Episode 39: Fighting the Tech-Bro Stereotype with Dr. Mar Hicks

In this episode we finish up our interview with Historian Mar Hicks and talk about contemporary issues facing women in computing, the impact of globalization on IT, and how pink-collar jobs impact everyone.

Tip: the answer to all of our problems may be labor organizing.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Hello, and welcome to she whopersisted the Nasty Podcast. I am your
host, Elizabeth, and today wehave the second half of our interview with
historian mar Hicks. In this halfof the interview, we address contemporary issues
facing individuals in the fields of informationtechnology and academia, and the intersection of

(00:24):
gender, labor, and globalization.Since we're talking about contemporary issues facing information
technology, I thought I'd bring upsomething that actually is going on in the
world today, and that is thefact that we have a picture of a
black hole, not just an artistrendering of a black hole, but an

(00:44):
actual photograph of a black hole.You might have seen doctor Katie Bauman.
She is one of over two hundredresearchers who worked hard to be able to
come up with a number of algorithmsand process enormous amounts of data to come
up with this image. Now,doctor Bauman became kind of the face of

(01:10):
the project when she tweeted a photoof herself or maybe Facebook a photo of
herself where she was super excited aboutseeing the first images of a black hole.
Understandable if I was on a teamof people who was using an algorithm
that I had worked on to findan image of a black hole. I

(01:33):
would treat the hell out of that. But because Katie is a twenty nine
year old woman is really enthusiastic whenshe describes her work, she became kind
of the pr image of this team. She acknowledged herself that she was not
the only person, but she essentiallybecame a really great face for the project.

(01:56):
However, because we can't have nicethings anymore and because everything turns into
a dumpster fire, there was somebacklash. There was maybe some misogynist backlash
online wherein people talked about how doctorBauman didn't do that, that she wasn't
part of the team, that itwas really a man who did the project.

(02:19):
And I'll admit there's a man who'sthe PI on that project. But
Katie Bowman contributed to the team thatcame up with the algorithm and that processed
all of the data, and whopresented that image to the world. There's
no reason that we have to takeaway from someone's accomplishments, especially when she
herself admits that she is not theonly person who worked on the project and

(02:44):
she was one person on a team. But she does explain her research in
a way that is really accessible forpeople, and she's going to be starting
as an assistant professor in the fall, and that university and those students are
lucky to have her. Thank you, doctor Bauman for the work that you're
doing, for putting a humanizing faceon technology and explaining your research in a

(03:07):
way that makes it accessible for everyone. And for the haters out there,
screw them, They're not worth yourtime. This transitions very well into the
conversation that I had with mar Hickson issues confronting women and people who are
mothered by the information technology field today. I hope you enjoy the interview and

(03:30):
stay nasty. She was warm,she was given an explanation. Nevertheless,

(03:55):
she persisted. So let's turn alittle bit to some contemporary issues in women
in technology. Sure, so,as as an expert, I would consider
you an expert in the topic ofwomen in computing and women technology. You've
actually spoken on campuses of some ofthese tech companies about issues related to the
treatment of women maybe in these ITcompanies. Yep, So, whether it's

(04:18):
sexual harassment or general generally like ahostile work environment. Obviously this isn't a
new phenomenon, but is there adifference now? Is it entirely a like
me two times up issue? Oris there a difference? What do you
see? Sure? So you meanlike, is there a difference between when
I started to these talking at thesetech companies a couple of years ago and

(04:40):
now, or between historically and now? Yes? Both, okay, cool,
So there's there's definitely differences historically betweenyou know, then and now because
now we actually you know, inthe UK and in the United States and
many other countries, we have lawsthat say you're not allowed to pay people
who are doing the same job lesson the basis of gender or on the

(05:03):
basis of race. That's no longersomething that we think is culturally or legally
okay, now we know that ithappens exactly. However, it still happens
even um, you know, eventhe most privileged workers in the workforce,
so like white let's say, whitewomen who are working in tech and white

(05:23):
collar jobs, even those women aremaking significantly less than their male peers in
the aggregate and usually also as individuals. This all blew up recently, you
know, with the Google walkout andwomen at Google advocating for pay equity and
Google just being like, we're notgoing to be transparent about that, and

