compassion for the computer scientists
reflections on being ‘just a girl’ in a world of incels
new york, july 2024
Note: everything in this article is my own personal opinion, and doesn’t reflect the perspective of any of my former, current, or future employers! I’m just a girl writing about the world.
a pretty long but relevant foreword on the need for humans in technology
This piece is the first in a series of reflections on what I’ve learnt so far from studying and working on ‘human-centred’ algorithm development. My thesis across these narratives will probably become evident: that we are facing an urgent need for human-centred engineering, embedded into education, the way we design and evaluate algorithms, and within the ethos of the tech industry itself. As evidenced by initiatives like the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence’s Decolonizing AI project, one of the greatest limitations of today’s technological ecosystem is that it was imagined by predominantly male engineers who assumed that they understood the problems faced by their users better than anyone else (like say, a social scientist.)
Throughout the early 2010s, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg famously reiterated that his social network “wasn’t a media company.” As a helpful consequence, this meant that his engineers could claim to be simply responsible for building a platform to distribute social content — but not for what was published there, or how it might influence society. It was only years later that whistleblower Frances Haugen was able to reveal how many intentional decisions Facebook’s engineers made to build algorithms that they knew could harm their teenage users.
In today’s era of AI, it’s finally become clear to the everyday consumer how influential the algorithms around us are: we game the TikTok For You Page, tune our Netflix recommendations, train our IG Feeds. What the consumer often forgets is that there are engineers like myself actively tuning the dials behind these predictive devices.
As I’ve built my early career working on recommendation and personalization algorithms, I’ve been faced with nebulous dilemmas about where we draw the line on our moral responsibilities as software engineers. At the same time, the lessons I’ve arrived at are entangled with my emotions about the way I had to learn them, and so this article is also a ruminary on how it’s felt to be a woman in computer science who loves who she is outside of the industry, but had to give some of it up to assert my place here.
To be clear, I love my work as a software engineer. I would just like to change how we learn how to become one.
it starts with the state of the cs education
As I entered my last fall at the University of Waterloo, with a postgrad job lined up and only two CS credits left to earn, I found myself faced with a previously unfathomable scenario: the luxury of choice. How exactly should I spend this last year before the rest of my life? And why hadn’t I thought about what I wanted from my education earlier?
For context, Waterloo students are trained from day one to take the “hard” route — I say “hard” because it’s all about the ‘tangible’ technical skills at this school — disciplines like math, programming, physics, complemented by LeetCode prep and resume reviews in your free time. Although these disciplines are necessary to become an excellent computer scientist, it’s my opinion that given the sociopolitical influence of many tech roles today, learning these topics alone isn’t sufficient.
One of the key reasons I left Waterloo’s software engineering program (for CS) was because for years, my courses were preselected for me, a blend of calculus, physics, operating systems, compilers, algorithms, and finally just one elective class of my choice (selected from a group of ‘acceptable’ non-STEM classes). This strict schedule often felt designed to leave students with little space, mental or logistical, left to learn the very social sciences that underpin the human problems we set out to solve in “revolutionising the industry.” If you scour the web for ‘bird’ classes at UW, you’ll find reviews of eng and CS students who recommend taking geography not because of their interest in geopolitics or the sciences, but because it’s the easiest class to breeze through with time leftover to tackle your problem sets.
why i’ve never felt like more of a rat
It sort of makes sense then, that if this is the attitude towards humanities taught to CS students, that the very same engineers will grow up to proclaim that they were ‘ill-equipped’ to predict the negative societal consequences of the products they’ve been trained to build. Is it any surprise that Facebook’s engineers were shocked to learn about their role in producing misinformation that affected global democracies, given that they may not have taken any classes on political power in the first place? Is our career really in technology alone, rather than developing compassion for the people whose lives we transform in building it?
Beyond Waterloo’s borders, on Tech Twitter and Reddit forums with names like r/cs_majors, the culture of CS education makes it an inevitability that students find themselves mindlessly in pursuit of a rigidly defined version of success. CS nerds who fought to get into this school now fight to keep good grades in courses prescribed to them and get good jobs in companies they’re taught to idolise from their first day on campus. It is an educational system that actively encourages its students to deprioritize their holistic health — mentally, physically, spiritually, creatively — all in search of an external validation they might feel upon matching with a prestigious company, or at the very least, to avoid the public shame of admitting they’ve failed a tough CS course.
