On the Nature of Doors

wrangletangle:

Whenever I tell people that my grandmother was one of the early cobol programmers, they seem to think it’s cool. There’s something nostalgic about looking back at the days of punchcards, right after they switched over from human computers. Something almost cowboy-mythic about it.

What people miss is that they think my grandmother was a female pioneer in the field. She wasn’t. She was something like the exact opposite, and I want to tell you why.

Human computers in the US were women, many of them women of color. It was an undervalued job that didn’t require a degree, the way engineering did at that point. From the way my grandmother tells it, it was similar to the way women did most of the basic work in telegraph companies, and later acted as telephone operators. (My grandmother also worked for the telegraph, on roller skates, as her first job out of business/secretarial school. But that’s a story for another day.)

Early computer programmers were also often women. My grandmother had female managers. What my grandmother didn’t have many of were female colleagues in her cohort. In fact, women were rapidly dwindling in a field once dominated by them. Why? It moved from being relatively self-taught to requiring a college course, and it was rising in both prominence and pay, so men were joining up. My grandmother was the only woman in her cohort at the technical school she attended.

Now, my grandmother is not a completely reliable narrator when it comes to how other people treat her. “Prickly” is a word that comes to mind. “Self-centered” has been slung around. So perhaps her female managers were not quite so unhelpful and frankly harsh on the ladies under them as she says, except. Except.

The few other women coming in just ahead or behind my grandmother were also not promoted. Even by female managers, who had the power to promote them. Instead, men were promoted. And a couple decades later, when my grandmother retired, there were almost no female managers anymore. In fact, there were almost no female programmers or code reviewers in her division at a rather large company.

My reason for telling this story is that this was the first time I learned that doors don’t only swing one way. There’s this story of “breaking into” fields, a story I was told as a kid. It’s a very incomplete picture of what really happens. My grandmother’s tale was also the first time I realized that the rhetoric of women supporting other women was not universal – was, in fact, a rallying cry against exactly what had happened in fields like computer programming.

So today I ask you to consider this: what is the job of the person who breaks the ceiling? Just to break it once? Or to keep helping others smash it afterwards, over and over, until no one can really remember there was ever a ceiling in the first place?

Hold the door open. That’s all I ask of anyone who makes it through. Hold the door open behind you so we don’t lose what we’ve fought for as soon as it becomes attractive to more privileged people because of the work we’ve done. So you don’t become the first – and the last. So you’re not the exception that proves the rule.

Hold the door open.