(05:43):
we're not even going to comply withum. You know, the US government
tried to get this information from Googleso that they could confirm or bring charges
for you know, for for violatingthe law. And Google literally said it
will cost us like one hundred thousanddollars to collect that data. I guess
Google is not good at like collectingdata. I'm sure they actually use ADP

(06:08):
as their as their like ADP couldprobably give that information for them pretty quickly.
Yeah, but it's interesting that youbring this up because, you know,
over the past few years, andactually just recently, earlier this week,
Google was talking about these kind ofgender pay disparities, and data came
out about this and it showed thatI guess women were actually being paid more.

(06:30):
And I'm not really sure how thatworks because they said I think that
the article said that they were givingwomen like discretionary money, more discretionary money
than men and maybe this was tomake up for the gap that existed in
their base day, but it seemsfishy to me. Okay, wow,
so that just came out this week. I'm going to have to pay a

(06:51):
little bit more attention. I didn'tsee that yet. So I can't.
I can't comment with you know,full certainty of what's going on. But
yes, that does seem a littlefishy because yeah, because I mean the
women at Google who have been bringingthese complaints, they have obviously been doing
their own research, right, They'vebeen obviously going around and collecting salary numbers

(07:15):
from all their male peers and figuringout what's going on, because you don't
enter into a fight with your employerlike this very lightly, especially not when
your employer is one of the mostpowerful corporations on the planet. So I'll
have to look into that. Butyeah, the other thing, just to
answer your last question about like howhave things changed in the past couple of

(07:36):
years. So I actually gave atalk at Google, Yeah, a couple
of years ago, now, afew years ago, kind of in the
calm before the storm. And atthe end of the talk, you know,
people were asking like, what dowe do, Like we don't want
it to be bad like this,and women were like, yeah, we're
mad, like we don't want tobe treated like this. What do we

(07:56):
do? And I just said,okay, wait, have you turned off
the recording because I'm going to becauseI'm going to talk about labor organization right
now, and everybody kind of laughednervously. I think the people who laughed
more were the managers. And thenI just talk to them about labor organization,
and there were so many like saucerwide eyes, like that had never
occurred to them. And now whenI go to companies to talk, they're

(08:22):
they're they're talking to me about labororganization. They're telling me about what they're
doing or you know, what theyplan to do in terms of labor organization.
And that's exactly like, that's exactlythe direction this needs to go.
Because, as I always try tomake clear when I tell people about,
you know, my work, laborfeminization doesn't just hurt women. It's a

(08:46):
deskilling process that drags down the payand prestige of everybody in that field because
all of our salaries are tied together. You know, some people may make
more than I do in a similaror the same job. But the lower
that management can depress my salary,the lower they can depress yours. Even

(09:07):
if you're not a woman, evenif you're not a person of colors.
So we're all in this together,and labor organization is a very important part
of this. I'm going to takethis out of the technology field and I'm
gonna talk about academic jobs for asecond, because I think that this is
something that happens in academia as well. We have moved from having seventy plus

(09:31):
percent of faculty members be ten yearlinefaculty members who have some amount of job
security, and often with public schools, they at least have you know,
transparency with what they're they're being paid, and they're being paid you know,
typically a living wage, and theyhave benefits. All of that's great.
We've gone from that which was inthe sixties and seventies to now about seventy

(09:54):
percent of the workforce is contingent labor, Yeah, who has paid significantly less
that national average I think per classis about thirty five hundred dollars four thousand
dollars per class, which is notat all a living wage when you consider
the amount of work that they're doing, and they often don't have benefits or
you know, they have to getbenefits through the Affordable Care Act, but

(10:16):
the university doesn't provide those benefits.Most of the contingent faculty that you see
out there are women, Yeah,and so they become this contingent faculty becomes
these kind of pink collar jobs,right, yeah, yeah, I think
that, you know, I don'thave the statistics on this, but I
think that women and also so whitewomen and people of color, I think

