Its a Guy Thing Why Are There So Few Female Hackers?

Girl hackers are as rare as Linux code in a Windows factory. (John Ueland) By Dianne Lynch Special to ABCNEWS.com

We have met the enemy, and he is ... well, just that: a he. In the wake of recent denial-of-service attacks on some of the Webs largest e-commerce sites, the culprits have been called everything from packet monkeys to digital outlaws. But nobody is calling them anything but male. In fact, ask anybody who purports to know  from national geek expert Jon Katz to MIT cyber-researcher Sherry Turkle to Michael Stillwell, author of A Portrait of J. Random Hacker  and its unanimous: hackers are male. Sophomorically, solipsistically, and scruffily male. So when the FBI finally tags that team of computer crackers, we can expect to find a group of brash, brainy boys  adolescents who in pre-digital days would have been out spray-painting buildings and breaking windows. Just for kicks. Geeks Its a testosterone problem, says Katz. When the dust settles and the FBI grabs them, youre going to find a bunch of misguided kids who were either trying to make some vaguely defined political point about corporations online, or who were just having fun, he says. Katz, whose new book Geeks looks at tech culture through the eyes of two young Idahoan adolescents, says cracking is all about hostility and aggression. Thats why girl hackers are as rare as Linux code in a Windows factory. Women are not into hacking for the same general reason that women are not interested in vandalizing stop signs and cars, Katz says. Theyre not as drawn to the hostile elements of cyberspace as men are. Not that they couldnt be. This isnt about competence, Katz hastens to add. Women have the brains and the skills to hack but theyre more interested in building communities, and in more creative things, like Web design.

Hey, Jude  Imagine! Tell it to Jude Milhon, aka St. Jude, one of the Webs best-known female hackers. Her definition of hacking doesnt include the kind of packet monkeys  crackers who flood a site with packets of information  who overwhelmed Yahoo!, Buy.com, eBay, Amazon.com and CNN.com this month. She talks instead of bravura intellection, inventing algorithms, computer code that is elegant, graceful and just plain ol fun. Hackers are the elite corps of computer designers and programmers. They like to see themselves as the wizards and warriors of tech, she writes in Mondo 2000, a book on cyberpunk culture. And in the off-hours, they can turn their ingenuity to sparring with enemies on the Nets, or to the midnight stroll through systems you should not be able to enter, were you not so very clever. Its a high-stress life, but it can be amazing fun. Imagine being paid  well-paid  to play forever with the toys you love. Imagine. Just imagine. And while youre at it, imagine a world in which testosterone was no longer a prerequisite of membership in any elite corps of computer designers and programmers. Imagine a world in which equal numbers of men and women were adept at tapping the art, elegance and power of technology.

Boys Club Hackerdom  with all its failings and foibles, eccentricities and extremism  is just a techno-nerd boys club. Its membership is male not because mens biological urges drive them to sit in front of a computer screen and wangle their way through firewalls. Its membership is male because women dont possess the technological savvy and depth that are the price of admission. And were not getting any closer. A new study by the U.S. Department of Commerce reports that only 9 percent of engineers, 26.9 percent of systems analysts and computer scientists, and 28.5 percent of computer programmers are women In 1984, 37 percent of computer science degrees went to women; by 1998, that number was 16 percent.

It Pays to Play? And studies show that women working in IT now make 72 cents on the dollar when compared to their male counterparts. In the mainstream, above-ground, work-a-day world of high technology, women are becoming less visible rather than more so. Little wonder that theyre downright invisible in the elite band of digital cowboys who call themselves hackers. Call it a testosterone problem. Call it a technology problem. Call it an economic, social, political, its-those-darned-whining-feminists-again problem. But while were pontificating and proselytizing about hacker danger and its threat to our national security and American way of life, lets also remember that those hackers are bound to be boys. Sophomoric, solipsistic, and scruffy. Technologically skilled, savvy, and successful boys

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/tech/WiredWomen/wiredwomen.html

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), February 23, 2000

Answers

Hey babe - I can earn the bacon, bring it home, and fry it up in a pan. Then I'll put the kids to bed, and enter the shadowy world of... well, you know.

I was once a nice girl hacker. It was 100% percent related to "intelligent and creative problem solving" for me. That's it. Unlike my day job, where everybody saw that I was female and judged accordingly, "blind" computer networks were the great equalizer. May the best hack win. No gender involved.

Maybe the female brain knows how to leave less e-footprints, ya think?

This guy needs to dig a little deeper, IMHO.

-- Jen Bunker (jen@bunkergroup.com), February 23, 2000.