One of my friends advised me to walk smart. He told me that Americans think we are very humble and not smart enough to handle a crisis. He said that the way we walk in the company corridors itself portrays the shabbiness of Indians …
Most of the consulting companies and personal advisers tell the Indian programmers to behave smart and bold. They also advise them to be more aggressive, positive, and outspoken, so that Americans will love them. Most Indians lack all of these good qualities. Indians are no match to Americans when it comes to the above skills.60
To anyone who has grown up within the Indian educational system, the notion that Indian techies would be regarded as “very humble” is puzzling. At my high school, we all knew which kids were preparing themselves for scientific or technical careers. We called them “Brains,” as in, “That Maitra is a huge Brain, he’ll surely get into IIT.” And the Brains were completely aware of their own superiority. Some of them had known at age ten that they were destined for one of the IITs or some similarly elite university; they knew because their families and teachers told them so, and they knew because their marks told them so. Every examination was ranked, and Maitra knew he had been “standing first” in class since first grade, just as the boy who was ranked forty-nine out of fifty knew exactly where he stood. Maitra also knew that the direction of his life could be determined by a fraction of a percentage point—if his desired college set its “cut-off marks” at 92.3 percent, a score of 92.2 percent would render him ineligible to apply. Maitra started waking up at 4:00 a.m. when he was thirteen, to attend a pre-school coaching class that prepared him to get into another nationally known coaching class that regularly placed its students into prominent universities. He knew that the names of students who got into nationally known institutions would be publicly announced along with their ranks, that pictures of the “top rankers” would appear in the newspapers, that they would be interviewed on prime-time television.
This educational process, with its obsessive emphasis on examinations and rankings, produces legions of rote learners, mark grubbers, and cheaters. It causes casualties—7,379 students committed suicide in 2010, an increase of 26 percent over 2005.61 It also produces fanatically disciplined and motivated competitors who are capable of decades of extraordinary concentration and ceaseless effort. But their competitiveness is couched in a cultural idiom that is not legible to many Americans, and therefore remains invisible or is read as general meekness or “shabbiness.”
This misreading works in both directions. I suspect I find David Barrett’s invocation of the ideal programmer as a “Lord of the Flies” who “grew up cooking squirrels over a campfire with sharpened sticks” so bizarre because my own cultural models of pioneering knowledge production come from the Indian scientists and technologists my classmates and I idolized during my childhood: J. C. Bose, S. Chandrasekhar, Homi J. Bhabha, Vikram Sarabhai. Whatever their actual caste or religion or beliefs may have been, these men seemed to embody Brahminical rectitude and austerity; they may have been as arrogant and ruthless and sexist as the American warrior-kings of software, but I’m completely unable to recast these particular Indians as gore-flecked paladins. In my mind, they are indubitably pandits, gyaanis, vidvaans, aalims, daanishmands, seekers after eternal knowledge and therefore eternal students; they are all brain, their brawn is irrelevant. Their affect is rabbinical, detached from the humdrum worries of the everyday world. A famous verse describes the five qualities of the ideal scholar: “Far-seeing as the crow; concentrated as the stalking crane; light-sleeping as the hound; in control of the appetites; unencumbered by desires or a household.”
But within the mythologies of American nationhood and selfhood, from which Nick Carter the Killmaster and his low-yield nuclear grenade were born, innovation is conquest, and great programming makes “killer apps.” Californian cowboys range over the frontiers of knowledge, triumphing over the natural environment and its native denizens because of their toughness and tough-mindedness, their practicality, and their ability to blow away anything or anyone who stands in their path. Manifest destiny—with its cast of robber barons, tragically doomed natives, laboring Asians and African Americans, grizzled soldiers, and Lone Rangers—still casts its spell over the boardrooms and universities of America, and so the practitioners of some of the most nerdy professions in history (media-making; software-making; lending and borrowing money) develop codes of masculinity that allow them to “walk smart.”
In September 2011, the programmer Rob Spectre gave a presentation at a conference entirely in character as Chad the Brogrammer, wearing the standard fraternity-bro uniform of popped pink collar and dark glasses. A video of the presentation quickly went viral, and Spectre’s lines were suddenly all over the blogosphere: “In the immortal words of Brosef Stalin, ‘Dude, I’m way too faded to build this [difficult low-level] shiz. Imma have some other broheims do the grunge work. Totes magotes.’”62 Spectre was joking, but he had touched on a trend that many had noticed: “Tech’s latest boom,” Businessweek observed in 2012, “has generated a new, more testosterone-fueled breed of coder,” such as Danilo Stern-Sapad, a twenty-five-year-old who doesn’t like being called a geek, who “wears sunglasses and blasts 2Pac while programming,” who proudly reports that “we got invited to a party in Malibu where there were naked women in the hot tub. We’re the cool programmers.”63 So, in addition to the nerd machismo of the programmers and the buccaneer strutting of the venture capitalists, there is also now the frat-bro aggressiveness of young men who get into coding because it’s a cool-dude way to make stacks of cash.
