Because of You

Thirty-one years ago I was teaching high performance computing to a mix of graduate and senior undergraduate students. There were twenty students in the class—nineteen men and one woman—and while there were a lot of bumps and false starts, I thought it was going pretty well.

Most people reading this are probably too young to remember, but that year was when the World-Wide Web really took off. All of a sudden people had access to a browser for the first time and were discovering that there were pages and pages and pages out there on every conceivable topic, and that if you clicked on a link you would find even more.

So one Saturday night in February I was in the computing lab trying to make sure that the assignment I was going to hand out that week actually worked, and over in the corner three young men had just discovered that there is pornography on the internet. They would click a link, wait a few seconds for an image to download, say the sorts of things young men say about such images, and then click the next link. I tuned them out, finished what I was doing, and went home.

When I got to work on Monday there was a note in my mailslot (yes, an actual piece of paper—remember, this was thirty years ago) informing me that the one female student in my class was dropping my class: in fact, she was dropping Computer Science entirely and switching to Math. I was puzzled—she had seemed to be enjoying the class—but I didn’t think any more of it.

A week and a half later, though, I bumped into her as I was walking across campus and I asked her why she had dropped out. She hemmed and hawed a bit, then said, “You probably don’t remember this, but…” and reminded me about the three young men in the CS lab. I shrugged and said something like, “Well, you know, assholes exist—sometimes we just have to put up with them,” and she said, “You don’t understand. I was the only woman in the lab that night and you were the only faculty member and you didn’t say anything to them, and I don’t think I should have to put up with you.”

I apologized, of course, and I’d like to think that I’ve done better since, but thirty-one years later, I can still sometimes hear the hurt and anger in her voice.

Time to make another cup of tea. If you came in peace, be welcome.