Women find new ways to hack it in Silicon Valley

A FEW MONTHS before my daughter’s appearance in the world, we went along to a birthing centre in the middle of Silicon Valley to see how it could help. It reflected, I think, the Valley’s general attitude to young families at the time. It was in a converted cubicle farm, with a few ferns thrown where there would usually be water coolers. The carpet, fluorescent lighting, and even some of the posters on the wall seemed eerily familiar to a standard 9-10pm code monkey’s office.

At one stage, it was pointed out to me by another visitor that the next door was guarded by a halon fire suppressant system, generally used by the military and telecommunications, largely discouraged due to its damage to the ozone layer, and probably not what you want flooding your maternity pool at an inopportune moment.

Times haven’t really changed. Families are still something that Silicon Valley start-up employees fit around their work, rather than the other way around.

The affluent upper middle-class here, like most of America, has a lifestyle that lets them cushion both parents’ lives with a world of nannies and daycare. But for most employees, either the mother or the father has to take a few years out of the workplace. And in Silicon Valley, that doesn’t just mean the effective independence of having your own paycheck – it means being excluded from the primary social environment that many of the tech towns up and down the San Francisco Bay muster.

Of course, this happens primarily to women. And of course, because this is the Valley, some of the most interesting social solutions to the problem are being approached – by women – as an engineering problem. I’ve just spent a couple of hours in my local hackerspace talking to the founders of Hacker Moms, a co-operative of local parents who have pooled their resources and their skills to set up a hackerspace for themselves.

Hackerspaces, to pull back for a moment, are part workshop, part geek hang out, part reference library, part classroom. They are not uniquely a Silicon Valley creation; there are hundreds around the world, and many of the pioneers started in Europe but they’re a form of organisation that the Valley has leaped upon.

In the cramped spaces of the San Francisco Bay area, there are at least five hackerspaces, and probably several more that fit the description, but aren’t for the public. The largest has hundreds of members, pooling $80 (€64) monthly fees to expend on the sort of capital items that the single nerd might dream of owning. Computer-operated milling machines, 3D printers, electronics labs, industrial sewing machines and high-end oscilloscopes – they’re everything that a curious techie might imagine in their ideal science club.

They’re also not work, although they have many of the tools and loose social conventions that employers here use to tempt the smart and eccentric hacker stereotype.

Google has its fancy cooks; hackerspaces have in-house kitchens where the geeks create their own culinary experiments. Facebook has a wood and metalshop for its employees to kill time. Hackerspaces do too, except you don’t have to work for Facebook. Or anyone at all.

Which brings us back to the years of pre-school childraising, when, given the paucity of paternity and maternity leave in the United States, so many women in Silicon Valley are at home, isolated from others, with very little time to themselves, and only small windows for their own intellectual or creative pursuits beyond parenthood.

Work is life for many geeks in the Valley; so if you’re not working, there’s not much else to do. Unless you combine hackerspaces with parenthood, which is exactly what the Hacker Moms have done.

They have a space, with the amenities a hackerspace can provide, plus co-operative childcare. They are building up craft centres, computer corners, and looking to prep the same kind of workshops as other hackerspaces, suitably cushioned for young kids.

Can you really build a child-friendly environment that’s also captivating to a technical mind? It’s a moot point around here, where environments like the Tech Museum in San Jose and the Exploratorium in San Francisco have long ago learned that attracting kids and geeks is an easy double to manage.

There may not be quite as many pieces of heavy machinery in a child-inclusive hackerspace, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be a place where the curiosity of its members can run rampant.

Despite the strange, and still often unchallenged gender politics of the geek world, there’s a commonality of interest that centres in the Valley, and crosses any gender divide.

As far as goals and common aims, go, there’s not much that separates the Hacker Moms and their hackerspace, the Mothership, from any other geek centre of gravity here, except a particular time and a particular challenge of young parenthood – a challenge that Silicon Valley’s employers have signally failed to address, or indeed exploit.

And in an environment where it’s usually the creative spaces and the small teams that come up with the next high-tech revolution, that should serve as a warning sign.

The male-dominated elements of the Valley are already famously bad at underestimating the contributions of its women technologists. If they’re not capturing their abilities in the workplaces they built, that creative power will centre and grow elsewhere – and already is.