The Meta Blog

I am constantly amazed by how much time I can spend online, browsing the blogs of perfect strangers. On Orkut, I once found a girl's blog. I had traversed through several links of friends' friends, and for some reason I stopped to read this girl's blog. She was Maharashtrian, and lived in the bay area. That's it. That's all I knew about her: a single Maharashtrian 20-something FOB in the bay area. I read her blog for something like 3 hours. I read about her roommates, her fiance, her colleagues, diwali celebrations and barbeque parties. It was a busy, ordinary life - a carbon copy of the one I live, all my friends live. And yet I was totally fascinated.

Blogging is a unique medium: at once intimate and exhibitionist. Some people use their blog as a soapbox, discoursing to an invisible audience, holding forth on science, technology, religion, what have you. Others use it to keep their friends updated, in lieu of writing mass emails. And there are those who use it to put their life on display: come look at me, I'll perform for you free!

I often thought about how much I would enjoy blogging. I'm sure everyone has, at one time or another. We all have a story to tell, or an opinion to express. But I held back for years... never knowing how to structure such a blog. Writing about one's life is hard. For one, I am too private a person to discuss my feelings before everybody I know. Besides, you cannot discuss events without discussing people, and it is hard to candidly discuss the people in your life. No, actually, it is scarily easy, but that is called gossip :) And I have to admit, a blog about my daily life would quickly become, how should I put this.. boring. I have trouble enough coming up with things to tell my parents in our weekly phone call. And these are people who are interested in what I had for dinner yesterday. Much more interesting to talk about my opinions on life, the universe and everything. So I've been writing about important, interesting topics: politics, spirituality, women in engineering, and ofcourse, my phone. It's fun, and I enjoy it.

The fact that some people have actually read these entries is unnerving, though. It is nice in a way, (because there is an exhibitionist inside each of us). On the other hand it makes me very self conscious. The knowledge that somebody may read an entry invariably affects how it is written. Sort of like Heisenberg's principle. Or, if you prefer, like Phoebe from Friends.. you know the episode where she sings on the street outside the coffee shop to piss off the coffee shop people? She sings some lame song and makes a dollar fifty. But then she sings Smelly Cat and only makes 20 cents. So she's torn between fame and artistic integrity :)

Wonder how long I'll keep up this blogging thing. It is a shame that most good ideas come to me when I'm in no position to blog about them. On the other hand, the few times that ideas strike at the right time, blogging sure beats talking to myself!

The truth about cats and dogs

Have you ever asked yourself the tough questions? The uncomfortable ones. The kind that get Larry Summers into trouble? You know Larry Summers - the Harvard president who suggested that men are smarter than women. Ok, not smarter, but better at maths and science. While women are better at, you know, colour coordinating outfits.

It is a strange, strange world.

All those years growing up, I knew I lived in a bubble. Inside the bubble, boys and girls were treated almost the same. Parents encouraged their daughters to excel in school and seek exciting careers. Girls walked around in jeans and skirts, free to say and do what they pleased. Every now and then we bumped up against the walls of that bubble. Our maids told of being beaten up by their drunk husbands. Our professors thought we lacked motivation. A school teacher once told my class that working women took jobs away from men who were the sole breadwinners for their family. In engineering college, only 30% of the students were girls. Well, of course, what do you expect in an underdeveloped country like India. Then as we went from one year to the next, it became clear the boys were out performing the girls. It's not that all the girls were flunking, it's that none of the top performers were girls. There were a lot of socialization issues there, girls hung out and talked about clothes and movies. Boys hung out with their seniors, discussed computers, kept updated with the latest technology news. Indian girls grew up in such an inherently sexist society, they were always at a major disadvantage. The stereotypes drilled into their minds by years of subconscious learning could not be easily erased. They were afraid to think for themselves, and if there's one field where a gal needs to think for herself, its software.

In the infinite wisdom of my youth, I knew exactly where the problem lay. It was our backward society, and we had to cast off the shackles. Ofcourse, in a place like the US, things would be different. Feminism had come to America atleast a generation earlier.

Yes, of all the surprises I found in the US, this was the most - surprising. All through my graduate course, I met 0 American women - count them, 0. Of course, there were very few Americans in the first place. There were lots of Indians, but only a handful of Indian women among the engineers. Among the far east Asian students, the proportions were much closer, a sizeable number of women. Apart from that, there was one European and one Jamaican. No Americans. I didn't even notice it at first.. was too caught up in my own life. But as time went by, I noticed it more and more. TV shows that implicitly associated women with shopping and cooking and dressing up (and being emotionally unstable). Movies that painted scientists as absent minded, socially handicapped, geeky men who never got any action. In fact, I'm trying to think of a female character who's smart technically and doesn't look at intelligence as uncool - so far, I've come up with Lisa Simpson.

What is most disturbing is that in this post feminist world, women have made a lot of progress. They are powerful politicians, chairmen and CEOs. But not scientists, not engineers. I remember Newsweek did a cover story about women leaders one time. I searched through their list for technical women leaders... in vain. The CEO of HP came up the sales/marketing/finance ladder. Meg Whitman of eBay is not a geek either. Later, somebody made a list online about top 10 geek women - apparently they were so starved for candidates, they added Paris Hilton; and Lisa Simpson!

I'm rambling, I know. I'll try to pull this post into some kind of structure...
A quick recap - I start out in life with wide eyed innocence, and naive confidence. Women are every bit as good as men. Then questions start to arise - why are so many of the girls in my college dumb? They do well when it comes to learning things by heart, but are terrible when it comes to applying their mind. Possible reasons come to mind - years of social conditioning, afraid to think for themselves,
uninterested in pursuing the field they've chosen. But then, what about a place where women have had a generation to get over these hurdles. A place where women are assertive, show great creative skills, great leadership skills - and yet fail to produce great technical skills? Is it social conditioning again - is it just a different kind of conditioning? Instead of being taught to be submissive and unobtrusive, American women are being conditioned to be materialistic, beautiful and air headed.
A strange kind of equality, which allows shows like "Beauty and the Geek" to be produced.

Hmm, so much for the structure, I'm rambling again. But I do have a point - are women "differently abled" than men? Does that extra limb in the second X have maths inhibiting genes? Given a wide choice of career fields - most women here have chosen non-technical fields. Overwhelmingly so. Is this social conditioning or intrinsic ability? Nature or nurture?

It's an uncomfortable question. On the one hand, it goes against everything I have ever believed, to think that women just may not be made for scientific thinking. On the other hand, scientific thinking demands that we think objectively - objectively speaking this is always a possibility.

Undoubtedly, something keeps women away from maths and science. Until we isolate the maths gene, we can only argue about nature versus nurture. In the meantime, we have to fumble our way through. Let's not take the weight of our sex on our shoulders, lets think of ourselves as individuals and see what we can do. Let history make the judgment.
I look at all the intelligent women I do know - the ones who are passionate about what they do, and have had successful technical careers. Its not many, but it is sufficient.

After all, even if it is true that men are smarter than women - even if there is only one freak-of-nature woman (in the entire world) who is truly smart; wouldn't it be a terrible injustice to that one woman to claim that all women are dumb?

After all, a zillion truth cases cannot prove a theorem, but one false case can disprove it.