522 Reading 08
Right at the beginning of Silvo Lorussoâs âLearn to Code vs. Code to Learnâ he pointed out that most of his students that dislike coding at the beginning of his courses are women, and that possibly this has to do with âwomenâs internalized estrangement from the so-called STEM.â Being a woman, who got an undergraduate degree in a STEM field, I wouldnât say that I agree with this assessment. Especially with how recently this was written, women are now more involved in STEM fields than they have ever been before, and more and more losing that âinternalized estrangement,â but continue to feel the oppressive, discriminatory nature that men bring to the STEM fields, including coding.
Lorusso seemed to continue the conversation of community in coding that we saw Zach Lieberman talk about earlier. Lorusso wrote, âCoding does not just manifest as a relationship between a user and a computer, but also between users through computers.â and goes on to describe chats and forums about coding, adding, âThe input of this process of patience and a capacity of listening; the output is fun and a sense of belonging.â Both of these men are seeing and experiencing these community spaces asâŠmen. Especially online, women continue to experience discrimination and hate in online community spaces, specifically related to the STEM fields. While women are breaking boundaries in these fields in the outside world, they are still being targeted and harassed in the same spaces online. Of course, not all online communities treat women negatively, but still, not all of them are as welcoming and kind as Lorusso and Lieberman suggest, especially to new-comers, especially to women.
Beyond just gendered experiences of the online world, some of Lorussoâs discussion of âCoding as Craftâ brings to mind the conversations we have had about the elitism and classism of tech, and coding. He wrote, âThe craftsperson enters their own physical or digital workshop [âŠ]. This is where they code and learn, learn and code. This is where they can forget, for a while at least, if they are lucky, the pressures and economic necessities of daily life.â In this section, Lorusso points out that a person has to be lucky to be able to experience that forgetting of pressures, but nowhere does he seem to point out that the majority of Americans are not lucky enough to experience that. This idea of everyone coding and finding solace in the code before them is unrealistic given the unrelenting âeconomic necessitiesâ that the working class feels in modern-day America. An amazing goal? Perhaps, but not one that the majority of people have time or money to achieve.










