Television for the Computer Scientist

The New York Times is proposing that the way to deal with an absence of women in computer science is to make good television about computer science.

First, this is a much better idea than trying to pinkify computer science, which is all too often the response to encourage participation of women in anything.  I don't know that it will actually help with enrollment, and I'd want more than anecdote, like actual numbers, to indicate that television actually does that.   The article asserts that an interest in forensic science is due to television, but they don't have much more than anecdata to support that.  It's an interesting question, and I do think there is probably a strong correlation, but I want more evidence than supplied.

Second, just making a tv show doesn't address the very important issue of how women get treated in overwhelmingly male fields.  On a related note, what about the men?  Do we do anything to encourage men to treat women in their fields like people and with according respect?   I suspect the answer is no.  As a woman in computer science, most if not all of my complaints are met with my being told I should be more assertive.  To my knowledge, no one ever tells men to be more polite.  Unpleasant environments because of gender imbalance and sexism are a real problem in computer science that is probably a more major barrier towards more women participating than lack of compelling television about the subject.

I also have a few caveats about television show as an entertainment medium.  I don't want to see tv about hackers because invariably you see the hacker using some elaborate graphical interface. Also, for some reason, Hollywood refuses to give up its belief that it is possible to infinitely zoom in on a digital image without losing resolution, and that is just irritating.

Blatant abuse of magical imaginary computers aside, the nerdy women of Hollywood tend to be painfully shy and probably ugly (which in Hollywood terms means glasses) but learn to abandon a lot of their nerdiness with their shyness and ugliness (which means taking off their glasses) when love enters their lives. Much as I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer,  I hate that that was exactly Willow's story arc (except for the glasses part).  I liked her better as a computer nerd than as a witch. The other really irritating trope Hollywood does is the Strong Token Woman, where the one woman in the film can't be a real person because she is the only woman and therefore must be a Strong Character because that's how equal representation works, right?

Assuming we can avoid all that, I actually support this proposal, because I want computer science themed television. It is past time that we had a show about the steampunk Ada Lovelace and her mathematical battles against the forces of evil and also her mad, bad, and dangerous to know daddy, Lord Byron.  I think the people behind the film Iron-Jawed Angels (about Alice Paul and the passage of the 19th amendment) could do a great job with the women of Bletchley Park.  Mad Men is incredibly popular (I think it's boring, but that's beside the point), why can't we have an office drama set in the 50s about IBM, which was mostly staffed by women at the time?  The show can feature a Frances Allen character as she develops Fortan!

Actual vintage IBM recruiting poster.

Or have a show, still about IBM people, on the people behind IBM's sexy supercomputers Deep Blue and Watson!  Hollywood is good at office dramas.  What computer scientists do may look really boring, but Hollywood has shown it can cut out all the boring bits of police and lawyer jobs and pad it with lots of interoffice sexual tension.  See Castle and The Good Wife.

The point is, we could have better television about nerds and geeks that is not horrible sexist things about terrible people we're supposed to mock like Big Bang Theory.  I doubt this will ever actually happen, and if it happened, it would probably be just as horrible as Big Bang Theory, but a woman can dream about steampunk Lovelace coming soon to a screen near her.