In a 2012 Globe and Mail story about Canadian programmers in Silicon Valley, Alec Scott quotes a high-level female Canadian executive who’s worked with many of the top companies as saying:
People ask me, would you encourage your daughter to follow you into tech. My answer is no frickin’ way. I would tell a woman going in, you’re going to be 40 years old pitching a VC in the Valley, and he’s going to pinch your bum. I had that happen to me! … I got demoted [at a tech company] when I got pregnant. We’re not making progress in tech. If anything, it’s going the other way.64
The annual Global Gender Gap Report 2012, released by the World Economic Forum, ranks women’s status in countries around the world in four key areas: economic participation and opportunity; educational attainment; health and survival; and political empowerment. The report ranks the United States at 22 out of the 135 countries surveyed. India comes in at a dismal 105.65 Yet, according to some accounts, the proportion of programmers in India who are women may be higher—at least 30 percent—than America’s 21.1 percent.66 This might be dismissed as an anomaly were it not for other trends: the proportion of undergraduate computer-science degrees awarded to women in the US has declined from 37 percent in 1984 to 18 percent in 2010. The number of female freshmen who thought they might major in computer science has fallen steadily, from 4.1 percent in 1982 to 1.5 percent in 1999, and to 0.3 percent in 2009.67
Meanwhile, in India, the trend has gone in the opposite direction. Until the mid-eighties, according to researcher Roli Varma, the number of women engineers was “negligible.”68 But in 2003, 32 percent of the Bachelor of Engineering degrees in computer science and 55 percent of the Bachelor of Science degrees in computer science were awarded to women. I’ve been told, anecdotally, that these percentages have risen since. Varma notes that Indian women took to computer science in spite of lack of early exposure; many Indian families cannot afford computers, and before opting for formal instruction, many of her respondents had only ever used computers in Internet cafés.
The young Indian women, though, came to computing with a confidence in their logical abilities which has been nurtured in their schools and homes. A study
showed that almost all female students [of computer science] interviewed asserted that mathematics was their strongest subject in high school, followed by physics. A little over half of the students also believed that their high school and intermediate col
lege did not prepare them “well” for the study of CS at the university level, and another one-third felt “partially” prepared. These female students qualified their responses by stating that their schools either did not expose them to computers or did not teach details, applications, and basic languages of CS. However, they were extremely confident about their mathematical skills and, thus, their logical thinking and analytical abilities. Therefore, even though they found CS a hard, demanding, technical field, female students felt their mathematical training enabled them to do well in CS at the university level … no one ever considered changing their field from CS to something else due to difficulties.69
The Indian women programmers’ notions about the characteristics displayed by a typical programmer were very different from those reported in the US, where “geeks/hackers/nerds [were thought to be] predominantly White males, fascinated with technology, [who] sit in front of the computer all day and sleep near it.”70 In India, however, the study
showed that most female students interviewed believed that the computing field is changing from being dominated by men to increasingly being penetrated by women. Female students believed that the typical computing culture consists of dedicated, hardworking, intelligent, meticulous, and smart students … They help those needing assistance and it is pleasant to be around them. They are active in social and cultural events held at their universities, as well as participate in sports. Most importantly, female students believed CS to be a field in which women could excel. According to them, economic rewards for a woman with a CS degree are much higher than with a degree in other [Science and Engineering] fields. Women who study CS are well respected by faculty and peers in the educational arena and by family members, friends, and neighbors in the social arena.71
Parents want their daughters to work in computing in particular and scientific disciplines in general, and support and cajole and push toward this end.
In India, the logical nature of work in computing, its abstraction and headiness, is precisely what makes the field a kind of haven from all the indignities and horrific cruelties that subcontinental culture inflicts on women elsewhere:
For Indian women, being indoors in an office in front of a computer means they are protected from the outside environment, which is seen as unfriendly to women. Construction sites and factories are the work sites where a degree in other engineering fields, such as mechanical or civil, are seen as more suited for men.72
Sexism of the most ugly and violent kind exists in the environments that these women must negotiate away from the computer, but knowledge itself is not gendered as male:
[Indian] women do not feel that teachers neglect them in mathematics and computing classes. This is one of the reasons that these fields do not emerge as a male domain. From early on, female students are taught to invest in hard work, which is seen to solve scientific and technical problems and, thus, a requirement to succeed in life.73
The outlook for these Indian women is not altogether rosy, however. Alok Aggarwal is co-founder and chairman of Evalueserve India, a research and analytics company that employs approximately 2,000 people, out of which 30 percent are women. He told me:
We believe that currently in most IT companies (IBM India, Accenture India, Infosys, Wipro, TCS, HCL, Cognizant, iGate, etc.), the percentage of women is also 30% [in the category of] “computer programmers.” However, unfortunately, at the managerial level, both within our company, Evalueserve, and the other IT companies mentioned above, the percentage of women managers drops to approximately 10%.74
In terms of the retention of employees, Aggarwal adds, “Among new joinees, 35% are women but within five years, this number comes down to 25% (because some of the women who get married leave Evalueserve India or the work-force altogether—at least on a temporary basis).”75 Cultural narratives about domesticity, children, and the exercise of power outside the home are still very much in place.
