Github Conversations: Characterizing Framing & Measuring Openness

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Aaksha Meghawat, Steven Moore, Qinlan Shen, Steven Dang, Carolyn P. Rose

Prologue

Who decides what is right? Who decides what is a ‘best practice’? The way open source developers, teams and software organizations deal with these questions is crucial to their success and the community as a whole.

The research I document in this post was carried out by me and a few of my amazing lab mates in 2016. With the rise of remote work and most work/design conversations (negotiations, decisions) moving to Slack, Zoom and other such online mechanisms, I have a new found appreciation for the insights we gleaned back in 2016.

General opinion seems to be that (other than likes, retweets) measures of the quality of a discussion such as openness, topic diversity, framing styles etc. cannot objectively be measured in any useful way. We challenged this assumption in our work and came across some interesting insights into developer productivity. Using our designs of conversation quality, we were able to improve the F1 score of predicting acceptance/rejection of a pull request by 66%. For 2 other key takeaways, you can jump directly to key takeaways.

The ultimate vision of this work was to translate our conversational quality measures into tools and interventions that would help developers and all kinds of teams have more productive conversations. Unbeknownst to us, many smart people had the same idea. Our ultimate dream would be make this a seamless real time conversation quality measure to help people have better conversations. The closest thing to this (out there) is Bridgewater Associates’ Dot Collector, (from 9:30 onwards in this video).

Introduction

Discourse in online work communities differs from that found in weblogs, online support groups, or news sites — the task-focused yet social nature of the community influences the nature of the conversation, as discussions are not solely focused on the ideas and issues at hand but also the social dynamics of the group (Richards, 2006). This raises the question of what are the dominant manifestations of this social influence on task discussions. Here we propose an analysis of Github pull-request conversation threads, looking at both how Openness and Framing are leveraged as well as how the two may interact to influence the success of a community pull-request contribution.

Looking at the data through the perspective of Openness, we wanted to see how accepting a project’s community was when discussing a pull request. We also looked at the data through a Framing lens to see how the topics discussed in a thread were indicative of its success. Combining these two lenses would hopefully provide insights into how a thread’s contributors made their ideas heard while also playing their part in the project’s community.

We analyzed pull request conversations from a subset of GitHub projects for Ruby. The data consists of 1862 projects that contain at least one pull request. From these projects, we picked out threads that have at least three different contributors. 

Research Questions

We define “success” of a conversation as acceptance/merge of a pull request. Our primary research questions then are whether the following have an impact on this “success” metric:

  • Openness: How do we define & detect openness computationally? (RQ1)
  • Framing Mechanisms: How do we define & detect different ways of framing, computationally? (RQ2)
  • Topic Diversity & Topic chains (Transactivity) (RQ3)

Data Description

We analyzed pull request conversations from a subset of GitHub projects for Ruby. The data consists of 1862 projects that contain at least one pull request. From these projects, we picked out threads that have at least three different contributors.

We picked out threads for qualitative analysis to get started on RQ1 & RQ2. We sampled threads from both highly active and less active communities. To do this, we stratified the communities according to total number of pull requests and sample two projects above and below the median number of pull requests. For each of these communities, we sampled 3 pull request threads. The threads in the selected communities were divided into three groups based on the number of comments in each thread (low, medium, and high number of comments).

Measuring Openness (RQ1)

Openness/Expansiveness in our work is defined as a statement which creates more dialogic space for another participant’s expression or opinion. This is often operationalized through a question or asking for explicit participation from other people. However it may also be demonstrated via expressing alternative views. We term a statement that has the opposite effect as Contractive. (Note that the usual positive connotation attached to ‘Openness’ should not be done so here. Vice versa for ‘Contractive’ statements. This is because too many expansive statements can also lead to confusion or slowness in decision making, resulting in failure of merging in pull requests, as we will show later in examples).

Following qualitative analysis, a list of expansive and contractive patterns was created from common patterns found. These initial patterns were input into the model where we then checked to see if they were appropriately tagging units as expansive or contractive. After a small sample was both qualitatively & quantitatively coded for expansive/contractive patterns with potentially interesting markers, we proceeded with affinity diagramming. During the affinity diagramming process, the markers that didn’t directly fit into expansive or contractive, such as using a particular acronym or ‘+1’, were grouped into various themes. After fitting them into their final groups, the context of the units for which these markers were used into was counted. This provided us with a ratio of many expansive, contractive, or neutral units these markers fell into. Markers that were most commonly found as either expansive or contractive by 75% or more were used as patterns for the respective classification. For example, the acronym ‘imo’ was used as a contractive pattern and the use of ‘?’ was used as an expansive pattern. 

Openness% Sample% Computational Tagging
Expansive20.216.36
Contractive3.782.67

Table 1: Percentage of units tagged as expansive or contractive (sample vs. computationally tagged dataset)

Characterizing Framing (RQ2)

We distilled 5 different framing types to be key for developer conversations on Github from our qualitative analysis:

CodeDefinitionExample
Establishing StatementIntroducing or supporting the factual/valid nature of a propositionIt’s very difficult to reproduce error because it depends on terminal width.
Alignment StatementStating agreement/disagreement on a specific discussion point including statements of appreciationGood idea @jferris. “+1”
Contrasting StatementDiscussing demonstrated or proposed attributes in contrast to alternatives
I would phase it out slowly, i.e. have has_plugin? recognize both current name and the gem name initially, then slowly deprecate it (with a warning possibly if the old name way is used).
Alignment RequestRequesting statement of stances on a specific discussion pointCould you please have a look there and comment?
Clarification RequestRequesting restatement/elaboration/clarification of a specific discussion pointsIf we leave this in: Is this something that needs to be generated during clearance install, if the users table exists?
Table 2: Framing Code Dictionary
Qualitative Analysis Methodology

Qualitative analysis began with reviewing 3 conversations annotating conversation fragments for two primary characteristics: framing related discourse moves and linguistic indicators of described framing moves. From this annotation library, an initial coding dictionary was formed by synthesizing the annotations into groups and forming operational definitions of each group. These codes were carried forward into the analysis of an additional 3 conversations in order to evaluate their robustness, ability to differentiate between statements, and coverage, ability to categorize all statements in the data. New framing moves were annotated and new synthesized definitions were formed from the revised groups. This analysis was repeated for the remaining 2 groups of 3 conversations until a final codebook was formed as shown below in Table 2.

Definitions of Framing Codes

The resulting code book discovered two broad classes of discourse moves related to Framing, Statements and Requests. Statements describe sentences that introduce information to the discourse while Requests are statements that solicit information from others to be introduced, where information can be factual or opinion-based in nature.

Establishing statements were the foundation of most discourse where they are describing all discourse moves that are introducing information with the purpose of establishing its factual nature. From a framing perspective these statements would be important to identify in the sense of determining which statements are introducing factual information and being able to identify which statements are debated and which are ignored and/or accepted.

Alignment statements are specifically discourse moves which introduce an individual’s agreement or disagreement with a particular fact or discussion point. These statements capture categories of discourse moves intended to introduce individual opinion into the conversation.

Contrasting statements are defined as discourse moves that introduce information intended for comparison or contrasting with previously stated or assumed information. These statements specifically contain multiple perspectives and relational information between each perspective.

