These postures and attitudes are common enough that some programmers have found it necessary to protest against them, as in a recent blog post by Derick Bailey titled “Dear Open Source Project Leader: Quit Being a Jerk.” Bailey writes about “open source elite” programmers making fun of inexperienced would-be contributors to their very own projects. “I’ve seen people delete their accounts, disappear from the internet, and leave the open source community behind because of jerks that torment and belittle and tear apart the work that they are putting in,” Bailey writes. “The worst part of this is knowing that some of these ‘OSS Elite’ were the geeks and freaks and nerds in high school, that got picked on by the jocks and other popular kids … The victims are becoming the perpetrators.”⁴⁴

The financial systems which support the software industry bring their own models of masculinity into interactions with programmers. Alec Scott, a Canadian journalist who writes about the Valley, was told by a rising young entrepreneur that he was surprised how “brusque” the venture capitalists were in meetings. “At first, I was taken aback by how tough they can be, but I learned to roll with it. There’s not much time wasted when they shoot you down quickly at least.” Another start-up founder told Scott, “This is a guy’s guy world, and you’ve gotta be prepared to go mano a mano with them. You might go down in flames, and they honour that. You can’t apologize. You must be ready for the fight.”⁴⁵

Those who do not participate in this manly roughhousing are regarded as suffering from a fatal incapability which precludes them making good software. The rudeness of elite programmers — the explanation goes — is actually the necessarily blunt, no-bullshit style of problem-solving engineers who value results over feelings. And finally what matters is the quality of the code — which is an objectively definable value — and the nationality or ethnicity of the programmers is irrelevant. Culture is irrelevant. Or, perhaps, in code, culture is absent, nonexistent. So if there are no women in programming, it is because they don’t or can’t code, because they are not interested in the craft. The world of programming is as it should be, as it has to be.

One of the hallmarks of a cultural system that is predominant is that it succeeds, to some degree, in making itself invisible, or at least in presenting itself as the inevitable outcome of environmental processes that exist outside of the realm of culture, within nature. The absence of women within the industry is thus often seen as a hard “scientific” reality rooted in biology, never mind that the very first algorithm designed for execution by a machine was created by Lady Ada Byron, never mind Grace Hopper’s creation of the first compiler, and never mind that the culture of the industry may be foreign or actively hostile to women.

The tech industry prides itself on being populated by rational thinkers, by devotees of the highest ideals of freedom and equality. Human resources departments are rightfully leery of litigation, and try to protect the companies through training and education. Yet, over the last few years, the industry has been beset by controversies sparked by acts of casual sexism — images of bikini-clad women used as backdrops for presentations about software; a Boston start-up that announced a hack-a-thon and as “Great Perks” offered gym access, food trucks, and women: “Need another beer? Let one of our friendly (female) staff get it for you.”⁴⁶ In the heated discussions that have followed, one of the main rhetorical modes used by defenders of the status quo has been that sexism doesn’t really exist in the tech industry because in this perfect meritocracy programmers who write excellent code will rise to the top. Programming is male because men are excellent programmers. As male doctors and lawyers and chefs were once thought to naturally possess certain essential qualities that fitted them for these once universally male professions, male programmers have logic and problem solving written into their DNA, they are naturals. A woman who codes is out of her realm; one might say that “to be masculine is her worst reproach.”

Of course, as Ensmenger shows us, the personalities and behavior that one encounters within the world of programming are embedded in a contingent culture constructed by a particular history. Ensmenger’s narrative denaturalizes the maleness and machismo of American programming, and as it tells a story that takes place mostly in America, at MIT and in the hallways of American corporations, it allows us to think of other ways it might have happened or will happen in the future.

The pre-Independence India my parents grew up in served as a vast source of raw materials and ready market for finished goods produced by the British Empire. “Before Gandhiji’s movement,” my mother told me many times when I was a child, “you couldn’t even find a sewing needle that had been made in India. Everything came from there.” The factories over there — in Glasgow and Manchester — turned iron ore into steel, cotton into cloth, and sold it all back to the Indians, whose poverty was understood as a pre-existent fact that the current regime was attempting to alleviate. The colonial educational system of course reflected this economic imperative in its structure and methods.

“The engineering colleges established by the British in India had a circumscribed role: to prepare Indians to work in subsidiary positions under British rule,” the historian of technology Ross Bassett tells us.⁴⁷ “The British established the engineering [colleges] … as a way to produce intermediate-grade engineers for the British Public Works Department, which had control over the schools.”⁴⁸ This policy, carefully designed to limit the range of technological advancement in India, meant that students interested in cutting-edge or even just up-to-date engineering education had no option but to look abroad. And so, between 1900 and 1947, roughly a hundred young men made their way to MIT, which was already famous as the foremost institution of its type. Since the colonial government would grant no aid for such students, they depended on private or family funding, which ensured that most of them came from the upper echelons of Indian society. Some of them were from elite “law, business, and government service” families deeply involved in the movement for Independence, and were therefore connected to leaders like Nehru and Gandhi.⁴⁹ As Bassett points out, “The early twentieth century marked the rise of the swadeshi movement in India, in which Indians developed indigenous industries as an act of resistance to British rule and dominance.”⁵⁰ The Indians who went to MIT were motivated as much by a nationalist desire to reconstruct the shattered economy of their country as by a thirst for technology. Gandhi himself wrote to Bal Kalelkar, a young erstwhile associate now at MIT:

I have your beautiful letter. I can understand that western music has claimed you. Does it not mean that you have such a sensitive ear as to appreciate this music? All I wish is that you should have all that is to be gained there and come here when your time is up and be worthy of your country.⁵¹

By 1944, Indian bureaucrats and politicians were trying to plan for Independence, which everyone knew was coming. That year, the Executive Council of Planning and Development announced “a plan to send 500 students abroad in 1945 to institutes in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States to meet the demands for ‘urgent needs of post-war development.’”⁵² How deeply Indians believed that the technological future was to be found at MIT may be judged from the fact that from the 500 who were selected to benefit from this unprecedented funding, 271 applied to this one institution. MIT admitted 16 for the fall semester, and placed 180 on the waiting list, “implicitly stating that the students were well qualified for MIT but that there was no room for them.”⁵³