Wired: Hacking the Hacker Stereotypes

BERLIN, Germany – On the wall at the front of a base­ment room here, Agnes Meyder is explai­ning a compli­ca­ted diagram depic­ting enzy­mes and cell walls, an exam­ple of a cancer data­base with which she is illus­tra­ting a talk on her field of bioin­for­ma­tics.

Orga­ni­zers of this year’s CCC Haeck­sen meeting.

An hour later, and it is senten­ces that are being diagram­med, as Cäci­lia Zirn descri­bes senti­ment analy­sis is allo­wing compu­ters to learn whet­her human writings – in online revi­ews or Twit­ter posts, for exam­ple – are posi­tive or pissed-off.

These aren’t stere­oty­pi­cal subjects for hackers, but this is the Chaos Compu­ter Club (CCC) Congress and Meyer and Stilz are hackers indeed, part of a loose 22-year-old group of women within the club called the Haeck­sen (a pun on the German word for witch).

There is no imme­di­ate agenda here, other than to meet each other, share coffee and ideas, and let other women know there are others like them. But it’s clear the women in this room have been forced to think about – and perhaps defend — their iden­tity as hackers more than many of the hundreds of men sitting in front of scre­ens and keybo­ards in the confe­rence outside.

“It’s good support to get to know other people here, and to know you’re not alone, ” says Martina Bauer, a student and group orga­ni­zer who works in IT support.

Much has been writ­ten about the rela­tive scar­city of women in infor­ma­tion tech­no­logy profes­si­ons, but in hard-core hacking and free-soft­ware circles, the gender divide is even star­ker. One of the guests at the CCC meeting, a Spanish docu­men­tary film­ma­ker called Spide­ra­lex (whose Dones­tech group, for the record, uses all free soft­ware), cited a 2006 EU study that found women making up just 2 percent of the popu­la­tion in free or open-source soft­ware deve­lop­ment.

Women in the United States and other coun­tries have formed many other groups simi­lar to the Haeck­sen, some­ti­mes aimed at poin­ting out what is often uncons­ci­ous sexism in program­ming circles, and that much of the appa­rent gender diffe­ren­ces come from diffe­rent soci­a­li­za­tion and diffe­rent expe­ri­en­ces rather than native abili­ties. The same EU study showed that women had star­ted using compu­ters, and had owned their own first compu­ter, on average seve­ral years later than had men in the commu­nity.

These statis­tics are part of what promp­ted the Spanish Dones­tech group to make a docu­men­tary on women in deve­lop­ment and hacking circle, which they previ­e­wed at this at the Häck­sen meeting here.

“The initial focus is always on women not being there, ” Spide­ra­lex says. “But in our daily lives, we saw many women around us, and we wanted to unders­tand their expe­ri­ence.”

The Haeck­sen group itself is loosely orga­ni­zed around a mailing list, with meetings prima­rily at the annual CCC congress and a hand­ful of other events. There is no hierar­chy, and none the four orga­ni­zers of this year’s meeting said they have a clear idea of the current number of group members.

Like the Congress itself, the point is to talk to each other, to get ideas, to get support for each other’s projects and plans. It’s about showing the men that there are women who can sling code with the best of them, and that this is normal. It’s about making other women comfor­ta­ble being inter­es­ted in taking compu­ters apart or being deeply geeky about compli­ca­ted problems of logic or math.

But it’s also about ensu­ring that the defi­ni­tion of hacker and hacker­dom doesn’t fall into stere­otype even within the compu­ting commu­nity. Hacking and its hierar­chies can too often be viewed within the narrow defi­ni­ti­ons of code-crun­ching or IT secu­rity, the women here say, while in fact the skills and curi­o­sity of many in the scene take them ranging across a broad spec­trum of tech­ni­cal and scien­ti­fic inter­ests.

The back­ground of the four women orga­ni­zing this year’s meeting show preci­sely this diver­sity.

Meyder, the bioin­for­ma­tics student, says she got inter­es­ted in the subject watching Ghost in the Shell (“I knew I wanted to be invol­ved in that, ” she laughs), was fasci­na­ted by biology, and was convin­ced early that her blend of biology and compu­ter science and deeply compli­ca­ted math was the future. She’s studying the deve­lop­ment of new drugs at the Univer­sity of Tübin­gen, where she says there are a fair number of other women in her program.

Bauer got invol­ved with a group of male gamer friends, and lear­ned early on that she loved taking compu­ters apart and putting them back toget­her. When she went to college, it seemed natu­ral to pursue this path.

Mela­nie Stilz studied both anth­ro­po­logy and compu­ter science in univer­sity, boun­cing back and forth when she found one or the other respec­ti­vely too fuzzy or too rigid. She now works with tech­no­logy in deve­lo­ping coun­tries, and recently spent time teaching in Afgha­nis­tan – where, in Kabul, at least, she says that the gender balance in compu­ter science clas­ses was actu­ally better than in the West.

Zirn found her focus in arti­fi­cial inte­lli­gence by combi­ning an inter­est in language with a fasci­na­tion with compu­ters, and is now pursuing the senti­ment analy­sis field.

The women say their expe­ri­en­ces growing up female and techie in Germany has shown a vari­ety of expe­ri­en­ces, many of which are not discri­mi­na­tory per se, but illus­trate the some­ti­mes uncom­for­ta­ble posi­tion of falling outside some­one else’s stere­otype.

Zirn says that when meeting new male hacker acquain­tan­ces, an intense inter­view-style process often follows. “It’s like they don’t beli­eve you, they have all these ques­ti­ons, they want to know what Linux distri­bu­tion you use.”

Bauer notes that gender rela­ti­ons can be some­ti­mes be coun­te­rin­tui­tive. When she is the only women with a group of men, they treat her as a friend and fellow hacker, she says. But when anot­her woman joins, even a skilled program­mer, the atmosp­here often swit­ches to a more stere­oty­pi­cal male-female dyna­mic.

The four orga­ni­zers say the number of women atten­ding the Haeck­sen events, and the CCC as a whole, has risen in the last seve­ral years, although because the overall congress atten­dance figu­res have also gone up, it’s diffi­cult to say whet­her the rela­tive percen­ta­ges have chan­ged. They say more women now appear to be atten­ding on their own, rather than in conjunc­tion with a boyfri­end or other male friends, for exam­ple.

Not all women within the CCC are part of the group, or even think it is neces­sary. But the women invol­ved say it is impor­tant, to help both women and men unders­tand that women are an impor­tant and growing part of the scene.

“The Congress helps everyone get over stere­oty­pes, ” says Stilz. “I think it defi­ni­tely helps when people haven’t had much contact with female hackers before.”