Illustration by Matt Daley

Straight, white men still dominate the technology industry. RM Vaughan introduces us to LGBTQ activists around the world who are fighting for change

STUART CAMERON REMEMBERS the first time Unicorns in Tech set up a booth at a major tech/IT conference. “People would stop and see ‘Unicorns’ and think, ‘Oh that looks like fun,’ and then see the subtitle, ‘LGBTQ in Tech,’ and run away! Or ask us why we were there. It was really terrible to see this reaction.” And that was only a few years ago, in very queer Berlin. As a Canadian who has lived in Berlin on and off for years, and who finds the city almost too informal and relaxed, to the point of difference-denying, I found this shocking. My first impulse was to be very Canadian about the story and become righteously indignant. And then Cameron started laughing. Sitting in his sunny Berlin apartment/office/hub with his two 20-something co-workers, the anecdote seems ridiculous to him, a story from a previous generation.

But the ugly truth of the tech/IT industry—that it is still overwhelmingly dominated by straight, white men—hangs over our giggling like a grey cloud. Despite its reputation for being the innovative and inclusive industry that propels our vaunted new Information Economy, most of the tech/IT world looks like the same old boys club. “The gear and the knowledge have changed,” Cameron notes with a shrug, “but the head office looks like 1975, not 2015. In terms of real representation, and money and decision-making power, we’re not even close to where we should be, especially since queers and women have always been present in the industry.”

Cameron, along with Jasmin Meiling and Marty Gormley, are the producers of Berlin’s massive Sticks & Stones, an annual LGBTQ-centric tech/IT Karrieremesse (a perfectly German word for this hybrid conference, career fair and party) that opens its sixth edition in June. From the funds that S&S brings in, the group puts together Unicorns in Tech events. Unicorns in Tech has a simple goal: to create events and meeting spaces in Berlin (and eventually elsewhere) where queers and their allies who are working in tech/IT can network and share information in safety.

Yes, safety. As Cameron points out, “in Berlin, tech is white and male and straight. There is still a shocking reaction of homophobia in that world. And, how does business work? It is built by networking and social circles: So why can’t queers make a ‘club’ the way straight men do?”

But it doesn’t stop at Unicorns in Tech. In May, S&S will launch #UNIT Festival, the world’s first queer tech festival, featuring over 40 speakers, performances, and art from all over the world all in one massive space. If Cameron is building an empire, it’s one that needs building. “We are trying to show the tech community that queers are a large community, a powerful community, and that we don’t want to just hear about ‘diversity’—we will instead make our own world.”

Angie Tsaros, a Berlin-based activist and co-founder of a monthly feminist crafting/gathering, puts it more bluntly. “I used to go to tech conferences and panel discussions and try to participate, but I’m a queer woman who does not look like a business woman, and it’s just too ridiculous to try to talk to a room full of expensive suits. I don’t belong there and they let me know that I don’t belong there very quickly.”
Why is the tech world so backward? Why does an industry based on knowledge sharing still need conferences and advocacy groups to teach them the basic values of diversity? Forget altruism, doesn’t everybody know now that being inclusive is profitable?

“Big tech has stopped pursuing diversity because now they know the right language and how to say the right things, so that they feel they have done their job just by talking about it. Also, when they talk about diversity, you never see any numbers for LGBTQ people,” Cameron shrugs. “I think it is better in North America than it is in Europe. When you tell European straight people you have a queer tech group, they think you are making pornography.”

It’s difficult to say, though, whether it is, in fact, better here. According to Canada’s Top 100, an annual list of businesses that acts as a guide to the “best places to work” in Canada, the “Best Diversity Employers” of 2014 (a list that marks LGBTQ inclusion) has everything from provincial governments to agri-business, all of whom, of course, rely heavily on tech workers. But there are no tech companies or startups
on the list.

Lukas Blakk, a Canadian tech expert who lives and works in San Francisco, and an old pal, recently spoke at a Unicorns in Tech gathering sponsored by SoundCloud. Blakk’s topic was a program Blakk created, in co-operation with a former employer, to build funded, safe spaces for marginalized people to learn how to code and thus gain entry to work in the tech field. The program was a stunning success, and several of the participants are now working in tech.

“Giving people space where they won’t be judged or feel excluded sounds obvious,” Blakk tells me one day while we hike up a massive canyon outside of San Francisco, chased by Blakk’s corgi Shortstack, “but it’s pretty rare. Some of the participants were living without permanent housing, and/or were gender-variant, or single mothers, and/or were underemployed—all people who have these amazing skills that they use every day just to get by. All we had to do was provide the space and the equipment.”

Blakk’s talk at Unicorns in Tech was well received, but Blakk is keenly aware of the pitfalls when social justice meets corporate profits. SoundCloud, the sponsor of the talk, is, after all, a third-party partner with Twitter and iTunes and is valued at between $1-2 billion (depending on which cranky music business executive you ask).

“Events that are purely social and don’t try to leverage the good fortune of being in a very competitive (read: well-paying) industry serve no tangible purpose for the marginalized community members who don’t have access,” Blakk emails me after the talk.

“Social get-togethers allow the company paying the bill to wash their hands of any actual accountability for changes in hiring practices, corporate culture, and civic responsibility,” Blakk continues. “It also lets attendees off the hook where they are being photographed and used as marketing for a very mainstream and privileged, top one percent agenda. Those who need jobs, access to better life quality, are in no way changed or helped by these types of events. I prefer hackathons and learning opportunities so that those who have are sharing back to those who don’t, yet. That, to me, is our responsibility to each other and how we make truly authentic community with others who share our marginalized identities.”

I put the same question to Cameron, and he welcomes it. “When I go to big tech events, I have to do so much explaining about who I am first. I feel safe, physically safe, but not maybe socially safe. I don’t think, however, in Germany, that companies are looking at what we do as a new way to make profits. For Sticks & Stones, companies have to apply to us and prove to us that they have good codes of conduct to protect queers before they can present. So, we profit off of them! What I have is a problem with companies selling products to the queer community, but they do nothing to improve their queer numbers. I hate that. Things are slower in Germany, and everybody here in tech checks to see what the U.S. companies are doing first.”

The core question of safety and, more importantly, of creating queer-inclusive spaces to thrive, remains mostly unanswered—even in Canada. In 2013, for instance, the Information Technology Association of Canada released a damning report on the representation of women in communications technology companies. The percentage of female-identified people on the boards of Canada’s largest tech companies was a mere 16.5 per cent. While there are no parallel statistics for LGBT representation, one imagines it is not much better. Queers-in-tech social groups come and go but appear, (unlike, say, HackerNest, a wildly successful, now international tech social gathering and information sharing group started in Toronto) to receive no corporate sponsorships. That’s not to knock HackerNest. Its open forum style and mission to spread prosperity via technology-sharing attracts a very diverse group of enthusiasts, even if LGBTQ participation is not specifically noted in the group’s PR.

Socializing and networking have value, actual handson activism has a deeper value, but the industry has a long way to go, and both Cameron and Blakk are still very much outsiders trying to bring change to a resistant monolith. “Being one of very few queer people in a company can sometimes feel lonely”, Blakk writes, “[Tech companies] need HR to make this sort of morale-building a priority to the level where people feel they can spend a few work hours a month on projects that improve the culture both inside the company but also build up connections with the larger community around us.”

A bitter irony of the tech boom is that companies tend to choose cities with high “gay indexes” (thanks again, Richard Florida), for their obvious cultural value, and then the actual workers displace the queers who make the city so interesting. It’s been going on for years in San Francisco, and has now reached the point, Blakk says, wherein “the SF tech world is primarily straight and male and it’s disrupting SF itself. We’ve got some amazing history here and people trying to stay here even as houses are being flipped out from under them.”