(10:39):
they are disproportionately in these jobs,which, as you point out, aren't
just lower paid but there's no jobsecurity. They're like, you know,
contract jobs that you don't know ifyou're going to even have them from semester
to semester, and a lot oftimes it's below minimum wage, it's below
the poverty line. If this isyour you know, if this is your

(11:00):
one source of income, and ofcourse you would expect it probably would be
because, as you point out,a lot of work goes into this,
and it's it's really really terrifying becausefor one thing, you know, obviously
it ruins lives. It wastes somuch talent. Like you know, we've
been talking a lot about the wasteof technical talent, this is the waste

(11:20):
of talent in all fields, anddisproportionately also in fields like the humanities,
which as we're starting to understand,while some of us have always known,
right, but more people are startingto understand how important that is to a
functioning democratic society, no matter howtechnologically advanced. In fact, the more
technological advances we have, we needthe humanities even more in that case,

(11:46):
And folks like that are getting paid, like you said, like two thousand
dollars a course, and if youcan only teach like two courses a semester,
which is often the case because thelabor market is flooded, that's nothing.
That's not anything to live on.And in a broader systemic sense,
what this has been doing since theseventies, the sixties and seventies is that

(12:07):
it's meant that the people who havepay to do research, the people who
actually get paid on the tenure trackto not just teach but do research,
have gotten to such a small numberthat the output, the research output of
our disciplines has just been so terriblyhurt and people end up, you know,

(12:28):
they end up doing all this researchfor their dissertations and then potentially never
even publishing it because they aren't ableto find a job. And the reason
they aren't able to find a jobisn't because they're doing anything wrong, and
it isn't because they're not needed.It's because way back in the seventies and
eighties, university administrators got this greatidea that like, hey, let's run

(12:52):
a university like it's a business.Let's run a nonprofit like it should be
a profit making enterprise, or ifnot profitmaking, that it should you know,
that it's not something that we're puttingmore money into them, we're getting
out of. And that's an incrediblydangerous way to think about education, that
it can be like a for profitindustry, because then you're going to end

(13:13):
up basically cutting out the infrastructure thatallows so many other things to happen in
society. Education is like bridges.You know, education is infrastructure absolutely.
And you talk about, you knowthis labor organizing. You know, most
contingent faculty are too afraid to organizebecause they, you know, even though
their jobs and their pay are crap, that's what they've got and that's what

(13:35):
they rely on and they don't knowwhat else they would do if they're not
doing that. Do you see thiskind of labor organizing in it? Do
you see that happening? Yeah,So it's really interesting that there are so
there was an instance of the programmersorganizing at one company like this is a

(13:56):
year or so ago. It wasthe first instance of programmers organizing and creating
a union at this one company thatit was in DC. Actually it was
called Lane Lane Techs, and rightas they were about to kind of finalize,
you know, and create their union, they were all summarily fired.
Stop. Yeah. Yeah, Soyou can look this up. But you

(14:20):
know, it's sort of the casethat if you're going to try to stamp
out an ember, you better bedarn sure you're not in the middle of
a forest fire. Because that justenergized more and more people in tech and
more and more people who are interestedin helping tech workers, you know,
unionize and organize to go after thisgoal and to do it in ways that

(14:45):
crossed boundaries both between companies and withincompanies. So, like there's this coalition
called the Tech Workers Coalition right nowwhich is trying to organize people in tech
companies from talk up to bottom rightso that the you know, the strongest
kind of white collar workers who arebeing paid the most, like the programmers,

(15:07):
will be in the same union aslike the kitchen staff, and the
idea is that through that solidarity,they'll be able to get the best gains
for everybody. And that has sortof happened in some cases in academia,
but not as much because unfortunately,you know, you really I don't think
you see too much awareness of theneed for organization on the part of ten

(15:31):
year track faculty. Most of theorganizing that I've seen in academia it is
actually adjuncts and contingent labor and graduatestudents and they're sticking their next out and
yeah, tenured faculty are not reallyand that's not so that's not as it

