kind of politics. It's actually doing it quite early on. Well, stereotypes were from the printing industry, weren't they? Yeah. So it's even the way that, you know, media and culture connect is the clues in the language, I think. Yeah, no, exactly.

I think the language we use is still important and we don't want to be accused of being politically correct when we say that. I mean, Rhianna, I wonder about... It's interesting to hear our questioner there mentioning toys and play and i wonder what your response to that is you know working in in games and narratives and do children you know exhibit the same kind of uh gender restrictions and are sort of sent into the same separate categories when they're playing computer

games as when you know you're talking about people gathering fluffy toys for little girls and getting a boy a truck or whatever it is um or is it a place where they can be i don't like i like i don't like to generalize because i think a good game will bring in everyone really um but it was it is interesting that there were actually quite a lot of significant women um working in games in the 70s and 80s in the adventure game genre. So people like Jane Jensen, like Roberta Williams, who created the King's Quest series, which was huge at the time for many years. Christy Marks, who was the one behind teaching me the word falafel um and as sort of adventure games kind of died out a bit and with the the rise of first-person shooters um you know some

of the women in the industry sort of you know left or did other you know went and did other things but now we're sort of seeing adventure games coming back things like kickstarter and indiegogo have really helped um push the adventure game genre back and things like episodic narrative uh with the great work that telltale does with franchises like the walking dead and the wolf among us and tales from the borderlands you've got uh don't nod doing episodic storytelling with uh life is strange um and you know we're seeing we're seeing that kind of coming back and i think that's bringing a whole generation of gamers um you know women very much included but also the different

platforms we play games on i mean i think now most under 18s whether they're male or female play games of of some kind it's just become integral in our lives and i think you know when i when i was at school possibly just speaking to the question about um the the difference between how how women are represented in in kind of science and medicine and you know computing you know i i never saw a computer at school you know i i. I am so relaxed with computers because my father gave me one and I learnt about them at an early age. But I think computer studies is becoming part of the core curriculum now, but it wasn't before.

It was seen as a niche thing, whereas you had to do a science subject. But, yeah, I definitely agree to to get them young to kind of show them the possibilities to to kind of make them feel comfortable with computers and tech to show them that there's a place for them there okay time's pressing we've got time i think for one more question so let's make it real goody who's got a burning one this lady here in the red yes hi there um so i always feel like we have a bit of a dilemma in tech um i've been working in tech for 20 odd years and i'm having a great time i've had a really good career i can't say it's without challenges and i can't say there aren't times when i suspected that things have been a little bit more difficult because i'm a woman but on the whole it's been

pretty good the absolutely horrible experiences i can count on one hand on the other hand there are horrible experiences happening to women and it's absolutely right that we shine a light on them so they can be stamped out but what I worry about is how do we walk that line where we're not deterring young girls from pursuing careers in tech because they hear all these horror stories by highlighting all the great things that are happening i think you know and all the things you can see around so you know for me focusing on mums showing mums what great opportunities there are out there in all sorts of industries in all sorts of ways with all different types of technology and just kind of keep sharing that message and and uh really highlighting the role models that we've got out there in all different

types of industries of all different types of ages and backgrounds um you know kind of thinking of diversity in in all ways and uh um just really kind of highlighting all of that i think what do you think i don't think we do the next generations any favours by hiding the problems. I think education is incredibly important here, and I think it's very important at an early age that we look at, you know, in a sense how the past gets kind of brought forward through these technologies, but that's also how we can change things. I mean, you know, what we really want is people invested in changing the status quo and then offering us kind of alternative visions to the ones we have now that come directly from the biggest parts of the tech industry, which are frankly, you know, so bad. They're laughable. I mean, they're really unimaginative. You know, they are a rehash of the 1950s. We can do better. And I think, you know, kind of giving giving them that opportunity without making it a chore.

So for you, it's Sarah, it's know your history. Know your history so you can imagine a future that's better than this. Yeah. OK, Rihanna, anything to add to that? Well, I mean, I absolutely agree that, you know, we need to show the problems, but we need to show, as I said, what's worth fighting for. And there's still a lot of kind of mystery about the games industry and what goes on in kind of making games. And every time I kind of go to a writer event and they find out I work in games,

again, it's like I've come from Narnia, and they're like, this is a mysterious world, and they don't quite know what's happened, it's big with the kids and so maybe they should try doing it Mr Tumnus is that you um so yeah I mean I think it is important to to kind of showcase um the the achievements of in my particular industry the achievements of of women in that industry get them out there get them talking to to young women and young people in general um i think that's important i think that sometimes we've been a bit hesitant to do that because we've we've wanted to be about the work and and the mission and that's that that's the kind of most important thing and for me the fight for narrative

and narrative recognition came before the gender fight but but now I feel kind of strong enough to fight two corners, really. And so that's been very helpful. And, yeah, I think that's probably the best way. I mean, I do get young women writing to me being very scared about entering the industry, and my experience of sexism is also fairly minor like experience of just people being shit about me online yeah of course yeah of course that that kind of happens and I don't know it I think if you're a woman

in public on the internet and and you kind of you know, do a high profile job within your industry, there'll be assholes out there. And that's sort of part of it. But I've never really let it bother me too much. But maybe, you know, that's just me. But, yeah, showing the kind of wonders of the industry and what's great about it has always, I think, served me well because I'm passionate about my industry and I want to share that passion and I want to kind of generate that passion in others. So, you know, there's plenty of people sort of talking about the issues in the industry

and how we can deal with them. I want to talk about why it's worth being in there in the first place. Well, thank you very much for doing that tonight. And thank you also to our audience here at the British Science Festival in Brighton and my wonderful guests Sarah Kemba, Dr Sue Black and Rhianna Pratchett. Thank you. I'm Sarah Trelevan, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started, like, warning everybody.

Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story. Settle in.

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