Berlin, with its low property costs and vibrant culture, is also quickly becoming a new tech wonderland. SoundCloud is based in Berlin, as is EyeEm, Wunderlist, and DeliveryHero, among others. It is also a start-up city for European tech entrepreneurs. And Berlin hosts the annual CEO-packed Tech Open Air festival. Subsequently, Berliners cannot stop talking, in increasingly panicked tones, about the rapid gentrification of their city. In the neighbourhood I live in, on the streets Isherwood once walked, cafes, bars, bookstores, and clubs are being replaced by kindergartens, modular furniture outlets, and“yummy mummy” clothing stores.

Cameron worries about the future he is partially helping to build as well. “The big thing is for the LGBTQ community to look at how we treat other groups ourselves. We have our own problems with sexism and racism, so until we fix our behaviour we can’t fix the behaviour of others. And of course sometimes straight people become interested in what you are building and then gradually take it over, away from you. But that will not happen as long as I can help it.”

Blakk offers a more blunt assessment. “Tech is supposed to be this ‘break all the rules’ industry that’s doing things differently but from most angles it doesn’t look that much different than the wolves on Wall Street I believe they (we) can do better.”

Straight, white, men still dominate the technology industry. In our May/June issue, This Magazine contributing editor RM Vaughan introduces us to LGBTQ activists around the world who are fighting for change. Also in this issue: Sam Juric tells us why we should stop painting foreign adoption as a Brangelina fairytale, and instead focus on the  not-so-happily-ever-after of trauma, mental health crises, and isolation that many adoptees and their families face; Nashwa Khan asks “Why is CanLit so white?” and challenges the default narrative in our current education system and literary communities; plus new fiction from Jowita Bydlowska, an essay in defence of Kanye West, and much more!

If you’re having trouble finding This Magazine at your local newsstand or bookstore (so many copies of US Weekly! So very many!) email our publisher Lisa at publisher@thismagazine.ca and she’ll help you find a store near you. Or better yet visit this.org/subscribe and get the magazine delivered right to your door.

A scientific and anecdotal rumination on why today’s kids are more than all right—they’re the best generation yet

I had only been a College professor for three years when Gregory Levey’s controversial and much-discussed magazine piece “Lament for the iGeneration” was published in 2009. I interpreted it as a cautionary tale: if we’re in the hands of the next generation, we’re really screwed. Levey, a Ryerson communications professor, basically argued he’s pretty sure education has tanked; the iGeneration (those born in the 1990s) can’t handle post-secondary learning; and that the gap between the schools and the kids is too huge to mend. Dismal stuff, but I understood where Levey was coming from—kind of.

I was terrified when I first started teaching. I didn’t have any teacher training. I got hired via email. There was no mentoring, no lesson plans, no prep. One day I was writing a magazine column in my crap clothes from home, and the next I was dressed like a grown up stammering through a lesson at the helm of a full class. I just wanted them to like me. I guess that’s why I took it personally when they paid more attention to Facebook than they did to me during a lecture. It was an out-of-body experience to have to tell them to turn their computers off and listen to me. I felt the same frustration Levey described in his article: “Radical advances in technology over the past decade have made today’s young minds incompatible with traditional learning. It isn’t just what they know or don’t know. It’s also how they know things at all.”

Seven years later, I still die inside a little bit when, inevitably, I have to give the speech about shutting down screens when I’m directly addressing them. I hate that I have to say it, but now I don’t take it personally. I still worry that they won’t get the crux of the lesson if they don’t give me their full attention, but I know they’re not mentally flitting around out of disrespect. Instead of finger wagging, I immersed myself in learning what makes them tick. Asking them to drop their tech would be like asking you to wear your shoes on the wrong feet. It’s do-able, of course, but does it ever feel wrong. What I found is that this generation multi-task very well, and that the cynicism surrounding the iGeneration is dead wrong. Not only are the kids alright, they could be the best generation yet.

My cynical generation is great at slapping critical labels on the iGeneration. We do it all the time. “Everyone dumps on the youngest generation,” says Giselle Kovary, co-founder and Managing Partner of Toronto-based ngen People Performance Inc., which specializes in managing generational differences in the workplace. “But this generation is scary smart.”

The generation born in the 1990s has pretty much always known things we haven’t: Facebook (est. 2004), YouTube (est. 2005), Twitter (est. 2006), Google (est. 1996) and Wiki (est. 2001). Social networking to them is what colour TV was to GenX: It’s hard to remember life before it—and just like T.V. used to be the big scare, we are obsessed over what the internet does to children of the iGeneration, especially now that they’re growing up. All of this freaky attachment to tech is seriously messing with the “social” part of their brains, some experts say. Everyone — including iGeneration itself  — is extremely sensitized to the way young people interact with technology. The list of scientific studies on the topic is as expansive as the more amateur commentary making its way through social media circuits.

The conclusions that such technology-attached-brain studies and commentaries reach are overwhelmingly scary. They ring not of advancement and exciting future possibilities, but of one word: beware. Take, for instance, the conclusions of one cautionary book. “Besides influencing how we think, digital technology is altering how we feel, how we behave, and the way in which our brains function,” says Gary Small in his book, iBrain: surviving the technological alteration of the modern mind, which he co-wrote with his, wife Gigi Vorgan, in 2008. “As the brain evolves and shifts its focus toward new technological skills, it drifts away from fundamental social skills, such as reading facial expressions during conversation or grasping the emotional context of a subtle gesture.”

In other words, the iGeneration’s techno brains are morphing them into socially-inept robots.  It’s easy—perhaps too easy—to agree with this assessment, but I don’t buy it. In my seven years in the classroom, I’ve witnessed how much more mature this generation is than I ever was as a student. On the upside, this techno brain phenom has resulted in a cohort that can think on its feet, make snap decisions and, on the flip-side of all the negative studies about them turning into social morons, there’s just as much research to show that students who use tech to communicate are actually fantastic collaborators. It’s like they’re wired for it. They are fearless about pushing buttons—literally and figuratively—and, as one article put it, it’s “as if they’ve been programed how to know what to do.”

I’m in constant contact with my students, partly because they demand it and partly because it’s just easier that way. Why wait a week to get an answer from me, when they can fire off a quick message, get the direction they need and then press on with an assignment? Isn’t that just working smarter? I’ve talked a student through a class project at 8 p.m., while she was still at school and I was grocery shopping. I’ve conducted a class from my hotel room at Disney World during March Break without a single hiccup. The students didn’t think twice about passing me around on an iPad to answer questions. What’s more, they all showed up to class, even though they knew I wouldn’t be there in body.

“This generation is known for its innovation and creativity,” laughs Kovary over the phone. “Think outside of the box? Um, they don’t even know there is a box.” This generation only knows a world where the next-best version is released quarterly. What they’ve internalized is that there’s no need to wait until every detail is perfect. Instead, you make adjustments as needed, in real time. This freedom of approach is what, perhaps, makes them the gutsiest of all generations.  As Kovary adds, the iGeneration doesn’t get stuck in the older generation’s static world, or even in the status quo. Change is okay. In fact, it’s great.

If the box no longer exists, neither does any sort of social or geographical barrier. Enter the now ubiquitous crowd-sourcing movement. What once was a small world has become a teeny, tiny world and no generation is more adept at taking advantage of that than the iGeneration. When I was a kid (Ugh. Did I just say that?), I wanted to be a travel agent. (Don’t laugh. Who saw Expedia coming in the ’80s?). But I didn’t know anyone in the field, I couldn’t find a college or university program, and that dream died. Today, those obstacles don’t exist. The iGeneration doesn’t blink at the thought of finding valuable life, job, or education connections though technology or social media. Just as those from other generations might ask their spouse, mentor or close friend, the iGeneration will source hundreds of “friends” and “followers” for love advice, career advice, and even thoughts on what to eat for lunch.