(15:52):
should be. Yeah, I thinkwith tenured faculty or ten year track faculty,
I think there is typically they don'tstart complaining until something starts affecting them,
and I think that this is justkind of human nature often that people
they don't see a problem until theproblem starts affecting them, and then it's
too late, right, I meanby then, like other people have already
been affected, and now once itgets to people who have some amount of

(16:17):
job security and benefits, like youknow, once it's there, you're you
know, you're screwed. Yeah,yeah, I think you're totally right that
part of it is just people kindof going la la lost to kicking their
fingers in their ears and thinking Istill have my health insurance, I still
have my you know, full timesalary. I don't need to put in
the work for this. But Ialso think that at least with younger academics

(16:41):
who are tenure track or just likelike me recently getting tenure's, it's a
scary situation because we know how replaceablewe are, and we know that if
we know that, in many casesour institutions would be more than happy to
actually replace us with adjuncts, noteven just replace us with one of the

(17:03):
hundreds and hundreds of other people whocould do our jobs on the market,
but actually just even take away thatline. And so I do think that
part of it is and I'm notsaying this to excuse it. I think
this in some ways is even worse. It's knowing what's happening and also being
maybe too afraid to organize. Andthat's it's always going to be an issue

(17:25):
because people don't organize for their rightsuntil their backs against the wall. It's
a you know, it's something peopledo when they really need to. So
it's always going to be scary,and it's always going to be time consuming,
and yeah, you might you mightlose your job. Well, yeah,
I mean, in the example ofthat tech company in the DC area,
you know, they where they're tryingto organize and everybody gets fired,
that just that becomes an example foreveryone else to not organize or you see

(17:52):
what might happen to you. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's definitely the
way the company intended it and hopedthat it would go. But I think
that they misjudge the situation because nowthe people who at least two or three
of the people who were fired,they have become these labor organizing fire brands,
you know, and they are they'reout there doing far more than they

(18:15):
would have done if they had justgotten their union and continue to work at
the company. So the company tryto solve this problem in one small instance
for themselves, but they sort ofunleash the whirlwind. You know. That's
great to hear, though, Imean, hopefully that can be a positive
change in the industry. I hopeso, I think so. Yeah.

(18:36):
So let's talk a little bit aboutfeminist intersectionality in science and technology. How
far do we still have to goon this? I think people are becoming
more aware of the impact of womenof color and non binary people and trans
people, and you know, peoplewho have been mothered within science and technology
and in computing. But is itbasically still like a white like tech dude

(19:00):
game. I have a lot offriends who live up in the Bay Area
and it's just like tech bros everywhere. Yeah. Well, you know,
that's such an interesting question, andit's it's so important because if we look
at, you know, just thehistory of this country, race and the
oppression of black people, they arefoundational. They are foundational to pretty much

(19:22):
every everything in this country. Andyou know, the infrastructure of tech carries
that legacy. It's it's no exception. It's not like these are problems from
the past. And so it's nota coincidence. I don't think it's a
coincidence. That's so many of thepeople who are doing really important tech critique,

(19:44):
like Sophia Noble, like Meredith Broussard, like Simone Brown, like Ruhab
Benjamin, that those are all blackwomen. You know, I don't think
that's that's not a coincidence. Butyou know, it's actually something that is
really important to pay it attention tobecause these women are better placed than most
of the rest of us to understandwhat's going on by virtue of their experiences

(20:10):
as black women in the country.And even if you look at computer science,
which is disproportionately white, there area lot of black women and women
of color and computer science who areaddressing issues of algorithmic bias in a head
on way, while you know,major corporations are still kind of trying to
weazle out of it and say like, oh, no, it doesn't really

(20:32):
exist or we didn't intend that,so therefore we're not going to take responsibility
for it. So, yeah,I think intersectionality is absolutely critical to everything
that's going on now and how weunderstand it because race and blackness is so
critical to understanding systems of oppression andoverlapping systems of oppression in this country to

(20:53):
what degree? And this I didn'tprepare this question for you, and so
I'm just kind of coming up withit off the top of my head right
now. But how much has globalizationalso impacted labor in it? Yeah,
you know, I was thinking aboutthat while you were talking about the white
tech bros in San Francisco, andI didn't because it's another aspect of this,

