Hidden Histories

[Music] hi everybody my name is brenda romero and this is my talk called hidden histories so i'm going to tell you five stories and for me these were stories of discovery and something that fundamentally changed how i see the role of women in this industry and the broader tech community so the first story is called usual suspects and when we're talking about the role of women in tech we will often bring out what i refer to as the usual suspects and we already know who these are they are of course ada lovelace so she invents the very idea of code in 1843 and then we have grace hopper who invented cobalt and she also coined the term compiler so she also coined the first computer bug quite literally we're looking at that bug here and we also often talk about hedy lamarr so hedy lamarr creates wi-fi

uh and these women are absolutely don't get me wrong they are absolutely worthy of celebration and their contributions to code and technology obviously cannot be understated um however i often find in articles talking about tacker women in games um that are attempting to be inclusive it's the same one or two or three people that met that are mentioned as if that's all there were when in reality if i said let's talk about men in tech and important male figures in tech we could fill this page and several more pages and the reason that i think this is important critically important is because they form the stereotypes of what we see in our heads what everyone sees in their heads when they think of what that person is and they shape the opinions about what people want to become so for instance what is a surgeon and what is a teacher what's a nurse what's

a ceo what's a lead programmer and i saw this take place in my own home when i was going to this kid's coding event and my daughter like mind you this is my daughter right and she says to me it's all going to be boys and she didn't want to go and so you can see like in her head the whole place was just filled with a bunch of little boys and the reality was that wasn't even true this it was a an event called coder dojo's uh the greatest projects that happens in dublin i mean there were tons of girls there so in fact i would say to me that it looked like there were overwhelmingly girls there so it it these ideas these perceptions shape people's opinions so usual suspects is what most people know and they make career decisions based on those things my next story is called impetus so first i'll tell you a little bit about me and what got me into the industry and what got me into this in the first place so i get my start when i'm five that's

that's when i start making games and i grew up in northern new york and my family had little money and so my mother would take me to yard sales and i would go around the place and i she would give me often a dime and with that dime i could buy whatever i wanted so i would usually buy games most of the times those games were missing pieces so i would gather them all up and i would make my own games and absolutely loved that and it really led to a lifelong passion and fascination with games when i'm 11 my mother gets me the most amazing thing in the universe she gets me dungeons and dragons and it is impossible to understate the love affair that i had with this game i could create worlds and i no longer needed to go outside and i think that's why i felt when i saw uh when i saw a stranger things was like oh my god all of those people are me it was just absolutely incredible so i gravitate toward role master by the

time i'm around 14 um and i end up rewriting the rules for encumbrance which to me looked like this but but actually weren't this um it ended up being that i had to rewrite the entire thing which i did and we played it for a couple of years so in 1981 in a location that at least looked like this i got my job at surtex software i happened to meet another person who worked there they were looking for somebody to man the helplines when this is prior to the internet so um i memorized a game when people called i would answer the questions that they had about that game so that's how i got into the industry and just worked my way up from there the first game i worked on was wizardry wizardry one proving grounds of the mad overlord and there is a screenshot of it now and my mom she was incredibly proud of me um she felt like i was really on the cusp of technology and it certainly wasn't something we could afford and it gave me such a head start um it's also where i met my first

husband we fell deeply in love and i still um we're still together we're still together to this day um so just again it was 1981 i couldn't get enough of computers and really working at this company gave me an opportunity i would not have had access to what it also gave me a chance to see was code so i first saw code the first code i actually saw would have been assembly language there but i fell head first into uh basic which i was taking at high school so for me code felt and still feels um like legos it feels like digital legos like whatever you understand you can build something with whatever knowledge you have so i begged our high school to continue to offer coding classes which i took and then unbelievably i left early because i did get that gig at surtec and during that time we put out a lot of games and i continued to work for surtek as i put myself through college so during this time i never saw myself