It can seem gutsy to put out a public SOS on Facebook or Twitter, but that’s the way the iGeneration rolls. “They will crowd source, no matter what the challenge,” says Kovary. “Their ‘pack’ is 700 people.” While critics lambast the generation for its me-me-me focus, the truth is that collaboration comes naturally to this extended pack. Their willingness to source what other people have to say almost makes relying on others second nature.

In one class, for instance, I blindfolded my students and told them to make their way around the classroom, being sure to touch each of the four walls before returning to their chairs, in an unconventional attempt to teach them about deadlines (newsflash: I set them because I can see what’s coming). Almost the entire group instinctively worked as a team, made a human chain and executed the task in a pack. In the end, I made my point about deadlines (my due date is preventing you from ramming into the proverbial desk you didn’t see) and they reinforced the notion that there is power, and trust, in a pack.

Perhaps surprisingly, rather than creating a generation of followers and drifters—as is so often suggested—this ask-everybody-and-anybody-everything-and-anything attitude has created a cohort of peers. This extends to all areas, including business, and pretty much anything where top-down leadership was once instinctive. Now, says Kovary, everyone within a corporation is a peer.  “If a senior manager says ‘email me’, [this generation] will,” she adds. “If you’re going to tout open communication, get ready!”

Whereas other generations were meant to maintain respectful distance, connecting with people—all people—is the iGeneration’s natural expectation.  Or as 23-year-old Katie Fewster-Yan puts it, because her generation is able to make so many easy connections with people, the top-down model of leadership seems unappealing, even obsolete. Instead, she suggests the term micro-leaders. She is co-founder of Ruckus Readings. Ruckus is a Toronto-based reading series that promotes spoken word literature, one of many, she admits, that exists in Toronto—an exercise in diversifying options, instead of competing for an audience. “Since it’s so easy to connect with people,” she adds, “You can really choose to follow the ones you’re drawn to.”

For Fewster-Yan, this has nothing to do with a sense of entitlement (another common, and tired, criticism of today’s twentysomethings.) In fact, she mostly feels like she has the inverse of entitlement: that her resume is one small sheet in a massive stack of overqualified resumes, not even entitled to minimum wage despite her university education. She guesses that, more than anything, is why many of the iGeneration start things on their own, like she did with Ruckus Readings. It’s not that they feel entitled to be happy or immediately successful or even that they should jumpfrog over others with more experience. Rather, there is a general sense that the old model of “shimmying in at the bottom, hanging tight and working your way up” is broken. And why, in this new world of change and crowd-sourcing wouldn’t it seem that way? “I think of plenty of people as role models,” says Fewster-Yan, “but I see them more as exemplary peers than superiors.”

Or, as 22-year-old Chanelle Seguin says: “The best part is that the older generations are learning from the iGen.” Seguin is the sole staff reporter at the Pincher Creek Echo in Alberta, where she is responsible for writing and designing the weekly community newspaper. In addition to putting in a solid eight hours at the paper, she also works part-time at Walmart to pay off the line of credit she needed to move from Ontario to Alberta for the reporting gig. Plus, she is a volunteer Girl Guide leader, is planning to coach hockey and is working on her own sports magazine start-up, Tough Competition.

She says her generation was forced to become leaders. They had to teach themselves how to use Facebook, Twitter, smartphones, Bluetooth—and the list goes on. Her generation doesn’t, she adds, follow the same way other generations did. In that way, she admits, they kind of deserve the selfish moniker everyone slaps on them. “We are almost selfish,” says Seguin, “because we lead ourselves and don’t consider following anyone.”

Even so, don’t ask for an iGeneration’s undivided attention because you’re not going to get it. It would be like asking a Gen-X to go back to changing channels without a clicker, or trying to convince a Traditionalist that debt is good. It just feels wrong. The iGeneration is of the “do it now, fix it later” mentality. But why wouldn’t they be? They’ve come of age at a time when technology changes quarterly. Change is good. Rapid change means things are getting cooler.

Some have labelled this trait as the desire for immediate gratification, or a lack of stick-with-it-ness, but I think they’re wrong. I think it’s a matter of momentum. They can’t stay static because everything around them, the social life-sustaining technology that triggers their all-consuming dopamine, is in perpetual change. Science tells us that brain function from age 15 to 25 is dopamine induced, which is why this is life’s most emotionally-powerful span. It isn’t until later, sometime from age 25 onward, that the ability to control impulses kicks in. Dopamine is the feel-good chemical, it’s that little Russell Brand voice in your head that whispers, “Go ahead, luv, have another piece of cake.”

The iGeneration is swimming in it. Science also tells us that hits of dopamine, for the iGeneration, come from things like Facebook status likes and ReTweets. It’s easy to confuse this with narcissism. While nearly all researchers peg key human development on ages birth to three years, prominent figures in adolescent research beg to elaborate. They say people ultimately become who they are during adolescence. The prefrontal cortex—the steady-eddie part of our brain—starts developing just before adolescence and doesn’t stop until we’re in our mid-twenties, which means from puberty until then everything feels really intense. We can blame this intensity on dopamine, a neurotransmitter that helps control the brain’s reward and pleasure centres and gushes when we do something that feels good. This entire process is about preparing young people to shape their own notion of who they are as people, as they strive for self-actualization.

In Jennifer Senior’s article, “Why You Truly Never Leave High School,” published in January in New York magazine, the power of dopamine is explored. She quotes studies on the “reminiscence bump”—the term used for the fact that, “when given a series of random prompts and cues, grown adults will recall a disproportionate number of memories from adolescence.” This explains BOOM radio, mullets in 2013, why NKOTB can still sell out, and why otherwise placid grandparents can still bust a mean jive at a wedding reception. Societal circumstances change with the generations, but basic brain development doesn’t. The drastic variable with the iGeneration, though, is the breakneck speed of technology. According to iBrain, we haven’t seen this kind of leap since humankind first learned how to use a tool.

Every human being experiences the same stages of brain development, in that we’re all in prefrontal cortex development from puberty to our mid-twenties. The difference today is that dopamine hits are coming from tech, and tech is everywhere, and tech equals perpetual change. According to Joel Stein’s article, “The Me Me Me Generation,” published in May in Time magazine, in order to retain this generation in the workforce, companies must provide more than just money; they must also provide self-actualization. “During work hours at DreamWorks (for example),” Stein writes, “you can take classes in photography, sculpting, painting, cinematography and karate.”

This whole self-actualization thing is a bit much for Gen-Xers and Boomers to stomach, especially in the workplace. I get it. And it took me a few runs at it, but I now see that self-actualization is the only way to truly reach the iGeneration in the classroom. I don’t fancy myself Michelle Pfeiffer’s character in Dangerous Minds, and I certainly have nothing on Dead Poets Society’s captain-my-captain, but when I handed out marshmallows to students in a magazine writing class I knew I grabbed them tighter than Facebook in that lesson. I had found a way to tap into their value system. It was all about them (ahem, self-actualization), yes, but I knew every student also had a story to tell.

Still, I had completely underestimated the power of my marshmallow lesson. I was humbled when one student’s composition described how it made him feel when he and his sister roasted marshmallows by candle flame because, as “apartment kids”, they never had the privilege of a backyard campfire. In Marshmallow, I expected a literal description of the taste of a marshmallow. Perhaps I underestimated the trust they had in me, and in their classmates, to share such personal stories. Educators need to find out what iGeneration’s values are by sneaking up on them with unconventional lessons.

