At the Tribeca Film Festival Daring Women Summit last week, Julie Ann Crommett made a strong case for broader representation in pop culture. In a talk titled “Cracking the Code “ Hollywood, Diversity, and Computer Science,” the Entertainment Industry Educator in Chief of Google opened by displaying an advertisement for the HBO comedy “Silicon Valley.” “When you think of somebody in tech…do they sort of resemble the images on the screen?” she asked, “Nerdy, glasses, maybe antisocial, white, typically, and male.” Crommett described her job as challenging these preconceptions, and promoting an image of tech that more closely resembled the attractive rainbow of faces that populated the next slide. “As you can tell, there are no glasses except the sunglasses in the middle,” she quipped.
Being able to relate to the characters one sees on screen is, in and of itself, deeply meaningful. But, as Crommett rightly noted, Hollywood’s influence extends further. In an industry where women are grossly underrepresented, these dominant images play an important role. According to Google’s research, stereotypes or perception of the career accounts for 30 percent of a young woman’s decision to pursue computer science in high school or college. Hollywood portrayals of nerdy, glasses-wearing techies, Crommett argued, is dissuading girls from becoming engineers.
Indeed, diversity in popular culture is important precisely because it has the capacity to expand our vision of how the world is or ought to look, and challenge our preconceived notion of how people are or ought to be. This is certainly true when it comes to categories such as race, gender, and sexuality. But it is also true for neurological traits like introversion or personality traits like social awkwardness or “nerdiness.” Much as gender stereotypes can hold women back professionally, managers often rely upon highly flawed cues to determine which employees will make good leaders, with career advancement as much a matter of personality as of competence. In the series premiere of “Silicon Valley,” protagonist Richard acknowledges as much. “For thousands of years, guys like us have gotten the shit kicked out of us,” he says. “But now, for the first time, we are living in an era where we can be in charge and build empires.”
Given this landscape, the best thing we can teach girls isn’t how to code, but how to develop confidence that isn’t dependent on the immediate validation of their peers. Young women must learn early on not to restrict their behavior to their classmates’ views of what’s cool or feminine, and to resist pressure to abandon their interests or passions.