as a woman in a man's world in fact my world at the time was mostly women so this picture uh surtek you can see here here that there are four women and five men i join just after this picture is taken and so it was parody and it felt normal to me so if we fast forward many years up until 2015 i'm now teaching at a college um and so i've been in the game industry for 30 years i'm also teaching 30 years actually i've been in the game industry longer than that but i'm at this point in time it's 30 years ahead and i'm making games but i'm also teaching and as a woman in the university i am put in charge of their diversity initiative so i actually thought this was a pretty great initiative it asked us to look at lots of different things that might impede making a more diverse candidate pool more diverse phd applicant pool so i was actually pretty excited about it um and it asks us to look at challenges people face

um so you know for instance um you know during childbearing years access to nursing sometimes no maternity policy um so anyway i put all this together and i was super charged up to do this the first email i get back has the following word in it that this is half-baked populist jargon um and that research into diverse teams and diversity was just whatever um and further that you know that like the nutshell of it that was that women just were not interested in tech and there really was nothing you could do to make women interested um so needless to say this caught me by massa surprise and so uh so i decided to ask a question about this so i forwarded this email to the head of department and i said you know like i'm offended by this it's it's um this doesn't seem to make any sense and the response that i got was this this is a direct quote there's little point in taking offense in fact if anything i wasn't taking

enough offense and so i set out to prove them wrong the fact that women have no interest in technology and they've never really had any interest in tech so uh so now uh this moves into the next story which is archaeology what you are looking at here are the first computers women literally were the first computers that's what this job is called and programming jobs were advertised to women specifically because they required menial detail-oriented labor and those words are from the advertisements and at the time people deemed that women were a perfect fit and in fact up until the late 60s ibm in the uk measured code in girl hours i'm finding loads of evidence that at one point in time here and there women were definitely not the minority and in some cases were the overwhelming majority it was really deemed that the labor perfectly suited women and if you can

think about it for a second like think about a typewriter like you know this is a heavy machine and somebody else will build the heavy machine but who types into the heavy machine well you know traditionally that would have been women this menial detail-oriented uh mindset was in the at the time framed so that this would be a perfect job for women and we actually see this um an amazing case in dundee's there's a big study done on this as well it was primarily women who built the zx spectrum and this is one of the most important computers in in european uh early european coding um but these women were made to feel just as if they were sort of the assembly line workers not really part of this this technological movement that that truly um defined an entire area and in many many genres so same thing cray computer women were often the people who were putting these things together as well and so at some point in time putting these things together

isn't enough so women need to learn how to code these things and how did they code well they coded it with 6502 assembly it was just the language that the computers understood and at this time there's not a lot there's not a tremendous amount of value put on to this per se and and what's interesting to me is at this is around the point in time when i am in college and i don't remember being the only woman in my college program in fact there were loads of women there were advertisements in the 70s that actually talked about the computer girls a trainee gets 8 000 a year a girl senior senior systems analyst gets 20 000 and it was really an ad it was really a job that was heavily promoted toward women so is the importance of this goes up because computers are obviously not going to be a fad this is going to keep happening the pay goes up and as the pay goes up men start to come in now i'm not saying this to make men go oh here we go this is the point at which

she starts you know saying things that make us upset no absolutely not i mean if you are listening to this talk i already know that that that isn't you and in fact culturally there were people in fact there were countries where women could not even work if they were married at this point in time men were the traditional breadwinners and therefore it made sense that as the pays going up men are going to start coming in looking for that bread that they're hoping to win it was just the culture of the time um and also there was another problem that is there's more men entering the field um they didn't necessarily want to be trained by a woman and so out goes the woman it just wasn't going to work and so we start seeing a lot of women leave now culturally things were not ready uh for a women-led tech revolution and i think it's helpful to take a look at the advertisements of the time so for instance here's it's a lifesaver you can get arranged by brown sipped with a soil free oven um and

let's take a look at this one this is from 1974. now mind you that we're talking about the same time period right so just you can see like if these advertisements in just mainstream media were okay you know what what would you expect it to look like in other places so here's another ad from legs in 1970 it's nice to have a girl around the house and i guess step on her head there's another one where a husband spanking his wife or i guess not getting you know that she didn't she didn't store test their fresh coffee it's just it's obviously absolutely ridiculous but it gives you an idea of where we're at the time so we were really on the verge of the female ed tech revolution but our culture was not ready for it it was a mismatch and so this period we're in now could just be an aberration and if you're interested in more on this there is a fantastic book that i highly recommend and it's all really well detailed it's called programmed inequality so i encourage you to check that out so the next story is the unicorn anomaly um people often view female coders as a

