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.”