I remember another lesson, where I had students write a hate letter to anyone or anything. Dear Money. Dear Coffee. Dear Dad. Anything. One girl, a Harley-Davidson employee, addressed her letter as: Dear Chrome-Loving Douche Bag. Of course, when I read it aloud to the class, there was an extended laughter pause, but the content of the letter revealed a real revulsion, and fear of, a middle-aged man who flirted with her during a sale. It’s bizarre. I’ve had some of the best Canadian journalists come speak in my classes, and I still catch students sneaking Facebook during the session. Yet, the Douche-Bag letter warranted undivided attention.

In a world so saturated with noise, it’s like the iGeneration is thirsty for honesty and direct, transparent communication. If you spin an inauthentic response, they will quickly abandon ship. I have to admit, there’s something endearing about a generation who wants to cut through the bullshit—much of it knee-jerk criticism of themselves.

Jennie Lamere is the brain behind Twivo. She’s 18-years-old and a girl. She developed the program for TVnext Hack—a national coding competition, or “hackathon” held in Boston last month. Lamere took first place among 80 hackers including grown, experienced businessmen in the T.V. and tech industries. She was the only person to develop a program solo and the only girl to compete.

The gaping gender discrepancy in tech jobs is pretty apparent. But is Lamere testament to a new trend that sees women at the fore?

A recent study that looked at jobs in the tech sector debunked the idea that women make 77 cents for every dollar a man makes. Instead it found payment was gender neutral.

Thing is, women still make less than men (on average $87,500 versus $95,900). But once you control for education and experience that difference disappears. People with the same skill levels—regardless of gender—earn the same kind of money.

But men and women don’t seem to hold the same kind of jobs. And the ones women fill happen to pay less than the ones men fill. A Forbes article reported on the study saying, “IT management, the fourth-most-common job held by men, pays an average of $123,000, higher than any of the other jobs men hold, and well more than the jobs held by women. For women, the fourth-most-popular job, quality assurance tester, pays just $71,000.”

The study also found women in the field have less education and experience than men.

So why the discrepancy?

Maybe it’s that women don’t want a part of the boys’-club culture surrounding tech jobs. Infiltrating male-dominated positions can be intimidating for a woman—or plain unappealing. Barbara MacDonald, co-founder of Willett Inc. told the Globe and Mail: “Women are inherently social, so they may view a tech start-up as being non-social – a bunch of guys in a basement sitting in front of a computer all day and all night eating day-old pizza.” Uh—no thanks!

In a survey released last month, Elance, an online job marketplace, asked 7,000 people why so few women hold tech jobs. Respondents agreed that lack of female role models was the biggest barrier.

And it’s true.

Only six of the top 100 tech companies in the States have female CEOs. And the 50 fastest growing tech jobs in Canada have just 14 females executives.

It’s a cyclical dilemma—women don’t pursue tech jobs because other women don’t hold tech positions. Fortunately, it’s a cycle that’s bound to break.

Organizations like Girls Who Code and CanWIT are giving women resources and support to enter and excel in tech jobs. And it’s not just important for women—it’s important for everyone. Blocking out perspective from 50 percent of the population limits ideas and collaboration—it stifles the creative process and potential for innovation.

I’m not saying science and tech jobs are the be-all, end-all to success in this world. As a woman, I’m no more proud of Sheryl Sandberg for presiding over Facebook than of Anne-Marie McIntyre for raising five thankless kids (love you, Mom!). Just so long as women have the right tools to take on whatever jobs they want.

What makes Jennie Lamere an exception—what let her dominate a room full of tech-savvy men—is that she had those tools. Her dad, a seasoned hacker, took her to her first hackathon three years ago and she’s been to five since. That’s an opportunity most girls, or any high schoolers, never get.

Now, thanks to ladies like Lamere, women are seeing they do in fact have a place in the technological sphere and will eventually shrink the gender gap. And as Rachel Sklar, co-founder of Change The Ratio said, “In the meantime, I am stoked to use Jennie’s invention to enjoy Mad Men at my own pace.”

Photo illustration by Dave Donald

A growing number of teachers and parents say Ontario’s current school  curriculum will graduate scores of children who are 21st century illiterate. Inside the fight for more technology and social media in the classroom.

Every school day from September to June at 3:30 p.m., Aerin Guy meets her nine-year old daughter at school. On this particular Thursday in February, Guy bundles up in a green duffel coat to shepherd her daughter and the family pet spaniel through their busy east-end Toronto neighbourhood. With only seven short minutes before they reach their semi, Guy launches her standard volley of questions toward the fourth-grader. That’s just enough time to probe for satisfactory answers to that question asked by parents everywhere: What did you do in school today? Guy wants to know if something memorable engaged Scarlet’s attention—besides the fact her tooth fell out. Most of all, she wants to know that she didn’t spend the day tethered to a desk, filling out yet another paper handout.

Scarlet’s grade four classroom has only one or two  computers— that she’s rarely invited to use—and a smart board that mostly serves as a projection tool. There are no mobile phones, no iPods, no laptops (though the grade six class has recently received a few of the latter). For Scarlet, and many of her classmates, it’s a bit like living in the Middle Ages. Here is a girl who can spend hours parked at the dining room table, MacBook Pro resting at her fingertips, a Yamaha keyboard on her right. With easy flicks of her slender fingers, she deftly scrolls through a website that she lovingly planned and designed herself, with a little help from Mom. She’s only too happy to showcase a digital resume of blogs, slide shows, Bitstrips comics, videos (made with a Flip camera and iMovie software), a podcast, and websites. One site promotes a dog hotel; a second focuses on launching a dream restaurant to be managed with friends. Scarlet reports she’s currently at the hiring stage.

Guy and her husband moved into their home in the spring of 2011. They were drawn to the eclectic mix of neighbours, and the proximity to restaurants and shops. Guy was confident the local school’s French Immersion, enrichment programs, music string instruments, and an annual musical would be a good fit for her daughter. Excited, the family packed their belongings, left Fernie, B.C. and crossed the country to resume life in Toronto, where they had once lived. What the digital strategy consultant didn’t bargain for was the divide between her technology-rich home and a school that doesn’t show the same appetite.

Guy is among a growing faction of Ontario parents, teachers, and education specialists who believe kids need more technology in the classroom, from blogs to Facebook, mobile devices and beyond. Without it, they argue, children’s education will become woefully irrelevant in today’s fast-changing world—think of it as 21st century illiteracy. These educators know it’s increasingly difficult to engage today’s student, whose life outside of school is inextricably linked to technology. A grassroots movement of teachers —who are starting to sound more like techies—has mushroomed on Twitter, and now a global network of educators openly share new learning strategies, and spread the word that technology promotes critical thinking, investigation and collaboration. “Without technology,” says Halifax-based Paul W. Bennett, a long-time educator and a senior research fellow with Society for Quality Education, “there’s a real risk that students’ curiosity will be suffocated and their education will be stunted.”

Last September, Guy joined the school’s Parent Council in search of allies in the push to integrate technology into the classroom. Instead of encouragement, Guy says she received blank stares from teachers, a litany of excuses about priorities, such as curriculum and test scores, and apologies. In a school with one computer lab, she was told, everyone had to take a turn. The Parent Council was (and continues to be) more interested in fundraising ideas and lengthy discourses on how to spend fundraising dollars—not rabble rousing for revolutionary education. Short of becoming antagonistic, Guy isn’t sure how to push technology into the classroom as a tool for long-term learning. “There’s just no will,” she says. For too many parents, technology is still considered a toy—and a potentially dangerous one.