bit of an anomaly so much so that we often would that we actually have the term female coder uh which sounds weird um like and so i sometimes hear questions like this like what's it like to be a female programmer or what's it like to be a female game designer or what's it like to be a woman in tech is if there's one answer to that question like for all of the women watching this i'm sure that if we were in a big room which we would be obviously but if we were in a big room and i said okay everybody i'm going to answer on your behalf there's at least there's at least at least 20 people who would say no um that's okay brenda thanks so much but i would like to express my own opinion and clearly there's not one answer to that question like i've talked to multiple women in the industry and i've talked to many women in the industry but some will say like you know what i really haven't i really haven't had any issue and then i will talk to other women and they have had the shocking issues for me i've largely had a great

experience but i've certainly had my fair share of weird things um things that i consider unacceptable um probably the the biggest of which was uh this was oh geez probably 15 years ago now if not longer i was talking to this guy who was an absolute giant in the industry this picture is quite obviously not scale and but i i massively admired this guy and we were having this completely professional work conversation and like 20 minutes in he moves his code over and he's he's sporting quite obviously uh an erection and he asked me if i want to do something about it now i'm a game developer i've spent my life behind screens i don't even know what to say i i don't remember what i finally did say um i felt i was surprised i was offended um i was scared by the oddity of this i couldn't believe it was happening um and i just i didn't know what to do so i just i left um this is this is

probably the the most dirty non-dirty picture ever in the the history of the gdc talk so as we're walking away um as we're walking away i'm just like you know i'm he's obviously still whatever and i just want to clear people out of the way um you know just ah just what a what a disgusting situation um so there's other questions though that i get like what would you say to other women who want to be in tech or in games and would you join our women panel and games or or would you be our diversity speaker and then there's the statements that need to be debunked right like i'm sure you've heard many of them and all of it ends up coming down to my gender um and being so much more about my gender and and even if we take gender aside from that right it's it's this experience of being othered right anybody who doesn't fit into the standard envelope is automatically made in other in that that otherness is highlighted so much more than their work is um and it probably to me the biggest

case was when amal clooney she was she's an international human rights lawyer and she was arguing before a case before the european court of human rights challenging an appeal on the genocide of 1.5 million people and a reporter unbelievably asked what she was wearing i mean this is a woman quite literally changing the world like what if we asked her this question instead and there's a repeat of it time here she is she is again she's talking about isis at the united nations what does time highlight her baby bump so i'm not saying that uh these incredibly necessary efforts to diversify companies conferences and events um are not necessary but it would be fantastic if we actually ask these people to talk about their work at mainstream conferences as well and not just their gender their sexuality or the color of their skin because we quite obviously are so much more than these things in 2008 i actually did an article

on women in games and i was given free reign to go the uh the angle i wanted to go with it so this is the angle that i went um i contacted a bunch of my friends and i asked them what it was like to be a male game designer and these are the actual answers i got what um that doesn't make any sense brenda wow uh that's a pretty niche topic there so i decided to double down now mind you these are questions women get all the time um so what advice do you have for men looking to break into tech the answers i got wait you're actually being serious is this a joke so just as a spoiler alert to the best of my knowledge my reproductive organs have never made a game or technical decision i never said i want to grow up in design or code as a woman i never said i want to play games as a woman in fact i don't even really know that i have any gender-based goals so i never said i want to be like the best

birth giver ever in the history of the world and nor have i ever said i want to have the best menopause ever though now at 53 i am actually rethinking this slide because i think the best menopause ever would be pretty fantastic um now that's not to say that i'm not grateful i do know that things like this are incredibly important uh we were at quakecon uh in 2014 and there was a guy here shown here dressed as a dress as a hot dog and he was really excited to meet my husband so much so that he kept like he would walk up and he'd walk away and so we had a conversation and i was asking him you know are you a fan of his games and he's like no yeah no but that's not it so eventually i sort of coaxed it out of him like what was what was it what was the thing and the thing was this it was that um he could see that john was mexican and he said to me that john was his hero not because of the games he made but because he made them as a mexican and