Alignment Requests are defined as statements explicitly soliciting the opinions of others. Requests differ from statements in that they can also introduce information, but the primary goal of the discourse move is to introduce information with the intent of soliciting opinions of others regarding the stated information.

Clarification Requests are defined as statements explicitly soliciting additional information from others usually with respect to previously introduced or assumed information. These requests may also introduce information, but with the intent of supporting the specifics of the request for additional information.

Key Observations: Usually a contribution is elaborated early in the conversation and one or two specific points are discussed for the remainder of the thread. In the sample analyzed, two threads from the same community introduced comparable features, lazy loading, but each thread presented the value of the idea from different perspectives. The result is that one thread was merged and the other was rejected. On the other hand many of the rejected threads followed a pattern of short elaborated descriptions followed immediately by at least one contrasting statement which is then followed by alignment statements. This indicates that capturing patterns of these base categories of statements could be valuable in understanding the conversational dynamics.

Similar to Openness, we extracted patterns for our Framing categories. Then we tagged sentences in each post as belonging into one of the five framing classes. Using the sentence tokenizer in NLTK, we split each post into individual sentences. For each sentence, we then counted how many patterns fit the sentence for each of the framing categories. We took the class with the most number of pattern hits as the framing class of the sentence. Sentences that do not exhibit any of the patterns are assigned to the Establishing Statement class. For each post, we then maintained a percentage of sentences belonging to each category.

Transactive Chains (RQ3)

A major aspect of framing is the control of what topics are discussed in a thread. To operationalize this aspect of framing for our model, we introduced the concept of transactivity chains, a time-dependent chain of comments in a thread that are similar in what they discuss. The rationale behind these transactivity chains is that they represent different “flows” in the thread about what is being discussed — one transactivity chain represents the entire lifespan of a certain conversation subject. By examining the different transactivity chains across a thread, we can gain insight into what kind of conversational structures may be indicative of successful collaboration.

We define transactivity chains as a time-ordered chain of comments where posts that are connected have some semantic similarity. To measure the semantic similarity between posts, we run LDA (Blei et al. 2003) over our entire dataset, using 50 topics and treating individual comments as documents. This generates a topic model over our dataset and assigns each post a distribution over the generated topics. We then consider two posts to be semantically similar if they have a cosine distance of less than 0.5.

We provide a simple example to demonstrate how we represent the transactivity chains as features for our model. Consider Figure 1, where each numbered node represents a comment (time-ordered) in a thread and edges represent that two nodes are part of the same transactive chain. The thread represented by the figure consists of 6 posts that make up two transactivity chains.

Figure 1: Example transactive chain structure

We encode each of the transactivity threads as 3 features: the number of comments in the transactivity chain (#Comments), the number of comments the transactivity chain spans (ΔT), and the normalized comment distance of the final comment in the chain from the end of the thread (LastTimeSlot). This gives us the following set of features for each of transactivity chains in Figure 1:

ID#CommentsΔTimeLast Time Slot
1366/6
2335/6
Feature extraction for Transactive chain shown in Figure 1

To summarize these features at the thread level, we use the median, mean, min, and max of the transactivity chain features. We also use the median, mean, min, and max values for the percentage and total number of statements tagged as each of the openness and framing features among the transactivity chains of a thread as transactivity chain features.

Results & Key Takeaways

The surprising relationship between Openness & Transactivity

Graph 1: No. of Transactive Chains vs. Expansive Units

In Graph 1 we see that points with greater than ~50 expansive units are sparse in terms of demonstrating a trend. We intuitively expected that the more expansive conversation units there were in a conversation, the more topics (and no. of transactive chains) would be found in the thread. However as seen in Graph 2, the general tendency to the left of the red line is that an increase in expansiveness does not necessarily increase the number of transactive chains. On looking at some of the conversations our intuition was that increasing expansiveness created greater dialogic space that encouraged discussion about the current topic, infact encouraging continuity of a transactive chain and potentially greater consensus building.

Graph 2: Average number of topic chains in a conversation vs. number of Expansive comments.

This intuition is also reflected in Graph 3 where the length of the longest transactive chain increases with increasing presence of expansiveness.

Graph 3: Length of longest transactive chain vs. Expansiveness

Conversely, according to our expectation threads higher in Contrastiveness should have had a lower count of transactive chains, as the posts would tend to be monoglossic and dead end. However, we found that in the threads shown in Table 3, the thread’s commenters reference other users in the project who have not yet commented on the thread. This brings those users into the thread’s conversation where they then contribute to the discussion and generate new transactive chains. It also appears to add to the contrastiveness of the conversation, as it’s often the case that the users come into the conversation and immediately provide their opinion.

Example Thread# Transactive ChainsContrastive %age
https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll/pull/1682525
https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/pull/1592521.43
https://github.com/resque/resque/pull/772621.05
https://github.com/vcr/vcr/pull/404521.48
Table 3: Threads and their percentage of clarification requests and expansive units

Unconvering a best practice to increase developer productivity

An interesting finding we came across was the interaction between one of our framing categories, clarification requests, and our measure of openness. We found that in threads which had a high percentage of clarification requests and an equally high percentage of expansive units, developers were following a common pattern to make their voice heard. The developers always began by referencing a particular portion of the commit with a code block and then proceeded to ask a question about it. By following such a pattern, the commenters were able to have their question(s) and opinion immediately addressed.

This insight can be used directly to design a feature in github. For example, every time a developer has a question, they can be encouraged to refer to a particular block of code relevant to the question to encourage a more useful and productive discussion.

Prediction of Pull Request Acceptance (Primary Research Question)

The final experiment that we ran was to use our features to train a classifier to predict whether a pull request would be accepted or rejected. We train a logistic regression classifier and use 5-fold cross validation on our fully tagged dataset (which includes our openness tags, framing category tags, and transactivity chain features) to compare the performance of four different feature configurations:

  • Openness: % and total number of each openness category
  • Framing: % and total number of each framing category
  • Openness + Framing: combination of Openness and Framing features
  • Openness + Framing + TC: Openness, Framing, and Transactivity Chain Features (described in the Transactivity Chains section)

We compare these models to a baseline model, which predicts the majority class (Accepted).

ModelAccuracyPrecisionRecallF1
Baseline53.826.950.0034.98
Openness53.8752.4551.5047.41
Framing59.2459.2557.7256.67
Openness + Framing59.3159.1457.9757.24
Openness + Framing + TC59.5559.2458.4458.04
Table 4: Classification results for predicting the acceptance of a pull request

We improve the F1 score over baseline by 66% using our features of measuring openness, framing styles and topic diversity/transactive chains. This indicates that the features we have developed encapsulate meaningful quality measures of developer discussions and can be used to gauge the potential productivity of a group of open source developers.

Data Driven Case Study

As an example we examined the outlier thread (circled in red in Graph 1). We were able to neatly summarize the negotiation that happened in the conversation using our metrics.

Figure 4: The longest conversation in our data whose general flow was neatly summarized by our features.