In the midst of all this hard work, we somehow fail to acquire the one critical skill I’ve noticed my peers in liberal arts degrees can wield with ease — the ability to question. To wonder, why are we running this race? Who are we running it for?
It makes sense, then, that I struggled when faced with any decision more abstract than what company I’d like to work for. Although I had the sense that I wanted more from my education, I struggled to envision what else I might pursue, if not recruiting or locking myself in a sweaty lab in MC to take the hardest CS class possible. I had never really contemplated any other way my university experience could unfold.
When I eventually decided to fill my time with an intro to cognitive science course last fall, it was the first time in four years I had written an argumentative paper that required research from the university library. I learned about Plato’s Forms — about philosophical searches for meaning and ambiguous definitions of humanity that stood in stark contrast to the objective laws we aspire to discover in engineering. My creative and curious brain felt nourished in a way it had never been before. I realised how little I had learned about society’s complexities, its contours and beauty. How the limited and simplistic worldview I almost left university with could easily become entrenched in the way I’d build my postgrad career — and design sociotechnical software systems, even… The fact is that when taken at its face value, the practice of studying CS at Waterloo rarely allows you the headspace you need to learn anything else about the world.
the grave reality of a future designed by “incels”
Given this culture, it’s no surprise that engineers can be some of the most socially awkward people you’ll meet in industry. I genuinely didn’t know what an incel was before my time at Waterloo, so for readers who were unaware like myself before studying CS, the term incel stands for “Involuntarily Celibate,” a premise I find confusing because the men who call themselves this are both simultaneously proud of the label and the indulgent objectification and misogyny it allows them, while still lamenting the fact that can’t seem to get laid as much as they believe they deserve to. If you’re still confused, a quick Google search will uncover many a Reddit thread exemplifying the CS incel. Although it’s true that most students at UW and other programs don’t fit this extreme persona, it would be wrong to argue that Waterloo doesn’t provide a safe haven for those who want to normalise the mindset.
In my second year of SE, I was followed home from class by a younger CS student (he was taking third year software classes to graduate early) whom I’d noticed picking up on a question I’d asked in lecture. Most women in tech know the feeling, of raising your hand to ask a question and feeling 70 male heads turn your way, examining you and your body and its very lack of normalcy in the Big Data Lecture Hall, a place they had proclaimed to be their safe space.
After class, this student followed me out the door, caught my eye, and held my gaze in an uncomfortable manner that made me feel like I was being studied, rather than considered. He asked me what I thought about ‘The Arts’ — he’d never learned about them himself, but figured I seemed the type to. (I have red hair and a nose piercing, and take pride in my New York-esque street style). He wanted me to advise him on how he might go about building an AI girlfriend, one of his Ultimate Goals in learning computer science. Of course. I wish I could say this experience was an exaggeration or outlier, but rather, it often feels like the reality of the future of tech. After all, isn’t the somewhat insidious desire to build a submissive but smart enough life companion with a sultry voice like Scarlet Johanssen in the movie Her the true vision of our most popular tech thought leaders?
During my time at Waterloo, it became very clear to me that the dominant viewpoint it emboldened was that to be a woman in technology is to perform at the behest of men. For a long time, the header of the Waterloo subreddit was a collection of six busty anime women, to represent each of the school’s faculties (see: https://www.reddit.com/r/uwaterloo/comments/hhguxr/day_5_of_drawing_every_faculty_an_anime_girl/ because it feels too gross for me to include any of those images in an article I’ve written). The link above takes you down a strange rabbithole of sexualized depictions of women, posted to the same Reddit community that students unfortunately have to access to see more useful Waterloo content like class and professor recommendations. The sentiments of this online community reflects how I often felt on campus.
Women are: curiosities, enigmas, emotional, DEI spot-fillers. Their value is attacked, and not just emotionally. In 2023, a professor and two students in a gender studies class on campus were brutally stabbed in a hate-motivated attack in Hagey Hall, one of our arts buildings. It was a violent and physical manifestation of all the ways in which men at this institution resent other genders and the spaces that should make them feel safe to express their beliefs.