Still, research in countries as varied as Iran, Hong Kong, Mauritius, Taiwan, and Malaysia has yielded results consistent with those found in studies in India, showing that there is nothing about the field of computing that makes it inherently male. Varma’s conclusion is blunt: “The gender imbalance in the United States seems to be specific to the country; it is not a universal phenomenon, as it has been presented in the scholarly literature.”76
In her book Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference, Cordelia Fine observes that “in prosperous countries it is not economic prosperity that tracks sex segregation in degree choices, but differences in adolescent boys’ and girls’ attitudes toward math and science. In richer countries, the greater the difference between boys’ and girls’ interest in science and math, the greater the sex segregation.”77
Fine also cites studies of the participation of American girls in the prestigious International Math Olympiad (IMO), where profoundly gifted mathematical whiz kids spend nine hours solving extremely difficult problems:
If you’re Hispanic, African American, or Native American, it matters not whether you have two X chromosomes or one—you might as well give up now on any dreams of sweating for nine hours over some proofs. Then within girls, interesting patterns emerge. Asian American girls are not underrepresented, relative to their numbers in the population. But that doesn’t mean that it’s even simply a white girl problem. Non-Hispanic white girls born in North America are sorely underrepresented: there are about twenty times fewer of them on IMO teams than you’d expect based on their numbers in the population, and they virtually never attend the highly selective MOSP [Mathematical Olympiad Summer Program]. But this isn’t the case for non-Hispanic white girls who were born in Europe, immigrants from countries like Romania, Russia, and the Ukraine, who manage on the whole to keep their end up when it comes to participating in these prestigious competitions and programs. The success of this group of women continues into their careers. These women are a hundred times more likely to make it into the math faculty of Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, or University of California—Berkeley than their native-born white counterparts. They do every bit as well as white males, relative to their numbers in the population.78
A hundred times more likely—emphasis doubly mine and in the original—would seem to indicate that within the American idiom of personhood, power, desire, and meaning, there is a figuring of mathematics as male, something that “Non-Hispanic white girls” should keep away from. Something similar seems to be true of programming in America, which is marked by a particular machismo that idealizes un-socialized, high-school-outcast geekery; coding excellence earned through solitary, singular focus; and adult programmer-bro success signaled by aggression.
So within this American landscape, on this new frontier, how do those who are not “cool” (or belong to the wrong gender) succeed? N. Sivakumar, the immigrant programmer who was warned about shabbiness, tried to learn coolitude: “All right, I am going to walk straight and smart as of tomorrow!” But his colleagues now teased him for walking like “President Bush,” and so he decided, “I better be me!”79 But being himself and succeeding required that he work very, very hard, and adopt certain strategies:
Indians learn for survival whereas most Americans tend to choose their career for passion. Indians learn everything …
Indian programmers have a habit of saying “yes” to everything. Again, it’s all about survival. They will say “Yes” to move to North Dakota tomorrow. Say “Yes” to work for someone who used to work for him. “Yes” to long hours. “Yes” to program in a completely new language (which they will starve to learn within days) …
Indian programmers are also tolerant enough to do the “shit” work. That is: going through somebody else’s code. This is one of the toughest challenges for any programmer …
Almost all the so-called “software maintenance” projects … were handled by Indian programmers …
This is what Indian programmers do and are patient enough to handle. Patience—a uniq
ue quality of Indians.80
N. Sivakumar is careful to qualify his assertions; he’s not saying that every Indian programmer is preternaturally patient and a paragon of hard work: “My comparisons … always focus on the average programmer … There will always be a good and a bad and an ugly in every bunch.” He adds:
An Indian programmer will most probably stop learning once he gets a job … Indian programmers are least likely to learn something new on their own—in their field of interest—to enhance their knowledge if not required. In other words, they lack initiative once they are settled and once they feel safe. 81
And finally:
Average American programmers are more innovative than their counterparts. I know my Indian and Chinese friends will disagree with me on this, but this is the truth. Although an average American programmer’s knowledge is limited to a certain technology or a programming language, they master the hell out of that, and have a higher probability of innovating something new in their area. Average Indian and Chinese programmers, on the other hand, tend to be all over the place and are least likely to innovate something new in their specific area.82
In reference to the success of Indians in Silicon Valley, the tech entrepreneur and academic Vivek Wadhwa credits efficient and ceaseless networking:
The first few [company founders] who cracked the glass ceiling had open discussions about the hurdles they had faced.
They agreed that the key to uplifting their community, and fostering more entrepreneurship in general, was to teach and mentor the next generation of entrepreneurs.
They formed networking organizations to teach others about starting businesses, and to bring people together. These organizations helped to mobilize the information, knowhow, skill, and capital needed to start technology companies …
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