Works Cited

  • Argamon, S., Whitelaw, C., Chase, P., Hota, S. R., Garg, N., & Levitan, S. (2007). Stylistic text classification using functional lexical features. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(6), 802-822.
  • Blei, D. M., Ng, A. Y., & Jordan, M. I. (2003). Latent dirichlet allocation. the Journal of machine Learning research, 3, 993-1022.
  • Chatterjee, M. (2007). Textual engagements of a different kind? In Proceedings from Australian Systemic Functional Linguistics Association Congress.
  • Chong, Dennis, and James N. Druckman. “Framing theory.” Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci. 10 (2007): 103-126.
  • Cosentino, Valerio, Javier Luis Cánovas Izquierdo, and Jordi Cabot. “Three Metrics to Explore the Openness of GitHub projects.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1409.4253 (2014).
  • Howley, I., Mayfield, E., & Rosé, C. P. (2012). Linguistic analysis methods for studying small groups. The International Handbook of Collaborative Learning.
  • Gee, J. (2011). An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method, Routledge. 
  • Jo, Y., & Oh, A. H. (2011, February). Aspect and sentiment unification model for online review analysis. In Proceedings of the fourth ACM international conference on Web search and data mining (pp. 815-824). ACM.
  • Martin, J. & White, P. (2005). The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English, Palgrave
  • Nguyen, V. A., Boyd-Graber, J., Resnik, P., Cai, D. A., Midberry, J. E., & Wang, Y. (2014). Modeling topic control to detect influence in conversations using nonparametric topic models. Machine Learning, 95(3), 381-421.
  • Read, J., & Carroll, J. (2012). Annotating expressions of appraisal in English. Language Resources and Evaluation, 46(3), 421-447.
  • Richards, K. (2006). Language and Professional Identity: Aspects of Collaborative Interaction, Palgrave, Chapter 3
  • Taboada, M., & Grieve, J. (2004, March). Analyzing appraisal automatically. In Proceedings of AAAI Spring Symposium on Exploring Attitude and Affect in Text (pp. 158-161). AAAI Press.
  • Tsay, J., Dabbish, L., & Herbsleb, J. (2014). Let’s talk about it: evaluating contributions through discussion in GitHub. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (pp. 144-154). ACM.

This research work was supported by an NSF “BIGDATA” grant. Code, Data and Features can be provided on request.

The Not-so-Golden Ratio: What are the Odds?

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This post is written as a third part in a series of blog posts: “The Not-so-Golden Ratio: Where are they?” and “The Not-so-Golden Ratio: Why Should I Care?”

I have spoken a little bit about “attention” in “Why Should I Care”. And hinted at several reactions to it in . Here I want to talk about navigating this attention that flows from demand to supply. I am not sure where to begin. This attention is such a woefully incorrect picture of the world that awaits you outside. And it will most likely render you so terribly unprepared for the blatant patriarchy that is headed your way at lightning speed, that you will mostly be blindsided by it. What do I mean by this? I will elaborate on that wave a little further down. 

Most of the issues surrounding women boil down to skewed narratives. There was a graph I talked about in “Where are they” . This graph shows how the number of women studying Computer Science took a decisive downturn between 1980-85. Researchers are still working on this puzzle. The most popular theory at the moment for the drop of women in computer science is that the narrative around coding and women took a negative turn at some point. It is an ongoing study but whether further research dispels this or not, the fact remains, your personal experiences will be at odds with some of the common narratives surrounding women.

The easiest place to be in is to not have a problem with any narrative. That you are at complete peace with the world as it exists. And that wave of patriarchy that I was talking about is not anticipated to be a problem because you don’t care, don’t observe it and frankly speaking can’t imagine being bothered by it. If this is the case, most of this piece is irrelevant, before leaving please scroll down and take a look at the last section. Pretty please.

For the rest, I want to start with:

Don’t pay Attention to the ‘attention’

Here’s a thought exercise I have for you. Imagine a guy came up to you and said, I would like you to be a part of my group because it is good for vaguely defined concepts like diversity and inclusion. And I may not want to state this directly but because it may help my dating life. And for all of this I am willing to do the “favor” of “lowering the bar” for you.

Would you agree to join this person? If you said ‘yes’, again feel free to skip most of this article and scroll down.

There are 2 major problematic aspects of this attention. Say you inadvertently or willingly joined a group/individual which for whatever reason thinks that they have lowered the bar to let you in. What exactly do you imagine your future is going to be like with them? 

You see, there are no free lunches, ever. It may sometimes seem great in the beginning, but the moment you try to negotiate for something more meaningful from the group/individual e.g. support, autonomy, control of resources, that relationship will fall through. Because, from their perspective they have done you a “favor” by “lowering the bar”. In the long run it is not going to end well. This is the reason why we have to deal with phenomenon like ‘glass ceiling’, ‘gender pay gap’ etc. Because someone may have ‘included’ you, but they still are not convinced that you deserve to be there.

There are only 2 ways of escaping the unhappy ending. 1) Never demanding more meaningful things (i.e. self fulfillment). 2) Changing the perception of it being a ‘favor’.

For (1), you know the drill, skip and scroll to the last section. Changing perception is a long, hard, thankless process for which at the very minimum you need to do good work. Cutting to the chase, due to the skewed ratio a lot of attention will flow your way to join and show up for many things. Some of you might even feel the pressure to show up just to compensate for the skewed ratio. However I would like to re-emphasize the principle of Occam’s razor for time management that I described in “Extracurricular“. Quantity and Quality, one at the expense of another basically doesn’t work.

The 2nd major problem is confusing “attention” with Respect. Simply put, they are not the same. And for some women this new found attention is so novel, taking it too seriously leads right to an adult version(*1) of princess syndrome. The princess syndrome has quite a few negative side effects. The worst effect being how it prevents any meaningful (but much required) change in narratives surrounding women.

Wave of Patriarchy

I have mentioned this so called wave of patriarchy as a reality in complete contrast to the scenario the undue attention might paint for you. Here’s what I mean. As you start to graduate and try to figure out what you “really” want to do with your life, many near and dear ones will start ringing wedding bells in your ears. Notice how that discourse treats you. Everything about your future: location, plans, goals, wishes, (even your name), rights to your time, rights to your income will be up for negotiation. You will mostly be referred to and addressed as a liability. Suddenly every digit added to your age will become a huge deal. Suddenly associating yourself with men at least half a decade older to you will become completely acceptable. You will notice how your current level will be compared to a man 4-5 years older than you I.e. someone who has had ‘x’ years of a head start.  

This basic calculation gaffe of society stumps me to this day. If we are evaluating the suitability of an older man for a younger woman, shouldn’t one also project the woman’s life that many years ahead to make a fair comparison? Apparently this never occurred to generations past and completely escapes most women of our generation too. (So, please don’t make that error). I personally have been part of conversations where young female acquaintances, failing to answer me proceeded to impress upon me how much bigger their older husband’s professional status/bank balance etc. was in life. Implying I would have a hard time getting there if I put in the same number of years. (Wow, so much for your support miss! :|).

Most of the conversation surrounding marriage optimizes for the man’s self actualization and for the women’s survival. More brutally, the bar for you is survival, without much consideration for what else you bring to the table. (*2).