(21:14):
like intersectionality and race and class andgender and you know, yeah status,
yeah, and and labor being treatedbetter or treated worse. So you
know, we all know about outsourcing, right um where basically, you know,
jobs that might have been done inthe United States, and these include
tech jobs they go to, forinstance, India, and companies get to

(21:37):
pay people less to do them.But what I think people are less attuned
to UM. Well maybe maybe notall people certainly, but but sometimes we
forget that there are an awful lotof people for instance, from India or
from China or other countries, butin particular from India who are here in
Silicon Valley and in you know,in tech in Research Triangle, part in

(22:00):
the Boston area, wherever there aretech hubs. There are people who come
over on H one B visas.These are these skilled visas that the idea
is we don't have enough people todo these jobs in the US, so
we actually have to import this veryhigh skilled labor. And when folks like
that come in. You know,several of my friends are actually originally from

(22:22):
India and they came here on HWEBvisas, and some are actually still on
those visas, waiting for years andyears for their Green card or years and
years for citizenship. They aren't treatedas well or paid as well in many
cases as their white male tech bropeers. But more and more they're defining

(22:42):
the industry. I mean, they'redoing the work, they're growing in number,
and you know, you can't ignorethe fact that the tech bro I
don't want to call it an ideal, I guess the tech bro stereotype like
that that really isn't the face oftech. You know, yes, we
have problems with there being too manylike white men in positions of power,

(23:03):
but if you start to look downthe management chain and look at people who
aren't in positions of power but whoare doing the work, it gets more
and more diverse. And yeah,and that's one of the reasons why I
think so many people are trying toturn to like labor organization, because they
see that management is not not whothey are and not on their side.
So I guess, I mean thenext step would be that, you know,

(23:26):
as people start retiring late gen xersor early gen xers, late baby
boomers start retiring, and these likewhite men who are in these positions of
power start retiring, that maybe we'llsee more diversity in these kind of upper
level management positions. I mean,I would love that to be the case,

(23:48):
but like historically that's not really whathappens, right because in fact,
if we look at who's in thesepositions of power, you know, Mark
Zuckerberg isn't that old. He's youngerby a lot than me. People who
are being groomed for these positions ofpower, who have a particular profile,
like you know, all the peoplewho are getting all the venture capital money,

(24:11):
they all are, no coincidence,pretty much white dudes, and they're
the ones being given blank checks toyou know, go off and change the
world. And so this is asystem that's perpetuating, it's not it's not
like it's going to solve be solvedkind of in an easy generational shift sort
of way. And also, youknow, going back to what we were

(24:32):
talking about with adjunct laborers and thentying that into like a parallel to H
one B visa workers. You know, one of the reasons that tech companies
really like hiring H one B visaworkers is because if your ability to stay
in the country is tied to yourwork visa, you're not going to engage

(24:53):
in like labor organization activity, ofcourse not, You're not going to be
somebody who has you know, you'renot going to be able to do that
sort of thing because you are literallyyou will have to leave the country.
You will get kicked out of thecountry if you lose your job. It's
all tied to your work visa.So I guess what I'm saying is,
you know, history is always astory of struggle, right, not evolutionary

(25:18):
change, and that struggle is Idon't want to say it's part of the
fun, but it's certainly it's partof the process. It's just it's what
we have to do. And soI think we're now, with a tech
lash and everything, we're sort ofwaking up to the fact that, oh,
yeah, the digital age is goingto involve the same sort of struggle
as the industrial age, and we'regoing to have to We're going to have
to put in the work because wearen't just going to magically end up in

(25:41):
like, you know, a computerizedutopia where we are cared for by robots
and nobody has to work. Yeah, that that actually terrifies me, the
idea of like computers taking over everything. I've been watching have you seen the
TV show Travelers? No, Okay, it's on Netflix. They're not making
any more and seven, so ifyou wanted to binge it, you could.
But basically, people from the future, it's a future is a terrible

