Is technology sexist? ‘course not darling…

Ada Lovelace was the first female geek. Nowadays acclaimed as the equal of mathematical innovator Charles Babbage, it took decades for her to achieve recognition for writing the first algorithm for Babbage’s mechanical leviathan, the Difference Engine.

Even so, she’s hardly a household name, unlike the boys that mostly run tech businesses these days or the men who dot the history of information technology. Rather illustrating the point, the fact that it was Ada Lovelace Day last week passed me by, but then I guess I’m not really the target market.

The reason for coming upon this Google-inspired flight of fancy was my ruminating on Barista Uno’s recent post on the Marine Café blog bemoaning the lack of women in senior positions in the shipping industry.

There is nothing much new in that, more’s the pity, though his observations underline an acknowledged truth that shipping is as institutionally unbalanced as any other industry. Should we worry about this?

I think yes for a couple of reasons but let’s also keep some perspective. The evidence from Norway, where a quota system is in effect, suggests that legislation is not necessarily the best route to having the right people in the right jobs.

We can all think of examples where people are in roles they are unsuited to or unqualified for and there seems little point in exacerbating the problem by bringing gender into the mix.

But – and it’s a big but – to assume that the status quo is acceptable would be a massive error. There are women in shipping technology and the ones I have come across tend to be hard scientists – I’m thinking of Anne-Marie Warris and Gillian Reynolds both ex-LR and Kirsi Tikka at ABS.

Tikka is a classic example of how to succeed by trying. An egalitarian Finn and engineer by training she cheerfully admits to enjoying her stint at Turku shipyards getting her hands dirty, experience which clearly served her well in corporate life too.

Interviewed for Fairplay earlier this year, Tikka made a prescient comment that avoided all the obvious gender politics about whether the current situation is acceptable or merely unavoidable.

While no fan of positive discrimination, she suggested that if you have one gender in the room, not only are you lacking half the available brain power, but those people will naturally tend towards agreement, because at root, they approach problems in a similar way.

I was reminded of this when reading Uno’s blog and also in calling to mind presentations I have sat through on the Electronic Chart Display and Information System (ECDIS) and specifically the issue of their displays and functionality being designed, apparently in a series of vacuums. There are multiple manufacturers and no common ground – despite the Nautical Institute’s tireless calls for an ‘S-mode’ that would enable mariners to put the ECDIS into a base mode that any mariner would recognise.

I may get brickbats thrown for this, but the point I think we need to consider is that men and women approach IT in particular in quite different ways.

Given a piece of IT, men will normally never bother reading the manual but attempt to figure it out by trial and error, setting it up and making it work. Women, (well OK, my wife) take a very different approach.

She wants to understand why the designer made certain choices, how best to approach the functionality and what the limitations and strengths are. This can be quite frustrating – anyone who has tried to read a modern instruction manual knows how impenetrable they can be – and sometimes impossible. Apple devices for example have all but dispensed with instructions, so intuitive is the interface.

But the point is that unlike myself, who will fiddle and make do, her attitude to technology is actually more rigorous, more enquiring, than mine.

How much better might ECDIS for example have been, with a design team that included a broad range of input: different races and both genders that sought to prioritise the over-riding mission – safer navigation – above the desire to include fancy functionality. Yes, the technology continues to advance but in the same vacuum, or at least without any overall guiding principle other than the IMO performance standard.

There are senior female members of the major committees at IMO but I suspect that the technical decisions are made by a cohort of men, as they will tend to be those with the greater direct experience or academic specialisations.

But as last week’s BBC story reported, the lack of young women studying science and pursuing it as a career is not just a waste of talent – in the UK, it is a genuine skills gap that needs to be closed. How much better would maritime technology be if those having input to its creation represented 100% of the available talent, rather than only 49?