There’s also this usual trope among some patriarchal girls that if they are X, their husbands should be X++. I am not playing a blame game here. This kind of a mindset is encouraged by our parents, culture. The kind where the entire point of your education is viewed as a piece of jewelry, to negotiate a better husband from your community. Moreover it is reinforced by misguided definitions of masculinity where sometimes it goes the other way. If the guy is Y, necessarily his partner must be Y- -. Is it really that much of a stretch of imagination to ask for, to attempt at being the ‘++’ for someone’s X?

A photograph I captured of the John Lennon Wall in Prague in 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennon_Wall

And again, it still amazes me that some sections of my extended circle, mostly older generations could only make peace with my professional success and drive for independence as they saw it as a technique to find a better, more educated husband. To this day, I find their lack of imagination about my life, irksome at best, disgusting at worst.

Mentorship

Male patriarchy is not the only issue though. It is by now a fairly well accepted idea that for many complicated reasons, women are not always good at supporting each other. Of many such relationships I want to focus on the one of mentorship. It is easy to mess this relationship up. The many problematic narratives associated with women results in a wide variety of baggages. While you may have developed your own mechanism to deal with it, it is very hard to be open with someone whose baggage may differ vastly from yours. But it is the same thing at the end of the day, baggage. And then there is also the age gap which introduces a natural time gap between the baggages two similar groups of women may develop. 

In an ideal world they would be able to help and learn from each other in dealing with these because the differing baggages are temporal-local instances of the same abstract inequalities, of the same thing expressed slightly differently in time. In fact it is because of cumulative actions of many ordinary women over significant swathes of time that narratives shift and your particular life has become easier (or occasionally harder). In reality however it is very hard to remember and appreciate this.

I remember at a NLP conference in the US one day, a BITSian female junior walked up to me out of the blue and went on to inform me: “I think you are a very sad person. You are super quiet and don’t seem to talk much.” I had never met this girl prior to this infantile accusation, and ofcourse had never had a conversation with her before this. Now you see, I care a lot about the issue of younger women who have walked and will walk the same path as me (its the reason I’ve now written an odd 5ooo words on the subject)so I did a little digging around. And it turns out that this specially affected case of princess syndrome walked up to me because she somehow felt that I needed to recognize her. Apparently I was on her checklist for acknowledgement thanks to a presumed BITSian connection.

While the changing times (thanks to the efforts of many men and women who have come before her), had done a great job of letting her know the historic odds she has beaten, is it that hard to factor in a little consideration for all the efforts that went in to make this possible? Of the communities of ordinary men and women who went ahead and did the right thing in their own small and big ways?

I had been rudely jolted into the realization that I now occupy that stage in my career where younger women are going to have expectations from me. And thanks to the skewed ratio, the exhaustion that follows from regular challenges and battles I face myself and their own baggages (like the princess syndrome in this case) I will be perceived to fall short.

Another time, in a conversation with a younger girl I was tackling the touchy topic of dating. I was trying to impress on the fact that it is hard to say ‘no’ to the right things. Staying single or alone or without a gang or without a community is always incredibly hard but I was insisting that waiting to find the right partner would make a transformational shift in her life experience and was therefore worth the trouble. This advice was tossed aside when this person informed me that “well, just because you got lucky does not mean everyone will”. In a different set of circumstances I would have laughed but the irony was just too excruciating. For someone who spent most of their 20s realizing just how much of an outsider I was for the world, I had felt anything and everything but lucky.

You see, this was 2 exhaustions colliding with each other. Just as 2 wrongs don’t make a right, 2 exhaustions do not produce something constructive, similarly 2 baggages do not a good mentorship make. It seemed like just yesterday that I was standing closer to the beginning, searching for someone to look up to, for someone to mentor me. And now I stand a little further up the chain. The conclusion is not very grand, anti-climactic even: Make some room for everyone’s baggage. If there’s nothing you can do to help up or down the chain, let it pass. 

This leads me to the main takeaway I want to emphasize for this whole piece:

Please don’t make it Worse

I have talked about the joint probability chains that result in a funnel. And then how the funnel leads to a skewed gender ratio. And then how other problematic cultural aspects load onto this to lead to havoc. To survive all of this you need to be very lucky, talented, strong and smart about maneuvering the many spanners that will be thrown in your works. In this piece I also at various points ask people to scroll down to the last section. This is that last section.

To quote a dialog from the excellent TV series Home Before Dark – “Familiarity brings Comfort. And Comfort brings Safety. And for most people Safety is more important than the Truth”. Our cultural and historic discourse wants to familiarize us with only a single, self serving idea of what a woman should be. Many words float around in my mind but I am a little tired of making sense of them. Anything that is not familiar, is not comfortable, possibly unsafe no matter how close it is to the truth.

As I was growing up and putting in the work to change the narrative surrounding my life, to shed some light on my truth, it inspired a proportional backlash in the form of isolation and ostracism, a lot of times spearheaded by other women. Your attempts at changing the narrative will provide an unwanted damning contrast to some people’s hyprocrisy, inspiring a backlash that will seem to come out of nowhere. Directly in proportion to how much the contrast highlights their actions (and lack thereof).

Please don’t be that person. 

You and I reading and writing this stand at some point in the funnel. Everyone of us is here because of many reasons like: slipping ‘up’ the cracks, extraordinary privilege and/or extraordinary merit. We may not appreciate this but we have beat some incredible historical odds to be standing here. I personally believe in the power of storytelling and that one single successful story makes it that much easier for many others. That a single submission makes it that much harder for many others to escape their mental bondages.

In my short life, some people have gone on to take painstaking efforts to remind me that it is not an obligation for them to do much with this privilege. Maybe so. But please, please don’t make it worse. If there is a journey or struggle you don’t understand and don’t want to do much about, at least don’t make it harder. At the very least, don’t fucking make it worse.

Epilogue

If you find yourself wondering why I wrote all of this, I answer that here.

Appendix

*1- What I mean by adult versions of princess-prince syndrome is this class of people who confuse ‘attention’ with respect and interpret it as a measure of how ‘important’ they are. Such people usually graduate to then assuming that their needs are above everyone else’s needs and points of view. Moreover, the greed for attention keeps growing with time. You will notice how such people love discussing themselves at length in any and every conversation.  They will cultivate so called ‘friendships’ only with people who are willing to satisfy this need, in which case you are not actually a friend but simply a member of their ever growing audience.

*2- I mean there is the whole messy business of financial gifts/expectation flowing from the bride’s family to the groom’s family etc. etc. but that is for another day, another blogpost.

The Not-so-Golden Ratio: Why Should I Care?

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This post is written as the second part of a series of blog posts starting with: “The Not-so-Golden Ratio: Where are they?”

I’m never one to mince my words so I would like to state it directly. The 1:7 (F:M) ratio is obviously going to create some supply-demand issues. Lets make it more (brutally) clear. There is an oversupply, under-demand of men and overdemand, under-supply of women. This creates some interesting unhealthy power imbalances. Add the cultural baggage of history and society and we are basically set up for failure, welcome Havoc. 

This imbalance starts playing out in the first few weeks itself at BITS Pilani during “interactions”. Every department, club and group, at least on the face of it tries to boost its “gender diversity”. The motivations for this are not very straight forward though as there is another factor at play here. 