Guy isn’t alone. There are many towns and cities in Ontario where parents are not joining the debate about the role technology should serve in the classroom. Some parents don’t even know a gap exists. While some classrooms are transforming into digital classrooms, many school boards continue to agonize over the decision to install WiFi, uncertain how to manage classrooms and control student access to the Internet, and fearful that student devices will compromise network security.

Parents feel powerless to incite change when principals say they are just following board policy. Across Canada, each provincial ministry of education is responsible for creating curriculum, while school boards are given the discretion of deciding whether to install Wi-Fi and to permit the use of Personal Electronic Devices (PED) in schools. Depending on where someone lives, a school may have: Wi-Fi and allow mobile devices, allow Wi-Fi and ban mobile devices, or allow neither. Ontario alone has 72 district school boards, made up of 31 English-language public boards, 29 English-language Catholic boards, 4 French-language public boards, and 8 French-language Catholic boards, and is home to 4,020 elementary schools and 911 secondary schools. With the exception of Quebec, the provinces delegate the tracking of Wi-Fi implementation to the school boards, therefore rendering it next to impossible for parents to gage progress—or challenge the status quo.

To date, change has mostly come at the hands of visionaries. Take Ron Canuel, now CEO of the Canadian Education Association (CEA), a Toronto-based group of Canadian leaders in education, research, policy, non-profit and business committed to education that leads to greater student engagement. In 2003, as director general of Quebec’s Eastern Townships School Board, Canuel launched Canada’s first-ever 1:1 laptop initiative. The $15-million project—mostly bank loans with almost no government money—put 6,000 laptops into students’ hands. Canuel was driven by twin goals: Engage kids in learning and enhance the teaching environment. Five years later, drop-out rates in the Quebec Eastern Townships lowered from 42 percent to 21 percent, and its overall ranking rose from 66 to 23 (out of 70 school boards). Despite his success, trustees from other boards were not persuaded to introduce a similar initiative. “That’s what made me think,” says Canuel, “about what is it that really impedes change? It’s that issue of courage, moving forward, challenging the norm.”

Only an hour east of Guy’s neighbourhood, the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board (HWDSB) is doing just that. On the second floor of Dundas Central Public School, room 208 boasts one board-sanctioned computer, five refurbished computers, one Dell Notebook, one flip camera, one iPod touch, 10 iPad 2s, one digital sound system, one green screen, and a plucky teacher who decided three years ago that something in the classroom had to change.

Heidi Siwak, 47, is the first to admit she was not an ideal candidate to become an early adopter of technology—“I was the Luddite in the family.” But something big had been nagging this teacher with 21 years of practice: the students were no longer engaged. They were just “going through the motion of school.” Siwak recalls days when students showed waning interest in the curriculum, and days when she lacked the luxury of time to indulge student-driven learning. She finally conceded the world was changing. “I would have to learn what technology meant to kids,” she says, “I needed to understand the genres. I needed to be using them myself as writing tools, as thinking tools, as reading tools.” So in the fall of 2010, Siwak changed everything.

This year’s eager grade six students who inhabit the large classroom with majestic ceilings don’t know how many hundreds of hours Siwak sat in front of her home computer preparing for the shift in education. They are, however, thrilled they no longer need to rely solely on textbooks to find answers. Now when they need to research, Siwak is more apt to lecture on good web search practices or, better yet, suggest they Skype an expert and ask their questions directly. Siwak has watched the world become the new classroom: students are immersed in digital citizenship and good practices for working in an online environment—all components of the 21st Century Fluencies program promoted by the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board.

In her new role, Siwak has morphed from teacher to coach. Rather than stand at the front of the class spouting content, she teaches thinking and encourages students to find opportunities where they can produce meaningful, original work that adheres to curriculum standards. They haven’t done away with paper and pen, but students are encouraged to record their stories, and to produce video posts on personal blogs that are shared with peers and parents on a board-supported social media platform. Last year’s class even made headlines after collaborating with a New York digital media artist, an Australian app designer, and a developer in Finland to plan and produce content for an augmented reality tourism app that promotes their town of Dundas.

The door to principal Barry Morlog’s office at Dundas Central Public School is wide open. He and vice principal Jennifer George (who has since been promoted to principal of another school) banter back and forth, finishing off each other’s sentences like a married couple. “I’m a computer dinosaur,” he says. “You were,” George says, placing emphasis on the past tense. “But I’m getting better,” he says. “And it doesn’t matter. My skills are not that important. It’s the people we have in this building who rolled this out for Jennifer and me.” He’s right: Morley has been blessed with a techie staff. He also works in a school board that was quick to recognize how students would benefit from the integration of technology.

The floodgates opened to this new way of doing school seven years ago when Morley’s district unveiled a plan to introduce Wi-Fi into their 94 elementary and 18 secondary schools. To date, only a third of the schools have Wi-Fi, evidence that implementation is a costly process that requires time to fully roll out across a school board. John Laverty, the superintendent of student achievement at the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board believes they have been successful, because the people coming into the board share a vision to make teaching relevant on three levels: at the student level, teaching level and board level. Their philosophy is to create an environment where students and teachers working in groups can access mobile devices, rather than interrupt the work flow to access technology stored in a separate lab or library. “We’ve been able to personalize instruction,” says Laverty, “without losing that contact with the teacher.”

Despite such successes, however, training Ontario teachers to leverage technology in the classroom remains a formidable task. Jim Hewitt, an associate professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, describes the Siwaks of education as “maverick teachers” who are creative and resourceful enough to experiment with technologies in the classroom—and who are also among the minority. “We are currently not doing a great job of training our teachers to use technology in educationally effective ways,” Hewitt says. He adds the Ontario government is exploring the idea of mandating longer teacher preparation programs, which would allow for more in-depth study of critical topics such as educational technology, among other things.

Zoe Branigan-Pipe, a seconded teacher in the Hamilton-Wentworth district, pre-service instructor and co-hort advisor who trains student teachers at Brock University, champions technology’s potential to help elementary and secondary students learn, especially those who typically rank in the bottom half of the class. Thanks to audio and video, for instance, students can learn without relying completely on text. It should be mandatory, she says, for teachers to learn how to teach literacy using technology. Yet even her enthusiasm is tempered when she considers that some teachers, though comfortable with technology, may not be confident with using it effectively in education—even if they do have access to it. Others may not be able to use it at all. “It worries me,” Branigan-Pipe says, “that we are encouraging students to use tools that we ourselves [the profession] are not proficient at.”

Take Robert Bell, who teaches a split grade 4/5 class just down the hall from Siwak’s. “The problem is that I’m learning five minutes ahead of my class,” he says. “I’ve taught older grades and I’m about five minutes behind them.” And while the introduction of technology has been an adrenaline boost for Bell, he has his reservations. He believes technology is a good tool for teaching literacy and math skills, but also that it’s not that simple. Technology will not make a bad teacher shine. Ultimately, he says, it is a teacher’s energy and enthusiasm that will engage students.

Yet, if teachers do not use technology in the class, can they realistically prepare students to meet tomorrow’s workplace challenges? Geoff Roulet, a Queen’s University education professor with a specialty in information and communications technology, says no. Roulet tells parents: “You’re training students for irrelevant and unpaid work if you restrict their learning to memorizing things and doing very basic skills that can be programmed.” The question is: Are parents listening?

Annie Kidder is the executive director and co-founder of Toronto-based People for Education. Her organization talks to parents every single day—sometimes up to twenty a week—and fields even more questions online. The organization was established in 1996 to engage parents, school councils, and communities in matters about public education policy and funding changes in schools. It also does research, provides support to parents, and works with policy-makers. Kidder says there are parents calling and fundraising for technology in the classroom, and feels that many parents care about the role technology should play in school.