that identification was important to him and it's also important to me i mean when i was first getting into games people like carol shaw were my heroes and we all need role models and we need their stories to inspire us whether that's in real life tech games whatever and so that's why it's so incredibly important not to comment women out of history but rather to include women women say like margaret hamilton so margaret was the director of software engineering at mit and she literally wrote the code that put men on the moon and she did it with her daughter in the office many times her daughter in fact even pointed out an error that was highlighted to nasa and and they said well you know that our astronauts wouldn't make errors well they did and there's a movie about that so there's also lois mitchell so louis mitchell is instrumental to fortran and sometimes i hear people say well yeah but did women do anything like actually hardcore in games uh or in

tech well how about an optimizing compiler i think that's pretty hardcore frances allen wrote the first one and four she won the touring award there's also also katarina yashenko so she created pointers in 1955 um with the development of the address programming language so this work was actually not well known outside of the soviet union and so in 1964 somebody in the u.s did the same and for it they won the computer pioneer award and you know it's it's absolutely a great achievement they they did these two things separately um but but katarina did it first in 1955 and i think that's incredible so yet another super wonderful hardcore thing here's kathleen booth who created the first assembly language and then and also designed the assembler and then we have melba roy who was nasa's computer and then a personal favorite of mine because i loved basics so much we have sister mary kenneth keller sister mary kenneth keller her work was instrumental to basic and we also have k

mcnulty so k mcnulty she's originally from uh county donegal in ireland um and she was the the one of an all-female team on the eniac all female coding team and a lot of these facts like a lot of this is just lost today as if women have never been in tech which is just simply not true we have always been here so there's also uh alexander foresight so she found co-founded the stanford cs program and wrote the first textbook and interestingly enough when she was going to brown um she was doing her phd in mathematics and she was an exceptional student however she didn't get to continue in the program because the dean didn't approve of female mathematicians so out she went and cut her support and those challenges were not uncommon for women at the time and again i don't think anybody watching this was part of that time or was part of the decisions that were made at that time it's it's the way cultures evolve um

but back then as well in games we had people like donna bailey who's responsible for centipede or roberta williams who is one of the co-founders of sierra and maybe you've seen this famous picture of eas you know we think farther in in showing like here's all of our rockstars a lot of people overlook that ann westfall is in that image and westfall was an absolute rockstar coder um created many games and was instrumental you know here we have carol shaw who you know prior like a lot of think people think that games sort of begin in the 80s no carol shaw was at activision she created river raid um in 19 and then in 1978 she was the first person to program and a first woman to program and design a video game for the atari 2600 you know so seeing people like her was important to me and then we have mabel addis who created the sumerian game and this goes back to 1962. so this notion that that women you know women are interested in tech you know man we have always been here

um in percentage-wise there had to have been many of us because it strikes it just doesn't make sense if there'll be so many women involved in such important spots if there were like five of us that were there um in fact the year that i go to college 37.1 of computer science applicants are actually women and so now uh the next story i want to talk about is the viewing room so if we look at the broader tech industry overall we can see that there are literally millions of women in tech and we are half the population but less than a third of tech workers and of those only a fifth of us are in leadership positions and so the reality is is that means influence women's influence on product development and company strategy is not at all what we'd hope it would be and the results of this are non-trivial to our health our well-being our education and our enjoyment and our success so if we take something like say the original xbox controller it

was nicknamed the fatty and then the duke in all territories except japan so here it is in a normal man's hands and here's a photo of it in mine so it was given a blunder of the year it was just way too big and eventually the japanese controller was released in in all markets and then outside of games on june 3rd in 2019 um apple introduced cycle tracking which seems like obviously that's a great thing to be in the health app and so just talked about fertility windows and you know and letting women know when their periods are coming um and and my bigger question is why did this take five years like there are two billion women in this age group healthcare had been out for five years i mean even disney released a film on it in 1946 it's a thing it's a normal thing and incidentally uh this was the first documented use of the word vagina in a film um random trivia now you know and it's also gotten into our ai