On any given day, dating and sex are loaded issues that many different kinds of societies/demographics struggle to handle in any meaningful way. One of the outcomes of this in India is that we never discuss these topics much in schools and homes. A young person has to resort to picking up and deciphering implicit cues from parents, teachers, religion, media (and each other!) to make up their own minds.

Naturally, we also pick up on the hypocritical censorship of sexual relationships. What does that mean? It is apparently ridicule-worthy enough to simply express interest in another person for dating purposes. You have to do it opaquely, through a long drawn flirtatious dance which starts with creating “natural” situations where you are in proximity of the opposite gender. Cue all the undue “attention” flowing from demand to supply during “interactions” and recruitments and everywhere else where it is misplaced.

Mind you, this is just “attention”.

And mind you, this creates a problem for everyone. People who fail at doing it usually find it easier to fall into the “girls-have-it-easy” chant. People who do succeed at it mostly create more problems than make things better for anyone in the long run. And the target of such attention, girls have some amazing reactions to it. These range from distraction, insecurity, overestimating the meaning and importance of it to downright adult versions of princess-prince syndrome. (*1)

So, it usually sucks.

At this point it would be tempting to say “Oh, just chill out, this is the natural cycle of life and mating, why you so serious?”. (Some might even add, “You were a girl right, didn’t you enjoy all the attention?”) 

Well, I wouldn’t be “so serious” and possibly “enjoy” something except that I have been at the receiving end of this unhealthy attention quagmire and I think it has some serious implications.

On Campus

Let me start with a trivial example. In my first year we had this course called ‘Workshop I’, which was an assortment of tasks related to carpentry, CNC machines etc. Even before we started the course, the word on the street was that “girls have it easy” because they can get away with some tasks after throwing around a few smiles. I didn’t really understand this until I actually entered the workshop. Some maintenance dude at the workshop was willing to help out the girls a little more than usual with the carpentry task. Needless to say I didn’t really enjoy this weird interaction with this dude where some girlish behavior was expected from me, failed spectacularly at the task and came out of the whole experience quite unsettled. For the next 4 years I watched batch after batch perpetuating this ‘word on the street’. It still amazes me that for all the IQ and so-called intelligence that BITS is supposed to filter for, not one, let me repeat that, not a single male peer in my 4 years ever wondered, “Hey Aaksha, did that guy ever creep you out?”. Not one guy considered the possibility that this throwing-around-a-smile business could have been unwanted and creepy for the girl.

In the larger scheme of things (i.e. even outside the BITSian context), it still amazes me to this day how easily people accept this narrative. That it is the onus on the girl to be attractive. And that if she is receiving a perceived freebie, she should be both morally responsible and at fault for it.

The media discourse and social media echo chambers’ coverage of sexual assault allegations, lawsuits, divorce settlements etc. may have us believe that the public sympathizes with the woman. However, with the exception of ‘extreme’ cases, the discourse in our homes, schools, temples, and other cultural spaces of society i.e. when no one is looking, is very different. I could write another 1000 words on navigating this bullshit but I will keep that for another day. I do not want to digress.

Coming back, this will play out subtly in most aspects of BITSian life. As I have already written a bit about how to navigate the web of departments and clubs in Extracurricular:
Groups which are formed around hobbies or interests (like ‘Clubs’ in the BITSianverse) have better anchors for their vetting process. Groups (like ‘Departments’/college fest organizing teams) which don’t have such clearly defined needs are more subjective.

The higher the subjectivity, the more chance that you will be able to recruit and are being recruited for something other than your abilities or passion. Some will do it to create the aforementioned natural proximity. And further, some others will have the audacity to call it “lowering-the-bar”(*2). It is tempting to argue that all of this is inconsequential but this kind of behavior has long term repercussions. 

In my final year, two aspiring BITSian male comedians created a web series of satirical videos on the BITSian life. One such video depicts a placement (job) interview. A guy goes in for a coding interview. He is asked several programming questions. Next, a well-dressed petite girl goes in. The male interviewer starts smiling, tries to make small talk, asks her about her hobbies, likes and dislikes. At the end of the day placement results reveal that it was the girl who got the job, not the guy. The video implies that it was enough for the girl to be cute to get the job.

The one person the video, the camera angle and dialogs don’t focus on is the interviewer. What exactly was the interviewer’s moral standing when he did a professional “favor” for a young woman to curry a potential sexual return in the future. How come this whole incident is interpreted less often as “whats-up-with-desperate guys” and more often as “girls-have-it-easy”?

You see, because this symbolic interviewer was at some point a student like you and me. Whose behavior was not even worth a little bit of ridicule and considered normal even after going through several years of so called ‘education’.

It is easy to project one’s sexual frustrations on the other gender but the seeds for why you find yourself in this situation were sown by many who came before you, much before you.

The Timelessness of Incorrigibility

Here’s a series of mental animations that I noticed started playing out in my mind every time I met a young closeted male chauvinist and was expected to put up with their not-so-casual sexism with a smile. Their hair became whiter, a few wrinkles and a paunch started to emerge. They started resembling some of the older men I have met who have expected me to put up with their not-so-casual sexism with a smile. Similarly when I was standing in the company of these older men, another set of mental animations played out. They acquired darker hair, became slimmer, leaner, plump cheeks, healthy skin with jovial faces. I imagined what “jokes” that older man might have shared with his friends when he was younger. The sexism that years of life experiences had augmented/reinforced to culminate in the exact sexist statements I had the misfortune of listening to. I wonder what opinions the younger man might share with his colleagues in the future unchanged by his life’s successes and blows when he is older. 

Because you see, ultimately it is the same kind of incorrigible person, unable to think outside the convention of his/her times. In the past it was the same person who told your mother that she belonged to the kitchen and exists primarily for child-bearing. In the future it will be the same kind of person who will tell your daughter that she can’t do X because she is a girl. Substitute X with any number of things needed for her self actualization.

“Locker room Talk”

If the situation wasn’t so dire, I would laugh at the inability of young men to see how much they are losing out because of patriarchy . If you don’t have enough options to date and you are doing stupid things because of that, its not because girls didn’t make it to your schools and within your “natural proximity”. Its because a generation of men and women before you didn’t let their daughters, wives and sisters make it to your school. I personally don’t enjoy crass simplifications of social issues but if Facebook, Sacred Games, GoT etc. have taught me anything, it is this: provocation apparently works. Instead of objectifying and making fun of girls’ body parts in the proverbial locker room talk, here’s a version of the locker room talk that would be more appropriate for our realities:

“Khud toh tharki line marta phirta tha, abhi social media par ‘rational arguments’ deneka hai usko against ‘feminazis’”
“Baap dada, 18 main shaadi karaadi maa ki, padhaya bhi nahi, head of the family samajhtein hai apne aap ko”
“Haan bey, meri behen ko toh bachpan main hi bol diya, 22 ke baad idhar se kat lena”
“Haan yaar meri dadi ne jo meri maa ka tel nikala hai, woh saala cricket match dekhne main busy rehta tha”
“Kya kanjus tha be, ek plate bhi idhar se udhar rakha nahi kabhi, aur maa ko bolta hai, roti-kapda-makaan dene ke liye, meri puja kar”
“Mereko toh bada kiya nahi, upar se bola, mera naam laga naam ke peeche”

Pardon my fantasy flight here, I got a little carried away. But hey, isn’t that the excuse thrown about for locker room talk, boys-will-be-boys and actions of mobs when they come together? I’d like to emphasize, I don’t derive any pleasure whatsoever from this locker room talk but I do want to highlight something. You see, you may be feeling like shutting me down which many peers have done for me on online forums. But before shutting me down, could you spend a moment thinking back to how many times have you stopped that friend who was willing to do anything for a girl, like anything to get into her pants and enlightened him on his debauchery. How many times have you shut down a friend indulging in Trump-esque-grab-em-by-the-pussy locker room talk vs. shut down a female friend who just couldn’t be ‘rational’ and ‘reasonable’ when expressing her frustrations with her life experiences, with the same ferocity and derision.