(26:04):
dystopian wasteland, and so they sendpeople back to the past in order to
try and change it. And sothey do make changes, but the person
who is sending them person I sayit's in quotes, because the director is
a computer who is making these decisionsabout like what needs to change and who
needs to go back and what needsto happen. So like a computer is
deciding how the future needs to changefor the better. Now people have programmed

(26:29):
this computer obviously, but like likeyou can under I mean this the algorithm,
like all of it, all ofit is like none of it is
like value neutral, and essentially nothingend ends up actually changing because like it's
all going to turn to hell.It's not really uplifting. It's terrible.
Wow. Yeah, yeah, Istarted watching I guess it was on one

(26:51):
of the streaming services, and itwas like this Philip K. Dicks Electric
Dreams, you know, sort oflike oh yeah, yeah, a little
sci fi series, and I soI can't watch Black Mirror. I will
take like a leap off a tallbuilding. But I tried watching this and
it was really good. The oneI watched had like Steve Busemion and it
was really well acted and the setswere really good and everything, and it

(27:14):
was it was similarly like you know, it was just this dystopian nightmare warning
which was so close to our carrin context. It's like, I can't
watch this, This isn't this isjust a depressing you know. So um,
I've been going for sort of thelighter the lighter fare, which doesn't
necessarily show us how Utopia is afiction, but maybe gives us a little

(27:37):
bit of I don't know, ideasabout how we can be more imaginative about
problem solving. And sometimes also Ijust watched trash. Yeah sure, speaking
of like dystopian visions of what SiliconValley looks like. Have you seen Silicon
Valley the TV show? I havenot. I M yeah, you don't
want to watch that, okay,okay, yeah, you would make you

(27:57):
so angry? Oh man. Yeah. People always ask me like, hey,
do you watch The Bletchly Circle ordo you watch this or that show
that's really close to your work?And I'm like no, and I never
will because for me that would belike work. You know, yes,
yeah, no, I feel likeSilicon Valley is. I mean, it's
a comedy obviously, but it's sorepresentative of everything that's kind of wrong with

(28:22):
Silicon Valley that it makes me it'sreally cringe worthy and makes me kind of
angry sometimes. Oh man, thatis rough. But I will say just
to kind of like, um,make things maybe a little less depressing.
Most of the people that I know, and of course obviously this is a
like a self selecting group, butmost of the people I know, and
I do know a lot of folkswho work in tech, they are you

(28:45):
know, there there are men andwomen and non binary people. What I
was going to say is there aremen on the inside, you know,
like they are they have the samevalues that I think a lot of folks
outside of tech making the critiques do. And it's it's just we all get
trapped by these systems, right like, whether we're on the tenure track or

(29:07):
an adjunct or an H one Bv's a worker or somebody who's working in
tech, we get trapped by thesesystems, and in order to function,
we have to go along with themto a certain extent. And then we
also in order not to lose oursouls. We have to resist them.
So I'm skeptical but somewhat hopeful thatwe are we are heading into a period

(29:30):
where we're going to actually try toaddress some of these big problems. That's
a that's a good place to end. Actually that like there are people on
the inside who are resisting. Theyare like persisting in their desire to make
tech a better place, a moreinclusive place, and hopefully we can learn
from the past and make the futureof like computing and technology the technology space

(29:52):
better for all people and not justwhite dude tech growth. I hope,
so, I hope so cool.Well, thank you you so much for
joining me in this conversation. Thanksfor having me. Yeah, everybody should
read your book and I will postthe links to all of the books that
you mentioned in the show notes forthe episodes. Awesome. Thanks And if

(30:14):
you want to hit me up online, I am pretty active on Twitter at
at hist of Tech and yeah,feel free to say hi by email or
online. Awesome, Thank you somuch. Thanks, thank you for listening
to she who Persisted the Nasty podcast. If you want to reach out to
us on social media, you canreach us on our Facebook page. She

(30:37):
Who Persisted The Nasty Podcast, theFacebook discussion group per Sisters, the She
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You can always find us on ourwebsite She Who Persisted dot com. Thanks

(31:03):
for listening. We hope you'll continueto join us in thinking about ways that
you can fight the patriarchy, resistand persist, Stay nasty. Bye.