When I first registered this domain name in March this year, I had left my previous job as a university academic less than 2 months earlier and I was days away from starting my Northcoders bootcamp in Data Engineering. This was a huge change on a number of fronts. I’d been an academic, a lecturer and researcher, for nearly a decade and a half. I couldn’t remember wanting to be anything else. And now I was clearing some of my bookshelf space, moving some of the fiction to make way for Clean Code, Python for Dummies and The Data Warehouse Toolkit, replacing my trusty laptop’s Windows operating system with Linux, and patiently solving coding problems with the Javascript and Python I’d learned over the previous months.
Who was I?? Was I mad to do this? (No, said a dear friend who’s known me 20 years and been a software engineer himself all his career. Oh good!) Was I betraying the values I’d stood for, for so long, by turning to a career in tech? I didn’t think so. Was I abandoning human connection, art, literature, selling out, throwing in my lot with the humanities’ enemies over there in STEM? No, I knew instinctively, even though it took a while to articulate why.
I’d written my PhD on gender and the history of intellectualism as represented in literature, and I knew from reading masses of research on cultural and educational history that divisions between disciplines – science and technology over there, literature and art somewhere else – have, historically and in the present, been artificial and often politically motivated. This is still true today to some extent. I disagree passionately with the devaluation of humanities subjects in modern education in favour of STEM, for example. We need every major discipline to survive and progress.
I believe technology needs humanities people. As a humanities graduate with all 3 of my degrees in literature, I wanted to really lean into my tech skills and broaden my mind again for the first time since I was an undergrad in the early 00s, making websites in HTML to host my blog and keep in touch with my school friends. (We had to make our own social media in those days!) But, just as my broad interests had made me a better literary scholar and writer, I think, my love of words, ideas and art will make me a better engineer.
Still, I was worried as I actually made the leap. I didn’t know anyone else who’d made this kind of career change, from Senior Lecturer in English Studies to data engineer. I felt nervous, lonely and, admittedly, defensive. By calling myself a ‘humanist woman in tech’ and registering this domain name, I was trying to make a statement about by newly-uncertain identity. Nevertheless, as time has gone on and I’ve hit milestones including completing my bootcamp in mid-June, I’ve realised I was right to see these different interests as part of who I am, because they always have been.
When I started the bootcamp, I didn’t know yet that it would be the key to meeting lots of people like me, and also to fully understanding the choice I’d made. I’ve been lucky enough to find my people more than once in my life.
I want to wrap this up for now before it becomes a thesis so, to finish, I’ll reaffirm my claim to being a HUMANIST woman in tech. I use the term ‘humanist’, a bit pretentiously, in its renaissance sense, referring to the intellectual movement that began in Europe in the 14th century in which scholars studied what it meant to be human in a variety of ways. The modern academic disciplines of literature, history, history of art and the social sciences are historically rooted in this movement.
I am a humanist because I say we need people from all these disciplines in tech, and because we must assert the centrality of humans in everything we do.