You may have ‘schooled’ a female in real life or on social media , and got a million likes from your male friends, giving you the delusion that ‘Oh see, I am so right, I know how to think straight, that other female is just a feminazi who fails to see the big picture and can’t think outside her I-am-a-victim mentality’. Because while you may blame a so called feminazi who can’t think outside her I-am-a-victim mentality, you might just be displaying ‘I-am-too-entitled’ mentality.

It is going to be exhausting to have any kind of rational perspective on this issue because of the attention deficit staring in your face and playing out everyday in your life. Remember that exhaustion. As I described in “Where are they?” This is the legacy we have been given, the baggage passed onto us by older dysfunctional systems.

The Weight of History

When you finally realize the weight of history in front of your eyes, messing with your sexual cravings, that the complicated, twisted gender imbalances in society are very much your problem, and that most likely you are going to be a part of the problem and not the solution, unless you have any capacity for courage and independence of thought (left after an education system that actively attempts to thwart both), you will feel helpless. In my experience, it is one of the hardest, most exhausting ideas to keep in your head. Most people can’t and won’t. It is simply easier, just like your father and his father and his mother and the ones who came before him to generalize. It is just easier to think to yourself: “Oh this human being is born with a few different body parts, there has to be something intellectually, emotionally, inherently problematic with them. Religion and culture are on my side anyway”. You get an ego bump as a side bonus.

I was sitting in London in my final year of BITS coding away in a friend’s apartment when he balked at his screen. His face spelt horror so I asked him, “whats up?” He managed to mumble something about the Nirbhaya rape case. This rape case caught India’s imagination over the next few days. There were a lot of protests and some soul searching. The national conversation was awash with questions about the physical safety of women. I remember being in one such discussion where a younger male colleague cried out in exasperation, “really is it THAT unsafe for you?” This question took me by surprise and it dawned on me how separated my reality was from the other gender. Things that I could never take for granted like what time to leave a party, how many people were there around me in a room, bus or train or how far I was from a safe space etc. were not even factors for another half of humanity.

Periodically such atrocious incidents capture the national imagination. (They happen far more often though IRL). Most people seem to be confused about why these “random” acts of violence take place. Thank god for the ‘MeToo’ movement which set the record straight a little bit at least. (Yours truly being very much a victim of such an assault). Which is to say that these acts are not really ‘random’. They are very much the outcome of our cultural subjugation of women. We like to sleep at night thinking that we caught the specific perpetrators of these acts and solved the problem somewhat. However clearly the problem is nowhere close to being solved. It allows some people, especially the intellectual and cultural male guardians of our times to set a low bar and avoid the issue of ‘psychological safety’ of women completely. I’ll take a page out of Noam Chomsky’s timeless exposition on ‘The Responsibility of Intellectuals’: “As for those of us who stood by in silence and apathy as this catastrophe slowly took shape over the past dozen years—on what page of history do we find our proper place? Only the most insensible can escape these questions.”

I would like to end with this. You are not obligated to think about the other gender. You are not obligated to think or care about anybody. (Which way you choose, whether to care or not is going to however determine the quality of your life and future). Still there is one entity in your life that you must think about and for whom I do not believe that I need to make a case(*3). That entity is your mother. Do yourself a favor and run through this thought exercise. Imagine her when she was your age standing at the edge of her youth and prime. What was being told to her? What messages had society given to her about her life and what she should do with it vs. what you have been given? Did she stand a chance at self actualization? How did that shape her choices, life and freedoms (or lack thereof). 

Don’t do it as a favor. Don’t do it for charity. Don’t do it even to be ethical(what does that mean anyway?). Do it because you for better or worse have acquired the label of being ‘intelligent’. Do it for survival. Do it because if you cannot even think from the perspective of your mother, stand in her shoes for a minute, you will not be able to discern how you are yourself being taken for a ride by the educational, financial, religious and media systems surrounding you. Do it to get better at the game of life.

Epilogue

One month into BITS Pilani, I had joined or been recruited to some groups. There was this senior guy in one of these groups who decided that it was completely valid for him to force me to eat from the same plate as him in a group dinner. He sat next to me at the beginning of dinner, a few minutes later slid my plate away as food arrived. And then proceeded to serve himself large helpings of food, presumably for both of us. For sometime he kept asking me to take a bite from this common plate. It took me a while to process what was happening, and at first I was just surprised at the audacity of the whole thing. I started defying the situation by trying to make conversation with other people and ignoring this guy, not having a bite ever throughout the whole episode. As dinner progressed and other people’s jokes and conversations settled down, this guy’s nudges became louder and clearer. My appetite long gone, by now I was frantically running calculations of good ways to quietly slip away from the situation without being noticed. Unfortunately, this was close to the center of the table. This nonsense went on for some more time. Finally, this ordeal of a dinner was over and I walked back to my cycle. And sped off in the opposite direction as soon as everyone was out of sight. 

I was quite disturbed by the situation. To this day I wonder what went on in other people’s minds as they saw this whole thing play out. The questions that raced through my mind were: “Is this the modus operandi here?”, “Why did that guy think he had the right to display such unabashed coercion?”, “Why exactly was I recruited to this group?”

After some consideration, I decided that I would let my actions speak for me. I decided that if I overcompensated by focusing on the group’s work over the semester, it would send the right signal and such future advances would be discouraged. Of course it wasn’t that simple. Over the next few months I watched in horror as such advances were attempted at other girls in the group and some even seemed to enjoy it. Meanwhile my own personal journey got harder and harder because a pretty and petite frame such as mine and the cultural stereotype that comes along with it was quite at odds with the goals I had set for myself. As the advances did not stop, I kept becoming sterner, quieter and less open as a person. I put in many sleepless nights working towards the keynote event of this group. After the event we had a review session during which many people doubled down on me criticizing many aspects of my efforts. However some girls who enjoyed the former kind of ‘attention’ continued to be a welcome part of the group and (without ever raising a finger for any stated work goals of the group) accumulated more ‘social capital’ than I ever could have . I can only imagine that many guys in my cohort observed the same thing. In this situation it would be understandable if some of them concluded that ‘girls have it easy’. It is disappointing though that so many of them don’t consider that these situations are not easy for a lot of girls and that these kinds of modus operandi further discourage girls who could break such vicious behavior.