If you talk to enough parents, most concede that technology is so pervasive in society that it cannot be ignored by schools. Many, such as Whitby-based father of three, Derek Marsellus, however, attach a caveat. “We shouldn’t be using it just because we have it,” says Marsellus. “We should look at it and say, ‘What kind of educational benefit is there to using it?’” Like many administrators and educators, he is cautious and wants to know what long-term impact technology will have on learning. Sometimes, he says, it seems like educators grab hold of these things and do not thoroughly ask a vital question when it comes to technology: Is this really going to help?

“I see that it makes it very exciting for the kids,” says Nadia Heyd, a Scarborough-based mother of three, who volunteers at her children’s school. She describes her first impression of watching a grade two class draw with their fingers on a Smart Board: “The way the teacher used it was very interactive. The kids are right in there. They’re very physical and they want to be part of it.” But Heyd, whose children are not plugged in excessively at home, is unconvinced that technology is essential: “If you have learned how to learn, you’ll learn whatever technology you need to know.” Neither Heyd nor Marsellus believe limited technology in the classroom puts their children at a disadvantage.

Branigan-Pipe is not surprised by this reaction. The new generation of teachers she trains for the classroom also cling to a back-to-basic mantra, because that is how they remember school, and—more importantly—they thrived in that environment. “They see tech as scary and bad. They’ve always been told, ‘No computer in the school. Don’t go on the internet. Don’t put your picture on the internet.’ Now I’m coming in and saying, ‘Do it.’”

There are pockets across Canada where this urgency and excitement is resonating. But outside these pockets, administrators and educators’ vision for school hasn’t changed dramatically. The call for action is still very new and many are unaware of the sophisticated tools that are transforming classrooms elsewhere. In communities where school boards and administrators are resisting change and guarding policies, teachers sense there’s no support. Sometimes lone teachers advocate for change, hoping principals will appeal to school boards, but as one teacher says: “It’s really a stressful thing to do. The easiest thing for a teacher to do is to pick up the chalk and ask the kids to open their textbook”—especially if parents are not demanding change.

Unfortunately, many parents, and even kids, still think of technology as a toy—and toys are major distractions, not assets, in the classroom. Few realize the power behind technology’s potential to teach. Once, Branigan-Pipe had a parent complain her child wanted to blog every night as part of their homework. When Branigan-Pipe tried to explain the blogging was an authentic way for students to express their voice and share their ideas with peers, the parent told her, in unequivocal terms, “No, it’s a game.” Parents, she adds, need to become familiar with the tools and discover what technology can do for their child’s learning. “If parents are not shouting for it,” Branigan-Pipe says, “and we’re not saying that our students must have these things, it won’t be on the top priority of funding. And change will come slowly.”

Kay Kritzwiser, a feature writer assigned to the Globe and Mail’s weekend supplement, The Globe Magazine, had never heard of Marshall McLuhan when, on a mid-November morning in 1963, her edior, Colin McCullough, asked her to write a profile of him. She visited the Globe’s library and took away a Who’s Who entry and a few articles about the University of Toronto English professor. One, a profile by Kildare Dobbs published the previous year, compared a conversation with McLuhan to a trip to outer space. “In orbit with him one looks down to see the comfortable world of familiar facts diminished to the scale of molecules; long vistas of history yawn frighteningly…”

Kritzwiser, who regarded herself as a woman with her feet on the ground, thought it sounded like a carnival ride. She read on: McLuhan’s first book, an eccentric intellectual critique of advertising and society called The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, had been published in 1951 to good reviews and weak sales. His second major book, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, had been published in the fall of 1962 and widely reviewed both in Canada and in prestigious international publications, and had won that year’s Governor General’s Award for non-fiction. Nevertheless, McLuhan was, for the most part, a high-brow academic whose challenging ideas on communications and media were confined mainly to university campuses and a few industry and government organizations. In the fall of 1964, he was two years away from the mega-celebrityhood that his theories in part addressed.

At that time, almost all female reporters were forced into one of two stereotypes: those who specialized in women’s page fare (weddings, fashion, cooking tips) and the so-called “sob sisters”—reporters whose great journalistic achievement was the use of sympathy to coax family photos from grieving widows. Kritzweiser fit into a third category that might be classified as post-emancipation and pre-feminism: independent, determined career women actively competing with their male counterparts (at half their salaries) who nonetheless saw no irony in backing up serious reporting and research skills with a feminine flair. They were the precursors of the liberated, college-educated go-getters who began pouring into newsrooms in the mid-1960s.

A Regina native, Kritzwiser was recruited by the Globe in 1956. A year later, she had established herself as one of the paper’s senior feature writers. In his 1999 memoir, Hurly Burly: A Time at the Globe, Richard J. Doyle fondly described Kritzwiser in a passage that also revealed an attitude toward women shared by many of his generation:

The lady knows how to bat an eyelash, swivel a hip, show off an ankle or arch an eyebrow. A rustle of silk announces her arrival, a breathless voice begins the interview, a laugh like [Lauren] Bacall’s punctuates the questions. Tiny gasps greet the most mundane of responses to her guileless prodding into the dark recesses of the hapless fellow on the other side of her notepad.

Until the interview appears in print. “Did I say that? I didn’t admit… but if I did… why did I tell her about… Who does she think she is?”

Kritzwiser’s writing reflected Doyle’s modernizing of the Globe in the 1960s. Although most of us take it for granted today, at this time people were just beginning to realize that objectivity, a goal of news reporting for decades, was seen as too confining to cope with the complexities of modern life. Features were longer than a conventional news story and had a beginning, middle, and an end; readers who devoted time and attention to them expected some interpretation, not just a recitation of facts. Pierre Berton and a handful of others had turned out these kinds of features from time to time since the 1940s, but now they were becoming accepted practice. And it was the only approach that had a hope of making sense out of a figure like Marshall McLuhan.

“How do you do, Professor McLuhan?” Kritzwiser said, stepping into McLuhan’s cramped, shabby office on the U of T campus. Considering McLuhan’s published statements about how the electronic media were killing print, it was hard not to notice the books: shelves groaned with them, they were piled high on tables and the floor, and they spilled out into his secretary’s tiny alcove.

“How do you do,” said McLuhan, standing up behind his desk and indicating a chair. Kritzwiser sat down, crossed her legs, and placed a notebook on her knee.

Like most things she did when working, Kritzwiser dressed for effect; this morning she was wearing her beautifully tailored grey wool suit with the pearl-white buttons and a stylish grey felt hat. She was a short, trim woman with a sunny personality and plain, boyish features. On most occasions she seemed entirely at ease, a function, in part, of several years spent in amateur theatre in Regina, which she regarded as excellent preparation for interviewing. She drew a cigarette from its package and politely asked McLuhan whether he had a light.

He was a tall, lanky man, his thinning grey hair swept straight back, handsome in a distinguished way, she observed. He wore a russet-coloured Harris tweed suit and, as he leaned forward in a courtly gesture to light her cigarette, she noticed his relaxed stance, the angular lines of his free hand on his hip, index finger pointing downward. Then he sat down and lit a thin cigarillo.

Kritzwiser was a social smoker. Cigarettes, to her, were mainly aesthetic, a prop, part of a formality that relaxed both interviewer and interviewee in the days before antismoking sentiments came to dominate Canadian society. Her brand was Sweet Caporals, not for the taste but for the red filter that approximately matched her lipstick.

