IT in the movies
IT IN THE MOVIES
If we don’t have enough women in IT, blame it on Hollywood!
Every so often we see hand-wringing in the press lamenting the fact that we don’t have enough women in IT. For some recent examples check out “What is it about girls and IT?” (Financial Times) and “Making IT work for women” (Computerworld). Well, for one of the main culprits, look no further than the silver screen, whose role models help to shape our kids’ career choices.
Of all the professions misrepresented in Hollywood – which is just about all of them – IT clearly gets the worst treatment. Never mind the computers, which display the ultimate in technological contradictions: fantastic graphics, super-computing processing power and universal networking capabilities – combined with such poor security that anyone can break in simply by typing conversational English and guessing the right password. No, one can forgive Hollywood its hardware fantasies – it’s the people and the profession that are the problem.
Despite job simplification on the silver screen, some semblance of reality usually manages to find its way into most scripts. For example, we’ve all got at least a vague idea of what to expect in fields like law, the police, journalism and finance (which, by the way, constitutes 95% of the working population of Scriptville). However, when it comes to IT, we are asked to totally suspend all belief.
The scriptwriting rules for IT are really very simple:
- There is no such thing as an IT profession, with its developers, analysts, ops staff, project managers and CIOs. There are only hard-core techies, period. This wouldn’t be so bad if the techies were normal people, but they’re anything but that (next point).
- There are two categories of techie: (1) the brilliant, techno-geek rebel/social misfit in his late teens, who’s got a bone to pick with some corporation – or with society as a whole (2) the sassy ten year school kid who has total mastery over whatever computer system he or she comes into contact with.
- Whatever the scale of the undertaking – space-launched lasers for James Bond villains, or the complete infrastructure and security systems for Jurassic Park – you never need more than one person! Two would be a crowd. As for a team, fuhgettaboutit…
Take James Bond movies, for example, with their complex mix of systems and technology needed to menace democracy and dominate Earth. What should normally be a multi-billion dollar effort involving at least 5 000 IT staff and systems integrators is all effortlessly achieved by a single individual! Actually, there are 5 000 people in Spectre or whatever the evil organization is now called, but 4 997 of them work in security. The remaining three are the villain, his sidekick and the resident IT expert. In the only exception to the teen rule, this person is always a man in his forties (never a woman – what happened to equality of the sexes here?), whose final reward is always to die with his scheming boss in a ball of fire or a hail of bullets in the final scene.
Jurassic Park is another example of the rules of IT scriptwriting – and a disappointing one, because whereas James Bond films by definition defy belief, one would at least have expected an icon like Steven Spielberg to put some effort into it. But what does he throw at us instead? The archetype geek! A fat slob developer in a Bermuda shirt and nerd-specs, pushing 280-300 lbs, with his ass hanging out of his pants, and the social skills of the very dinosaurs his systems are supposed to keep in check. This moronic whiz-kid is supposed to deliver the complex systems that control, amongst other things, fully automated guided tours, security gates, motion-detector sensors, and high-voltage fences which will protect humans from man-eating dinosaurs. Shame on you, Steven, you could have done better! (At least when Seinfeld created Newman using the same actor, he had the good sense to cast him as a postal worker).
Before Harrison Ford in Firewall (2006), Hollywood had yet to feature a single IT executive or manager, or indeed any white-collar worker hero. This has probably gone a long way towards dissuading women from seeking a career in the profession. Until scriptwriters realize that IT is about so much more than the laptop environments on which they churn out their techno-geek disbelief, women will continue to head towards the better portrayed professions such as law, journalism or finance.
MG