Anyway, personally that review session was the last straw. Something broke inside me and I found it hard to trust most people at BITS Pilani moving forward. It took a lot of effort to get over this with the help of some amazing people (interestingly mostly men) I met later on in life .

I do believe that everyone would have been better off if people could be more straight forward about their intentions and did not have to resort to this kind of bullshit to find dates. And I still wonder what stops the same men from doing the same thing as they step out into real life with people who may someday in the future report to them? (Or does it?). I wonder if the stringent harassment policies that men’s rights activists have such a problem with, have a role to play in stopping such behavior?

Appendix

*1- Of course there is the occasional fairy tale here and there but we’ll leave that under the category of exceptions or good marketing 😛

*2- There is a more problematic context in which this concept exists and I talk about it here.

*3- Because if I have to make a case even for this, I am pretty sure such a reader did not survive this far into the post and/or our basic premises in life are so different that most of what I have said would be lost or futile to that reader’s mind

Worth a read: The Story Behind BITS Pilani’s Girls’ Hostel Curfew Removal

The Not-so-Golden Ratio: Where are they?

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This post is written in continuation of Musings on a BITSian Life: Basics and Musings on a BITSian Life: “Extracurricular”

In “Basics”, I wanted to address one elephant in the room. I call it that because that issue has a lot of bullshit surrounding it. My goal was to take that as a use case and demonstrate the act of building a framework. A framework to arrive at one’s own decision strategy.

I want to address another, larger, more complicated and more important elephant in the room. It is one of gender ratio. The despicable and obstinate gender ratio of 1:7 (F:M) that has persisted over the past decade in (Indian) undergraduate engineering batches (*Data Sources).

This matter is so complicated and by now I have been part of so many painful conversations, arguments that I hear a collective sigh. That is, an imaginary collective sigh echoing through my ears of a group of young people dealing with the gendered legacy passed on to us by the older generations. And there is hardly any acknowledgement of it, leave alone training or emotional tools to deal with it. 

So, one of the most common manifestations of this baggage is the question…

“Where are they?”

A question I hear often stated explicitly or framed implicitly. If I had a dollar for the number of times an older, younger or contemporary male has engaged with me in the following questions, I would be a millionaire:

“If women were as smart as you claim them to be, where are they?”
“Dude, come on, if so many men can crack these competitive exams, and women can’t, there must have to be some kind of deficiency, I mean it’s a pattern right?”
“So I guess we have to lower the bar now for more of them to get here?”

No, no. Don’t get me wrong. Simply asking the question is not wrong. However why and how you ask this question (out loud or in your head) is very important. Firstly, you are neither original for thinking it (in your head). Neither are you a trailblazer for asking it (out loud). You have plenty of company. In history. In government. In education. In laws. Take any aspect of society and you have plenty of company in asking it. So that moment when this question arises in your mind, remember to take a step back and recognize it as a larger echo of our society. This question and that moment is the legacy of our past generations. Remember that.

It is politically incorrect to ask this question but not for reasons that you might think so. Does it offend women? Yeah sure. Does it make you sound like a douche? Yes, maybe, depending on how you frame it. But this is not why it is weird to ask this question. The reason it is weird to ask this question is because up until recently society already had an answer for it. And our current society is designed assuming that that answer was correct. 

What do you mean?

Here are some examples of spectacular female scientists and the sentences that surround the description of their life stories:

Kamala Sohonie : “her application was turned down by the then-Director and Nobel Laureate Prof. C V Raman on the grounds that women were not considered competent enough to pursue research”….“She will not spoil the environment of the lab (she should not be a ‘distraction’ to the male researchers)”… “Though Raman was a great scientist, he was very narrow-minded. I can never forget the way he treated me just because I was a woman. Even then, Raman didn’t admit me as a regular student. This was a great insult to me. The bias against women was so bad at that time. What can one expect if even a Nobel Laureate behaves in such a way?”
Lise Meitner : “…women were not allowed to attend public institutions of higher education in Vienna…”, “she and Otto Frisch did not share in the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for nuclear fission, which was awarded exclusively to her long-time collaborator Otto Hahn. Several scientists and journalists have called her exclusion ‘unjust’”….”According to the Nobel Prize archive, she was nominated 19 times for Nobel Prize in Chemistry between 1924 and 1947, and 29 times for Nobel Prize in Physics between 1937 and 1965”
Mary Somerville : “I resented the injustice of the world in denying all those privileges of education to my sex which were so lavishly bestowed on men”….. “The Morning Post declared in her obituary that ‘Whatever difficulty we might experience in the middle of the nineteenth century in choosing a king of science, there could be no question whatever as to the queen of science”
Nan Laird : “I had to make choices early in my career….My first husband and I separated when I entered graduate school, and, as a single mother, I jealously guarded my time for the sake of my son….I decided to eliminate activities that did not lead to academic publications or teaching success….It was always a surprise to me that many men do socialize at work.”
Henriette von Aigentler: “She was refused permission to audit lectures unofficially.”
James Barry : “Barry was born Margaret Ann Bulkley and was known as female in childhood. Barry lived as a man in both public and private life, at least in part in order to be accepted as a university student and pursue a career as a surgeon, with Barry’s birth sex only becoming known to the public and to military colleagues after death.”

This is a small sample. You must be thinking, “So what? How does that answer “Where are they?” And why should I care why it is politically incorrect to ask that?”

1 – For most of modern history, Culture, Law and Religion have operated on the underlying idea that women do not possess the cognitive abilities and objectivity for science and engineering. (*2) They form a richly vicious self-sustaining feedback loop augmenting this idea in each other’s spheres. Every time some reform is attempted in one sphere, it is quickly inadequate in the face of feedback forces from other spheres.

For a moment imagine if we did not have the artificial barriers that women have faced over several centuries. We would today be talking of Noetherian Mechanics, Somervillean distributions or Hypatia’s Theorems. Young boys and girls like you and me would not be raised with faulty notions and unnecessary damaging doubts regarding one half of human species’ capability to do something.

Thanks to the insurmountable battles fought by a few men and women over the past decades to change the narrative, and painstaking research by psychologists, we have hardcore evidence that this underlying notion is nonsense. However large sections of humanity spanning multiple age, income and education brackets have completely missed the memo. 

If an alien read Indian memes,“its-just-a-joke” conversations that do the rounds on WhatsApp, or listened extensively to the conversations of husbands and young men over the past 100 years (if not more), it would seem that taking cheap digs at the feminine self esteem was the prevalent national sport, not cricket. “women can’t drive”, “wives are a nag”, “too emotional”, “too talkative” are several manifestations of the same thing, cheap digs at the feminine self esteem. In Silicon Valley this ugly zeitgeist surfaces its head regularly, sometimes by way of so-called “logical”, “rational” manifestos like these.

Any reasonably emancipated woman with some capacity of independent thought knows that this idea is nonsense. However convention is heavily armed against her. You, the unsuspecting young person are standing in the middle. This is why it is politically incorrect to ask this question. Convention is so sure about its wrong answer that it has religious laws and cultural norms going back 100s of years for backup in the face of any doubt. However, walk up to a young girl who’s spirit has not yet been thwarted or an older woman who survived society’s assault on her self esteem and you will find an attempt at compensating for this deficit.

