Rewriting Tech’s mythical narrative! Revealing new talents…
A frank, self-critical look at Tech’s pitfalls - and a few tips to tackle some major problems: the weight of collective unconscious in Tech’s mythical story, the difficulty in developing new talent from diverse backgrounds and the near-absence of women.
MOVING BEYOND RHETORIC… TOWARD CONCRETE ACTION!
In 2023, hiring developers remains challenging. This job is booming, profiles are in high demand and the market still struggles to match supply with demand.
Moreover, the field has yet to inspire vocations among more atypical backgrounds and the female population remains underrepresented.
If we want to change this situation - which hurts businesses and society - we must move past attempts to fix the digital problem at school purely by focusing on technology: for example, just loading up middle schools and high schools with gadgets.
Let’s consider other approaches - like teaching “language skills” to code, and thereby inspiring budding developers in the process…
Questions abound: how do we teach programming? Who does the teaching? How do we spark career interest? These are far more relevant issues that we need to address now.
CHANGING OUR PERSPECTIVE… TO DISCOVER AND REVEAL NEW TALENTS
This is ultimately about humans - their biases, identification needs, individual and collective imaginations, representations, and projections…
It seems logical, then, to bring in the social sciences and humanities: history, sociology, psychology, anthropology, ethnology. The idea is to bring in more unconventional profiles, to tap different learning and life journeys and thereby grow a new generation of developers.
One example is the work of Georges Balandier, who introduced the concept of “techno-imaginary” (the importance of machines in our contemporary imagination, shaped by mythical stories), and of Pascal Plantard - a digital anthropology researcher at Rennes 2 University (and, by the way, let’s not just focus on Paris for our reflections).
Plantard reminds us that techno-imaginaries form the foundational material of representations, fueling and guiding digital practices.
Studying this could help us figure out why young women self-censor. And we can move past “geek shut-in” clichés - because IT projects are often team efforts.
Indeed, research on techno-centrism encourages us to analyze these imaginary narratives, mostly shaped by Anglo-Saxon, male-dominated references. Part of our answer may lie there…
DRAWING ON REALITY… AND GIVING WOMEN THE PLACE THEY DESERVE…
Yet France - and other countries - boast numerous historical success stories and entrepreneurial models in research and industry that could match any Anglo-Saxon achievements (or those of Asia).
Take, for instance, the French company Jeulin, which, from the mid-1980s onward, offered educational solutions featuring touchscreens and robots for teaching computer science. Pascal Plantard highlights how this is rarely remembered.
Somehow, mainstream history remembers only the “great male programmers.” But if we go all the way back to the 1800s, we find Ada Lovelace - Lord Byron’s daughter and a friend of Charles Babbage - who invented the world’s first theoretical software algorithm!
Closer to our time, at Bletchley Park during WWII, pioneering women programmers cracked German codes. Alan Turing wasn’t alone - but he is the one widely featured in a movie…
And Margaret Hamilton was a key figure in the Apollo program, heading the flight software team. The term “software engineering” is hers. We might also mention African American women mathematicians in the US space program, as well as Grace Hopper, who - holding a Ph.D. in math - helped create COBOL in 1959.
…TO REWRITE TECH’S MYTHICAL NARRATIVES!
Though these pioneers were long overshadowed, the tide is gradually turning. That momentum is rewriting the grand mythical narratives and reshaping how we view both individual imagination and collective imagery in tech.
We should keep telling these big stories, much like France did with space exploration via Thomas Pesquet (another man!) and Claudie Haigneré - the first French woman in space - so young women no longer feel excluded from the digital universe.
WORKING LONG-TERM ON THE “EDUCATION, SOCIETY, RECRUITMENT” TRIPTYCH
Along with high-level changes, we must also tackle things at the grassroots. Specifically, our recruitment processes must be as open as possible: engineering schools, universities, short-track degrees like BTS…
The same goes for programming languages and Linux-type environments. That’s how we’ll find “tinkerers,” in the anthropological sense, where innovation is a process of borrowing, modifying or newly recombining existing elements, as paleoanthropologist Pascal Picq suggests.
Finally, let’s revisit how we engage with engineering schools, where faculty often fail to consider industrial concerns.
You see, shaking up the “education-society-recruitment” trio will take a major and extended effort to spark interest in every digital job (not just whatever’s hot right now).
In the end, the best way to train - and hire - more developers and especially women in this field might just be perseverance: picking up the pilgrim’s staff to inform and persuade countless people, for many (more) years to come!
Check out ACT-ON TECHNOLOGY job openings.
Got a project? Contact us.
