Women in IT: a trans-cendental meditation

For the latest in our series of blog posts celebrating our "Women in IT", Teaching & Learning Advisor Stephanie Jesper follows the secret passageway back to her childhood, and wonders to what extent that childhood facilitated her route into IT.

Along with the other women in my team, I snuck into IT via the secret passage from the Library (a field where, in stark contrast to IT, women outnumber men by about four to one). We’re a converged service at York (Library, IT, and Archives all together), and the team I’m in straddles both Library and IT to provide skills support for both. In my job I provide application support and create online training like you might have seen on our Skills Guides. I also get to come up with weird and wonderful solutions to people’s technical problems. I basically get to teach, make magic spreadsheets, and fiddle with scripts for a living. Which is all pretty cool.

Like a lot of people my age who found their way into IT, my interest started at line 10, as I began to explore the basics of BASIC. On the telly, Maggie Philbin’s deft transition from Swap Shopper to Tomorrow’s World presenter provided me with an inspirational example, opening me to a world of technology. By the time I was at uni here in York, my social circle largely consisted of a quintet of compscis; our digs strewn with network cables. I owe a great deal to this parallel education. The skills I picked up snowballed through use, play, and a lust to tinker. I gathered more as I tried (and failed) to sell records on the internet, and more still at Library School, where my IT interests found their way into my dissertation. I wouldn’t be where I am without any of that.

IT was a hobby that helped me to do my job. Now my job is finding ways for IT to help other people. I may have snuck in from the Library side of things, but my IT skills are now at the core of what I do for a living. In other words, my hobby now is my job, and that makes for a pretty delightful job indeed!

There’s another layer of experience that may or may not be of relevance to my route into IT. I’ve absolutely no idea if I was the only trans woman in the room at the Women in IT Excellence Awards. But as we’re sharing our routes into IT, and the obstacles we’ve faced in a sector where women are so underrepresented, I find myself asking the question: would I be here had my gender circumstances at birth been the same as the majority of the other people at this event?

I’ve dwelt on such hypotheticals often. I’ve had to, in order to formulate the very precise wording I’d need if ever I were to encounter a monkey’s paw. There’s no doubt that a cis me would have led a very different life to trans me, but would that life have led me to a similar place?

Some points of my childhood would have been constant regardless of gender, some were informed by the inkling of ‘transness’, and some were a consequence of being socially, outwardly, circumstantially male. My gender probably played little part in my father buying the family an Acorn Electron: the education-focused marketing would doubtless have been a factor in his selection of that machine, whatever gender I appeared to be. But the encouragement may perhaps have differed. And the context even more so: would cis me have turned her cabin-bed into a spaceship and set the Acorn up beneath the quilt to play Elite? Would she have been given the spaceship Lego that inspired these fantasies? She almost certainly wouldn’t have got the Transformers I received one Christmas in lieu of the stereotypically girly presents I’d asked for. My toys informed my imagination, and my imagination informed my interaction with technology.

But my interest in technology was not simply a consequence of my toys. At the same time that we got a computer in the house, the aforementioned Maggie Philbin made her switch from kids’ TV presenter to science and technology broadcaster. As I noted above, Maggie Philbin was a huge role model for me. Other scientifically minded children’s TV presenters such as Fred Harris and Johnny Ball had first piqued my interest in such things, but it was Maggie Philbin who got me watching ‘grown-up’ science programmes on telly. Meanwhile, Carol Vorderman was donning a white coat to do science experiments on the Wide Awake Club, and I bought her books so I could do my own experiments at home. By now I was aware of my gender issues, and I was looking out for female role models. But my gender trouble was also setting me out to my peers as “a bit weird”, so I saw science as a way of capitalising on this: by embracing a ‘mad scientist’ demeanour.

Maybe cis me wouldn’t have had to resort to such things. She probably wouldn’t have started consciously modeling herself on the Ghostbusters, and tinkering with electronics in quite the same way. Nor would she have been competitively programming with Paul (whose dad worked for Acorn) to see who could make the best quiz in BASIC. She therefore wouldn’t have broken her Acorn and become one of the first in the class to get an Amiga 500. And who knows, she may have been sufficiently popular at school that she didn’t spend most of her free time on her computer making spreadsheets or trying to customise her computer games. On top of all that, she possibly didn’t feel the same weight of expectation (or just plain interest) to do science subjects at A-Level, so maybe she’d’ve taken more arts and humanities subjects, and ended up on a very different trajectory as a result. As for living with a load of computer science students at uni…!

It’s all speculation, of course. Who really knows what tiny butterflies of experience would’ve driven whirlwinds through her life? Maybe Maggie Philbin on her own would’ve proved enough of an inspiration. The room full of women at the awards we attended, and the other stories we’re blogging in this strand, are testament to the wealth of possible trajectories I could have followed to arrive where I did. One common theme, though, is the extent to which gender stereotyping in early life can slide open and closed so many little doors -- doors that take an awful lot of work to reopen once they’re shut upon us. I long ago accepted that I wouldn’t be me without having the childhood and experiences I’ve had: it was those experiences which unbarred great sections of the path to where I am today. Given how much I love working in IT, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else right now. But nor would I wish anybody else to be denied this pleasure. It’s important, therefore, that we consider the nature and roots of such denials, so that we can remove the obstacles for the future generations of women in IT.