“Still doesn’t answer ‘where are they’? ”

The Funnel

2 – There is this concept of joint probability. While it is much easier to model probabilities of binary events like admissions conditioned on single factors, in reality it is a multi-variate problem. For an event to actually happen in real life, its joint probability has to multiply out in its favor. 

“Why is this relevant?”

Just as an example, math performance on national tests have demonstrated no gender disparities in many countries. However this does not necessarily translate into better female representation in engineering or sciences. Because this is just one factor. For a girl to survive the journey to becoming a scientist/engineer (or anything meaningful in any career/endeavor), many probabilities have to work out in her favor to make it there. Here’s an example funnel:

The Funnel
The Funnel

In my personal experience I have met many men who have expressed outright disbelief that young girls still face such barriers. However hard it is to accept it, the reality is sadly just that. While growing up I heard some form of all of it. These are the exact verbatim sentences I have heard, no matter how well I did at school or may do in life:
~~
“Ab khana banana sikhado, ladkiyon ki jagah kitchen main hi hai” / “High time she learnt cooking, girls belong to the kitchen”
“Beta badhai ho 1st aane ke liye…Par ghar ka kaam to tumhe hi sambhalna padega” / “Congratulations dear on topping your school, but you still have to take responsibility of the house”
“Engineer kyun banna hai? Ladkiyan toh doctor banti hain” / Why do you want to become an engineer? Girls usually become doctors.”
“Shaadi ke baad sheher aur job toh change tumhe hi karne padenge” / “Well, after marriage you will have to be the one to move cities and change jobs”
“Aap beti ko US bhej rahe hain? Log toh bete ki padhai par itna kharcha karte hain.”/ “You are sending your daughter to the US? People generally spend that much only for a son’s education.”(*3)
~~
“There needs to be a shift in how families and female students think about professional choices for women. A large percentage of women decide not to join IITs despite having qualified the exam—their decision to opt out is a huge loss to the institutions and to the society at large,” said Ruchira Shukla, regional lead, South Asia, venture capital-International Finance Corporation. “This is often driven by the misconception that engineering is not an ideal profession for women.” (2018) (*4)
“Every year, many highly talented women just miss a seat at the IITs. The main reason is societal biases that place geographical constraints on women and deny them equal access to preparation for the highly competitive JEE (Advanced) entrance exam,” said Timothy A Gonsalves, director, IIT Mandi. (2018) (*4)


Just in the case of Computer Science, the scenario is even more special (worse):

Source (worth a read): https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding


~~

If you happened to click on the wikipedia links I listed above of a few women in history, you may have noticed that they all have one thing in common. All of those women jumped unimaginable barriers, were able to pursue their passions and survived censorship in history only because atleast once in their lives they met or had a phenomenally open-minded backer. In some cases it was a male in the form of a father or husband. In some cases it was an extraordinarily protective & supportive maternal family. And in the last case, the person decided to live out her adult life as a male, seeing no other way to match her potential with her reality.

Next, I did not quote some of those verbatim sentences that followed me around while growing up to give an excuse. No, no, they never deterred me, not even for a moment. But this was only because I also have extraordinarily open-minded and exceptionally supportive and protective parents. It was them who put in the back breaking hard work to build walls that protected me from bullshit till I turned old enough to not let it break me. 

Everyone does not have this. 

I can only imagine that if you don’t have some counter balancing forces for this perennial undermining of your self-esteem, you would have to break and give in at some point. It is not an excuse for not doing something but it is also a reality that countless generations of women have faced and continue to face.

What you see at BITS is a ratio that is the outcome of many such funnels. Of many joint probability chains that never made it.  
There is a significant difference in the joint probability distribution for men and women. This is hard to see, especially in the backdrop of social media echo chambers, “apparent” focus on feminism and the “attention” women will get on campus. 

However it is these multivariate factors which are going to play out over the next few years in front of you. They have played out already to some extent as you stand at the gates of BITS Pilani. But its about to get “better” (by which I mean worse). This is what I want to talk about next. The Havoc. That lays ahead of you.

Epilogue

There is a 3rd reason it is politically incorrect to ask “Where are they?”. This is when you are not really asking a question but looking around for confirmation of your biases, and for company in your prejudice. The kind of thing people do with Facebook statuses and social media in general, seeking out their own echo chamber. It is not very hard to discern this intention. Because in the face of mounting evidence or information which fails to satisfy the bias, such people get super personal, super fast. They already have Convention to fall back on. In case a complete picture or more understanding or more nuance offers a good fight, the next best thing is a personal attack. “Who does she think she is?”, “I will prove to her via ostracism how unpopular and wrong she is”, “I met this one other girl in my life who fit my bias and that is proof enough that I am right and generations of women are wrong”. Again you are not alone. Look at the world around you. We live in a broken world because many so-called “great” men before you have done the same. It is easy, comfortable and you have plenty of company. I want to explore the implications of this so-called comfort, not for the world (who cares dude :P) but for You, in the coming sections: Why Should I Care? and What are the Odds?

I have also spent some time in this piece entertaining a hypothesis, the underlying notion that women lack some cognitive abilities. And also, that we live in such a godforsaken world that we require proof to dispel these ideas. While I was growing up, this idea seemed so illogical and preposterous to me that I could not imagine that someone would actually believe it. However, its repercussions had started affecting my life as early as a teenager. I was “that nerdy girl” Sheryl Sandberg talks about in her book “Lean In”. I was bossy, headstrong and either too quiet or too outspoken. It took me many years to put my life experiences as a young girl in perspective. 

Still, before entering BITS I naively assumed that the basic IQ filter applied via competitive exams would ensure some rationality and decency about gender equality. In reality though, it was but a stepping stone in a spectacular, repeated and successive shattering of my assumptions and comfort zones.

And I do want to cite 2 most poignant reminders of this ugly zeitgeist, which I faced very recently. One was where a fellow male student reminded me in a private discussion that women must ultimately learn to bend and bow in front of him because that is their place in life. This person had the highest imaginable honor you can think of in Indian competitive exams, went through years of engineering studies at the most elite institutions in India and will possibly design some of the more influential AI systems in the future.

And the 2nd was when a male peer at one of my workplaces informed me that the only way we could fix the representation of women in tech was by “lowering the bar”. This is another one of those “politically incorrect” concepts that I want to talk about because in my opinion it played a major role in the gendered experience of my undergraduate years. And contributed much to the Havoc that I want to talk about.

Appendix

(*Data Sources- I have been searching around for hard numbers for this infamous gender ratio and phenomenon that gets quoted often in media and otherwise. I would like to acknowledge this excellent set of data collected by Nirant Kasliwal. Some gender ratios for colleges other than BITS were quoted in this article by ET. PSA: I am totally in the market for more such objective pieces of data collection on other institutes across the country. Please let me know if you have similar numbers on institutions you attended and I would love to create a publicly available dataset out of them. Thanks!)

*2- This may come as a shock to some of you. Another name for this shock is acquiring historic perspective on modern inequalities and problems.

*3- Of course I wish I could show up in an invisibility cloak and capture such people’s expressions when my parents informed them that I was going to study on full scholarship.

*4- https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/services/education/to-improve-gender-ratio-at-iits-start-at-school-level/articleshow/63089610.cms