In my last months at the school, a self-published philosophy ‘paper’ began circulating around the schools’ Mechatronics department, written by the professor of one of their popular upper-year algorithms courses. It was titled “On the Challenges of Dating and Marriage in the New Generations,” and among its less stomach-churning suggestions were ideas that professors dating students should be normalised, that “girls” make “strange excuses for rejection” and feminism is “getting out of control.” Although the PDF copy of this paper has been wiped online and the professor fired from both Waterloo and Guelph, I can still clearly remember the sick feeling in my stomach as my roommates and I read through the paper in March with the sense that finally, we had something concrete to point to when asked about what it was like to be a woman in Waterloo Engineering. The incel personified.
How are we as women supposed to feel safe sharing our perspective when men in positions of power view us this way?
the worst way to train our best hope for the future
As many at Waterloo can tell you, the most common and instant rebuttal to cases of sexism like these (which happen so often one might start to believe they’re normal, even though they’re not) is that they reflect “fringe views.” Not every man in tech is an incel who believes chatbots will make better partners than women.
But when you think about an AI agent, what tone of voice do you hear? Why is it that for years, the first training image used for teaching computer vision to college students was an almost naked woman’s body, pulled without her consent from a Playboy spread? And how is it possible that even after Elon Musk has been exposed for convincing his female employees — from interns to executives — that it would be a “privilege” to bear his children, my peers at Tesla would still fanboy over a selfie with him? Tech bro culture exists for a reason — because baddies would be bad for the brand of CS they love so much.
Although the sentiment is usually left unspoken, this one professor’s perception of girls and their sexual influence on boys (his choice of descriptors) reflects the opinions of entire underground communities within the tech industry, hidden in Discord channels and murky subreddits, that wish women in the real world would stay within the mental confines of what they think a girl should be. (Wouldn’t it be nice if they could build one themselves?)
At the same time, Waterloo continues to produce Canada’s highest number of unicorn founders, encouraging the aforementioned mindset that its students are in fact primed to build world-changing technologies upon graduation. This is dangerous. While I don’t deny that the University does foster an entrepreneurial environment — recently, clubs like Socratica have taken steps towards a less-techy culture of creation — there are still gaps in our collective ability to empathize with the humans using the products we build. This generation of coders was raised to idolize the black hoodie ‘hacker’ fighting back at the institution — popularized through collegiate lore of Zuckerberg rising to fame from his humble beginnings hacking Harvard to build facesmash.com and rank the hotness of his fellow classmates. It’s their intentional choice to let the faces he may have exploited to do so remain a mystery.
I feel that the human cost of technological progress starts here, with the loss of personhood for minority students who don’t fit the traditional stereotype of “software engineer.”
I recently attended a talk by Hannah Rose Kirk from the Oxford Internet Institute on her work building PRISM, a new dataset that contains LLM preference data collected with diversity in mind. The crux of their approach is that alignment can never be binary — each culture has its own values, and to build a truly “general” intelligence would require a multicultural, interdisciplinary effort to collect human knowledge and organize it in a way that makes sense to both the social and computer scientists. The need for interdisciplinary knowledge is exactly why I tried to curate my degree to learn as much as I could about responsibly building technology while studying CS — in my next article, I’ll share the culmination of those efforts and how you too, could hack your university degree to become the type of engineer that embeds empathy into their work.
At the same time, a culture shift is critical to the state of engineering overall. Through my experiences at Waterloo, I started to realize how integral a safe environment to express oneself in is to the very act of believing that such a responsible technology may actually get built. By failing to encourage diverse perspectives of humanity, we are choosing to ignore the dangerous biases we might embed into the technologies that shape our world — particularly as we start to define how to align these tools with “human values.”
Ultimately, my hope is that when history looks back on engineers from this era, it sees us as guardians of knowledge, that spun together each vibrant and unique thread of humanity into a story that reflects the world as a whole, becoming more than just the reductive narrative of the Silicon Valley Tech Bro you may be familiar with today. I hope to see you there.
****
Thank you for reading! I’m looking forward to sharing a part two of this article, which includes my learnings from a journey to leveraging the more positive aspects of a Waterloo degree to learn about human-centred AI (I promise I did enjoy my degree). The school can absolutely give you all the knowledge you’ve ever wanted, if you know how to ask for it — so stay tuned!
