Justin Zobel is a professor in the School of Computing and Information Systems and Pro-vice Chancellor Graduate Research at the University of Melbourne. Justin speaks about the misrepresentation of computer scientists, women in the discipline and what it all has to do with entrepreneur and actress Hedy Lamarr. 

Does computer science have a more diverse student body than engineering? 

Justin: So, there's multiple forms of diversity. For most of my academic career, my school has been based in academic faculties, in engineering faculties, which means that you get to speak to prospective engineers and prospective computer scientists, and they are quite different. I have always felt with engineering that there is a strong input condition that the people who go into engineering often have wanted a lot of certainty in their career. They know what an electrical engineer or a mechanical engineer is going to be doing professionally. They sort of know the objects that they will be dealing with in their study and in their professional life, and they are very drawn to that. Whereas the computer scientists are often very freewheeling. So, the same computer scientist might begin by writing the code platform for microfinance in a country in the Global South. And the next job they might have would be building an educational platform, you know, because the same skill really speaks out to almost every application of human endeavour.  

(Why) are women pushed away from the discipline? 

That is kind of a modern phenomenon. What is well documented is that female enrolments in computer science in the global West peaked in about 1984 and then fell fairly quickly after that, but peaked at about forty percent of student enrolment, which at Melbourne meant that computer science had a higher proportion of females than did the institution as a whole, because women were about thirty percent of the undergraduate body at that time. There are a lot of theories about it. My personal theory is that the introduction of computers into homes, which were very quickly adopted by boys for game playing and for basement bonding with mates, was a real turn-off to women. Before then, the computer was something you encountered as a tool at university. They did not have computers in schools. It was something that you saw for the first time at Open Day and sort of thought, “Wow, here's this thing that can do anything, you know? And I want to do science, but I don't really want to do physics with the boys and I'm not really interested in that wet lab stuff because it's messy and not very structured as a science, which is how some people react to it, I'll do computing. You know, it's really scientific and it's forward looking and there'll be great jobs.” But once it got into people's homes, I think there was a lot of deterrents and I think, girls get put under a lot of pressure to not perform academically. You know, if you are sixteen and you are the best in class, that is social suicide. And you know that some of that translates forward into university. People carry that behaviour. They do not want to be seen to be bright in some of those mathematical areas.  

So, the computer that was at the university was a neutral thing, but it then became gendered? 

Correct. Absolutely. So, my first job as a developer, I went to Telecom, which is now called Telstra, in ‘83, and my boss was female and she had been a developer for twenty years, since quite early on, and her background was in classics. She was a hyper logical woman and that is where they were recruiting women from out of these degrees that had a sort of rigour of thought, philosophy would be another one to become. It was an early pool of developers. Actually, the first software company was founded by a woman in 1959 and had only female staff.  

During this year's FEIT Film Festival, we screened the documentary Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story. What did you take away from this film? 

I was really pleased to discover that film, which I was not aware of before the screening was announced. Hedy Lamarr is someone that I had been aware of for a long time through my stepfather's interest in film from 1920s to 1960s. And of course, her peak as a movie star was right in the middle of that period.  I was aware of her for that reason, aware of her as a Holocaust refugee effectively, or a refugee, you know, certainly a refugee from as a Jew from the Germanic culture of the period because she left slightly earlier and aware from the 1990s of the importance that was attached to her inventions in particular, the, you know, switched frequency radio transmission that had a lot of profile briefly in the 90s in a period when I was teaching or contributing to teaching of the history of technology. So I was aware of her in some very fragmentary ways. The documentary brought all of that together and illuminated it because we heard from her in that fabulous Viennese accent that she kept to the end of her life. 

Are events such as FEIT Film Festival valuable for the engineering and IT environment? 

For me absolutely. An event like that is something I'm having to think about a little bit because there are different ways of pitching an event like that, and I'll come back to that in a sec. It is very tricky often for a student of a discipline to see that discipline in context, to see it in a social context, to see other people experiencing the discipline as a consumer of it, or from the outside or as a perspective on it. A movie like that shows a rounded person contributing to discipline, I think is eye-opening. It also allowed people to see the history of how technology is applied, but being simply exposed to conversations like what is it like for a woman in STEM, I think is terrific, because I heard women there getting sort of affirmation of their experience and men there who would be thinking about it. 

Computer science and engineering representation in the media: How important is it? 

I know I am not a typical computer scientist. My books are about writing and communication, they are not about computing. I grew up in a certain kind of a household in which there was a lot of film culture and a lot of literary culture, but it has always seemed to me such a defect in our technical education that we have struggled to find ways of injecting empathy and understanding of culture. And I don't necessarily mean high culture, but the importance of culture and the importance of society into our programs. I love film, so I love the idea of a “film school” that is part of our engineering culture. So, when I heard about the program you are offering, I thought, that is fabulous. And I got a lot out of the session I was part of but I can see, too, how getting reluctant people along to things that will excite thoughts that they would not otherwise have had would be a really fabulous thing to be continuing to do.