so in 2017 a group of academics decided to review bias in open source computing um and here's some good news so women's contributions were actually rated higher and accepted more often than men so that was that was heartening to hear unless their gender was known and if it was known then it dropped by 20 so obviously you know that's um well it's endemic and it's scary and it's wrong and it's the good news however is that it's also engineered and if it's engineered it's a created problem and it means that it can be changed so as we look at the overall history of computing women have gradually been pushed out and we tend to view it as say a man's field and then i hear this is when we hear things like you know the women are the women aren't there so i guess women just aren't interested in coding except that's not true right it's women

are interested in coding and there are ways to bring them back i deeply believe that it was a temporary aberration that was engineered and i believe we can reach parity well how can we do that well first i think we need to clear away the myths and one of the big myths i often hear is that girls are not good at maths and i.t and that is simply not true in fact many studies show that girls are good at maths and i.t and unless they're told that they're not and then they'll live down to it and that works the same with boys by the way um there was also a fantastic study uh done by science foundation ireland that talked about how important the message is coming from parents in fact a kid's mother is the most important influencer of their children's future career choices so if mothers say absolutely you would be great at this kids tend to follow that and so it educating parents as well is incredibly important

because they can influence their their children's decisions more than anything else and we all know that it must change women were the original computers quite literally we created code we created programming languages we built the machines we put a man on the moon for god's sakes and just to be petty we also built the the man who who got put on the moon as well and as much as i'm saying this this is about diversity and it is not at all about exclusion it's important for us to get to equal because there are loads of uh loads of studies that show that diverse teams make better games and diverse teams make for better educational environments so we need to clear away the barriers um for what's keeping people out of let's say the other side of the room and it's also the business case um even more than that companies need to have more workers like this might be fine now but as an industry we are growing

and we need to fill many more chairs and in part to do this i also think we need to change the marketing so i decided to uh to get in in my of this free time that i fantasize that i sometimes have i decided to get get back into c um and so i found a c programming tutorial and this was the first and most recommended one and this is the very first thing i see so i imagine just rocking this thing up to my daughters and you know them looking at this guy going like i'm old and i'm white and don't you want to be like me right you know like if we're looking for equality and diversity i think that there's way better ways to sell it like why not having margaret hamilton there like i love this you know here's a woman who put man on the moon like let's do it and then i remember this advertisement which is currently my all-time favorite this comes from 2011 so this is a company that was looking for programmers um and this was their ad campaign so you would be if you if you signed up and you were hired you would get a tux which i thought maybe i could rock the tucks but then you would also get um cologne

which was sex panther cologne um which okay and then this is the one where i i drew the line like i don't want their beard grooming oil that's what that was cigars whiskey uh bacon wrapped money fine beard grooming oil no right like it just it doesn't say that you belong and so i think it's important that we change the message um i sometimes think about doing something like having an exceptional summer camp or summer camp for exceptional coders and just you know constantly telling girls that you know girls are natural coders and i.t is for girls and like overwhelming them with this message not because i just want to say it and hammer it home but actually because it's true like it is really true there were times in my life where i was told that i was no good i was told by a teacher that i wouldn't amount to anything i was told that i would live in the worst part of town i was i was told i had no chance of getting into a college of my choice and i was told not to make the

games that ended up being part of the reason that i wanted bafta um and what if i believed all that right like you know the good news is that i'm a fighter um and i wrote three books and i made those games and i got into that college and i live in galway which is a long way from where i thought those people those people thought i would end up and and i'm grateful for my life and i'm grateful that i didn't listen you know but it's sometimes like i'm not a fighter and sometimes i believe the that i hear and i wonder how many girls we've lost to those messages that are just obviously not true i mean ultimately game dev is for everyone um and code is for everyone and i want anybody who wants in these doors to come on in and see people who look like them you know whether they're school kids or just entry level into the job or their lead coders or you know they've they've gone up to the cto level like i want to build the ladder for those who come after us to show them where to go so that when we look at an image like this you know we don't think like oh my goodness it's girls coding

you know we we look at this as just a completely normal thing like yeah there's some kids making some games i want everybody to feel welcome in this industry thank you