UPDATED 11:43 EDT / NOVEMBER 05 2018

NEWS

Bringing tech’s boogiemen to life: Woman coder is naming names to fight industry bias

Despite numerous initiatives to promote gender parity, women currently hold just 28.6 percent of computing jobs. Why? It’s a question that elicits a barrage of clashing answers that light flames of controversy in the news and social media feeds. There’s a sense that some in the tech community, such as former Google LLC engineer James Damore, are growing weary of the criticism. Yet discrimination against women in tech remains rampant, and survivors have war stories to prove it.

Alex Qin (pictured), director of technology at Gakko Inc., began her tech career as a software engineer. She offers a straightforward summary of what is wrong with the tech industry: “It’s run by a bunch of assholes who aren’t held accountable for their actions.”

That’s what Qin told the audience at a recent talk she gave at DockerCon in San Francisco. Male peers and colleagues harassed her in her college classes, internships, and full-time jobs on engineering teams. Qin named names (and showed pictures) in a move to give the tech-sexism boogieman an actual face that could not be denied.

A combination of stubbornness and sheer love of coding enabled her to persevere. She’s taken her lessons and put them behind her initiative to call out bad actors in the industry, and democratize tech literacy for women and other underrepresented groups through educational programs. Qin advocates early exposure to computer-science education, and her startup offers artfully-created educational applications for young children.

Qin spoke with Lisa Martin (@LisaMartinTV), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host John Troyer (@jtroyer), chief reckoner at TechReckoning, during this summer’s DockerCon event in San Francisco. They discussed her experiences in the industry and her efforts to blend technology with social entrepreneurship.

This week, theCUBE spotlights Alex Qin in our Startup of the Week feature.

When you love tech, but it doesn’t love you back

Qin, who has an American accent, was actually born in France. She entered the freshman engineering program at New York University with the not-too-slouchy ambition of becoming an astronaut. Plans took a sharp turn when she encountered programming for the first time.

“I’d never coded at that point, but one of their requirements was an intro to programming class in Python, so I took it and I fell in love with it immediately,” she said. She switched her major to computer science, where the dearth of females instantly struck her.

“When I was starting out and throughout my career, people didn’t necessarily want to work with me,” she said. At school, one could potentially attribute this to the fact that Qin was relatively new to coding, while many others had been at it for years or had parents who were programmers. But even as Qin performed at the top of her classes, this attitude among her peers persisted. And out in the working world, degree in hand, she would encounter the same situation.

During her talk titled Shaving my Head Made me a Better Programmer, Qin detailed her experiences with harassment and discrimination in the workplace, at tech conferences and elsewhere. She called out a number of male colleagues and described their unprofessional behavior.

Naming names at DockerCon

At her first software internship, she was the only woman on the engineering team. A few weeks into the job, the quality assurance lead made the seemingly kind gesture of inviting Qin out for coffee. He began asking her questions like, “Where do you live?” and “What trains to you take to work?” It soon escalated to things like, “Do you have a boyfriend? Does he get jealous? Do you like to dress sexy for him? Do you wear lingerie for him?” Qin said.

Qin’s superior kept trying to spend time with her, and it was making her uncomfortable. The boss at this company did not discipline him in any substantial way, and Qin learned that he continued to harass and stalk women after she left, and he was even promoted.

Later, in a front-end engineering position, a new vice president of engineering came aboard and set in on Qin.

“He would say things to me that would make my skin crawl,” she said. “He would make jokes about how women existed only to serve men. He’d make comments about my appearance, telling me he didn’t like the way I dressed or the way I did my hair.”

Qin reported him to his superior, and he apologized. “He also said that he wished we had more women on the team, but that would mean he would have to lower the hiring bar,” Qin said.

His apology was apparently only superficial, however. “Although I was one of the first engineers to join the team, and my code was literally all over the code base, he started pushing me onto smaller and smaller projects,” she said. “At one point, I was even asked to stop talking during product meetings, because I intimidated the product lead.”

Eventually, Qin tired of the hostile atmosphere and quit.

So where does head-shaving fit into this? “When I shaved my head, a lot of those challenges kind of disappeared, because I wasn’t perceived as feminine anymore,” Qin said.

This experience shocked Qin — the working world was supposed to be a meritocracy, wasn’t it?  But the revelation also gave her some ideas. “I kind of started on this new quest to make tech as diverse and inclusive as possible, so that people from all backgrounds, all genders can learn to code and write code happily, and safely,” she said.

Hard lessons lead to new avenues

Qin founded the Code Cooperative in 2016. “It’s an organization that teaches formerly incarcerated individuals computer literacy and coding, so that they can build websites and technical solutions to the problems they’ve identified in the criminal justice system.”

Gakko is a global education design studio with locations in Tokyo and New York. They set up experimental education programs, summer camps, coding classes, etc. It builds educational software for kids aged three to five.

Moji Moji, which teaches the alphabet, phonics and spelling to pre-kindergartner kids, is the first app developed by Gakko.

“Technology is helping to bridge the early learning divide in classrooms, allowing more students to enter kindergarten with confidence and eagerness to learn,” said Chris Boardman, director of digital products for Gakko. “What makes Moji Moji stand out from other apps is its attention to detail in translating input from the education community into a rich and immersive experience.”

Qin believes public schools are not doing enough to spread computer science education to all students.

Qin is involved in a program called Code Forward that teaches coding to students in New York. “My classroom is basically coding meets social entrepreneurship. So all of our kids build an app that solves a problem they’ve identified in their communities. And these kids are just coming up with the most beautiful solutions — like, more brilliant than any adult that I’ve met,” she said. “I feel good about the future.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the DockerCon event.

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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