McLuhan, she knew, had been born in Edmonton and brought up in Winnipeg, so they chatted about the West. McLuhan had no idea how to make small talk—he described it as “a world without a foreground, but with the whole world as a background.” Then he began a discourse about how the industrial revolution was symbolized by the extension of feet into the wheel, the knight-in-armour into a tank. Next the earth’s curvature was discovered, which led to the invention of modern media.

“Today, the central nervous system has been extended outside the body through the age of electricity,” he explained, smoke forming a nimbus around his head. “Literally, our brain is now outside our skull. We’re lashed around by the fury of these extensions. It’s like a spinning buzz-saw. It’s not known where the teeth are but we know they’re there.”

It didn’t take much to get McLuhan started, and he was warmed up now, his voice purring on eight well-tuned cylinders while his thoughts wound circuitously through a maze of theories, many related to a work-in-progress that would be published, a few months later, as Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Kritzwiser’s pen darted back and forth across the page in an effort to keep up. McLuhan was incredible; he spoke in what sounded like feature-story paragraphs, although following his train of thought was like trying to scoop up a puddle of mercury. It was, she thought, as though he simply hadn’t stitched together all the loose ends yet, as though he was feeling his way toward a new philosophy, like a blind man acquainting himself with a new neighbourhood.

An exhilarated Kritzwiser arrived back at the office. In today’s world, where computers are not just in most homes but now ubiquitous in the palms of millions, it’s hard to remember that 50 years ago McLuhan’s ideas—about a “global village” and a computer-driven medium of communication that sounded a lot like the internet—might as well have been science fiction. “I don’t know what I’ve got,” she told her editor, “but I do know a man has pulled aside a curtain for me. I don’t know what I saw but I know I glimpsed the future.”

Later she read over her notes. The story hadn’t gelled yet, she thought. She was still looking for what she called the “moment of truth,” that dramatic scene or anecdote or object that symbolically captures the essential theme of a story. But what was the theme? So far, Kritzwiser had a professor in a book-filled office and seven pages of notes that included references to Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Baudelaire, and Flaubert, as well as cryptic phrases (even though they were in her own handwriting) such as “in a non-specialist society, relevance will be our business.”

The following Saturday, she arrived at McLuhan’s rambling two-storey home in the Annex district of Toronto, a few blocks north of the U of T campus. There were bicycles on the front porch and inside the homey smell of a baking pie filled the air. McLuhan, in a rumpled flannel shirt and casual slacks, looked like a homebody sitting in his chair beside a crackling fire with his legs stretched out. He was talking to a friend who worked at the Royal Ontario Museum about a lecture he was scheduled to give the following week.

“TV is tactile,” McLuhan was saying, rubbing his fingers together as though he were feeling silk. “The eye has immunity to radio…”

But Kritzwiser’s attention was captured by a carved wooden slab of a mask hanging on the wall. Was it Greek? She was interested in Greek and Roman mythology and her instincts told her she had found the symbol for her story. On January 4, 1964, her article, bearing the title “The McLuhan Galaxy,” was published.

On the fireplace wall of the Herbert Marshall McLuhan home, a giant wooden mask broods over the living room. Visiting children swarm up the chair beneath it to stroke its satiny furrows. It is a mask of Tiresias, the Theban of Greek legend who saw Athena bathing and was struck with blindness when she splashed water in his face. Through she repented, Athena was unable to restore his sight. Instead, she gave Tiresias the power of soothsaying. She opened his ears so that he could understand the language of the birds. She gave him a staff with which he walked as safely as a sighted person.

Six foot tall and lean, Marshall McLuhan, an internationally known expert in the new science of communications, casts a shadow like a television tower on the University of Toronto campus… But in his home, sprawled beside the fire, the mask of Tiresias above him makes a provocative comparison. For McLuhan’s new global reputation as a communications authority credits him with the power to see as few do, to hear a new language and to walk confidently in the strange and frightening world of the electronic age.

It was not Kritzwiser’s best story. McLuhan was both charming and hard to pin down, and her profile was overly flattering. Some of McLuhan’s ideas were summarized but they weren’t critically analyzed, nor was Kritzwiser particularly well qualified to do so. Few reporters were at the time, but she might have included one or two of the critics of McLuhan who thought he was a self-absorbed crackpot whose theories lacked intellectual rigor, or more often simply lacked a point. The closest Kritzwiser came to representing that view was through an unnamed faculty member who said he admired McLuhan’s ability to challenge tradition but admitted he left his seminars “with a thundering headache.”

Her story was otherwise typical of how daily journalism usually dealt with McLuhan in the mid-1960s. The opening was revealing. The key phrase was the reference to McLuhan’s ability “to hear a new language and to walk confidently in the strange and frightening world of the electronic age.” Aside from tying neatly into the Tiresias myth, it reflected the accepted wisdom among mainstream journalists that the electronic age was to be feared and mistrusted. Since the public had as much trouble understanding abstract subjects involving science, physics, and technology as the press had writing about them, most stories focused on a person. The mid-1960s was a time of accelerated change, and McLuhan seemed to offer an accessible link with the future. A Canadian, he was emerging as an internationally acknowledged “expert”— which lent him credibility—but he was also easily portrayed as a literary invention: an ivory-tower egghead who might be a genius, an adventurous non-conformist who, against all odds, wasn’t a young, bearded, wild-eyed revolutionary. Instead, he was a respectable family man with six children, and it was as easy as it was natural for Kritzwiser to “humanize” him near the top of her story by presenting him in a Norman Rockwell–like setting where Corrine McLuhan, “wife and mother, calm, handsome and dark-haired,” appeared as “the pivotal force in the McLuhan galaxy.”

Sometimes the mainstream media seemed like a three-ring circus, with a few big attractions on the front page (or leading the TV newscast) and plenty of sideshows to ensure there was something of interest for everyone. Even papers like the Globe or the New York Times, with their well-educated readers and lofty reputations, still had to entertain as well as inform. A few months later, when McLuhan’s Understanding Media was published, The Globe Magazine ran a critical review by Lister Sinclair in which he declared, “He has become a writer and he can’t write. He has become an authority on communications and he can’t communicate.” Many academics agreed, and if the debate had been confined to the insular world of university scholarship, today McLuhan might be an obscure curio of the ’60s. But instead, he became even more popular and controversial; a “McLuhan story” had increased in value because it was viewed as entertaining, which resulted in more coverage.

By publishing Kritzwiser’s respectful profile, the Globe introduced McLuhan to an elite audience and acted as a stamp of approval, signalling to timid editors of other papers that McLuhan was important. Over the next few years, the momentum grew. Articles were written about him in virtually every major North American publication, including the New York Times, Playboy, Time, Life, Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Saturday Night, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and the New York Herald Tribune. (Which, in November 1965 in its weekend magazine, New York, published Tom Wolfe’s legendary profile of McLuhan that posed the Wolfian question: “Suppose he is what he sounds like, the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov, studs of the intelligentsia game—suppose he is the oracle of the modern times—what if he is right…?”)

As McLuhan had written, the medium is the message. That meant new technologies, from television to computers, were revolutionizing human consciousness and altering the context of communications, but it could also be summarized as content follows form. The properties of the medium were more important than the information it conveyed. Still, even many scholars had trouble following his train of thought, so, in 1964, the job of communicating McLuhan and his ideas fell to journalists like Kay Kritzwiser who focused on the most accessible information—and left the theories to the future in which we live.

A suspect wanted for questioning by Vancouver police following the June 2011 riot that erupted after the Vancouver Canucks lost the Stanley Cup playoffs. The law is still grappling with how to track crime in the age of social media and ubiquitous cell phone cameras. Image courtesy Vancouver Police.

After the sheer surprise of Vancouver’s Stanley Cup riots had dissipated, Canadian commentators tried to figure out what it all meant. Most beat their usual political drums—months later we’re blaming the pinko anarchists, capitalist pigs, and beer companies for making their products so darn tasty and portable.

But this being 2011, many who broke windows with one hand held camera phones in the other. And as myriad pictures and videos of the event began to circulate, another worrying spectre emerged: social-media vigilantism. Images of those involved in violence and property damage spread quickly around the Web, often with the explicit intention of shaming, catching, and even punishing the perpetrators with acts of “citizen justice.”

“We have seen Big Brother and he is us,” portentously intoned social-media expert Alexandra Samuel to the Globe and Mail. And really, who could blame her? Anyone who has ever taken public transit or gone to a movie knows our fellow Canadians can’t always be counted on to be fair, or even terribly nice. But if our mistakes and trespasses used to be judged by the mostly neutral bodies of the State, this new technology means we now run the risk of being tried and even convicted by the body politic.

This speaks to a phenomenon increasingly difficult to ignore, as centuries-long practices of law and social norms, whether privacy, ownership, knowledge, or even statecraft, are threatened by new technologies. These are worrying prospects to be sure, partly because they’re just so new. But here’s a radical idea: rather than throwing up our hands, or simply calling for the use of less technology, we need to spend time thinking about how we will reshape our legal and social institutions to deal with the inevitable change that is on its way. To protect the relative freedoms of liberal society, we need to build policing of technology right into our legal structures.

After all, it’s not as if what we’re experiencing now doesn’t have some precedent. Take the telephone, for example. Though it was an incredible leap forward in communication, it also presented the rather sticky problem that your communication could be recorded and put to unintended ends. Similarly, having a point of communication in your home meant that people could contact you at any time, whether you happened to be eating dinner or not.

Our legal structures responded by enforcing laws about the conditions under which telephone calls could be made, recorded, and submitted for evidence in a legal trial. Maybe just as importantly, we also developed social strictures around the phone, including general rules about appropriate times for calling and the right way to answer. Like most social norms, some people follow them and some don’t, but at least legally speaking, our rules around the telephone generally seem to work.

What we need, then, is a similarly measured response that institutes civic and legal codes for how surveillance technology can be used, whether that is encouraging social sanction for inappropriate use, or articulating under what circumstances public footage can be submitted for legal evidence. In the same vein, it would also mean the legal system has to deal with the dissemination of information for vigilante purposes, and ratchet up consequences for those who take the law into their own hands. It would involve the tricky process of the law considering intent and context, but given the different degrees in murder charges and Canada’s hate-crime laws, that kind of legal subtlety seems to make our system better, not worse.

Implementing these changes will take decades, not years, because the changes here are huge, involving how the State exercises its authority, but also how we as members of a society relate to one another. Yet the purpose of the legal system has always been to police out those two aspects of our lives. And rather than only decrying the downsides of mob mentality, the unfettered exchange of private information or the Web’s detrimental impact on established business, we need to think about preserving the good in this new technology.

Because there’s another worry looming here too, and it also is about historical precedent. In the 19th century, the rise of printing technologies and cheap reading materials drastically altered how ideas were spread. The State responded by instituting literary study into the then-new school curriculum so that the young might “learn to read properly.” Certainly, there were upsides: national cohesion, shared values, and proscriptions against anti-social behaviour. But it also meant that the radical element was contained and made safe, as youth were taught to think usefully, not dangerously.

We sit at the cusp of a similar moment in the history of information, and it’s certainly true that it occasionally feels like a riot— out of control and of our very basest nature. The fitting response, then, is much like the delicate dance of riot-policing done right: a reaction that enforces some order on chaos, while still protecting the rights and privileges such acts are meant to restore.

Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant in 'His Girl Friday'. Newsrooms still have a long way to go toward achieving gender equity.

[Editor’s note: On a semi-regular basis, we survey a sample of recent back issues of This to analyze the topics we cover, how truly national our scope is, and the makeup of our contributor roster.  See the last survey here.]

The new documentary Page One focuses on the state of journalism, its new technologies and decreasing revenues. And if you look closely, the trailer also reveals the struggling industry’s sweeping bias. The reporters and editors interviewed at the New York Times are mostly men (and they’re all white):

It’s old news that American print media is running a deficit on female contributors. Last year Elissa Strauss conducted a survey of major magazines in the U.S. The New Yorker had 27 percent female bylines. The Atlantic, 26 percent. Harper’s Magazine, 21 percent. And that’s just to name a few. You can view a more extensive list by VIDA here. And last February, CBC Radio followed up on the story, interviewing Canadian magazine editors about the same problem north of the border.

So when my editor asked me to survey a year’s worth of This magazines, I jumped at the chance to uncover our biases. Where did our stories take place? What topics did we write about? How many of our writers, and their sources, were female versus male? The results surprised me.

Methodology

My survey may not be 100 percent replicable at home. You can view the whole spreadsheet on Google Docs here, or download it as a CSV file. And you can check out the previous year’s stats (which tracked geography and topics, but didn’t track gender).

I kept track of every article that had a byline. I assigned each of these a location (e.g. Vancouver) and a general topic (e.g. environment). I also noted each contributor’s name and gender*. Then I took note of every person who was quoted. I chose to do this because a direct quote conveys the person’s voice to the reader. I also took note of each source’s gender. Quoted sources are very often referred to as “him” or “her” in an article. When they weren’t, I asked the writer or Googled names to find out.

As I surveyed the first magazine, an unexpected trend emerged. There seemed to be far more male sources than female sources. So I retraced my steps and added each source’s profession, title or expertise. I kept it up, hoping this would give me more insight if the trend continued.

Results

We haven’t changed much since last year in terms of geographic distribution. Ontario, particularly Toronto, appeared frequently (though we haven’t determined yet whether it’s disproportionate to Canada’s population). British Columbia, with particular emphasis on Vancouver, was a close second. This year it was the Yukon, Nunavut and PEI that went unmentioned (last year, it was New Brunswick that was non-existent between our purportedly national pages).

When it comes to our favourite topic, the environment is still number one. We also love technology and politics, as per the usual. Freelancers take note: we didn’t have nearly as many stories about racism or homophobia in this sample as we do about women’s rights. Transphobia was invisible between our pages.

This Magazine is a lefty indie not-for-profit with a male editor and female publisher, and our bylines are also pretty egalitarian: 53 percent of bylines over the year were female (76 out of 142). Compared to the male byline bias in the mainstream media, This Magazine constitutes a fair counterpoint.

However, when it comes to sources we’re not doing so well. Only 72 out of 256 sources quoted were female. That’s 28 percent. Suddenly we look a whole lot like those other magazines I mentioned. Are our writers biased, or are the numbers reflective of the status of women?

Both. Male writers were less likely to quote female sources (22 percent of sources quoted in their articles were female). By contrast, sources quoted by women were 33 percent female. This disparity suggests that credible, accessible, female sources exist—but men aren’t quoting them. Another factor could be that men tended to write more for our technology issue (13 out of 23 bylines), which acknowledged a lack of women experts in the field. Conversely the most female bylines (17 out of 23) could be found in “Voting Reform is a Feminist Issue.”

If our journalists are quoting people of the same gender as themselves and over half our bylines are female, shouldn’t we have a more even split of sources? Sadly it doesn’t appear that personal bias plays a strong enough role to account for the disparity. I have to conclude that the lack of females quoted reflects the status of women in society.

Think about it. Journalists quote people who hold positions of authority. As I read down the list of sources’ titles, I can say pretty confidently that our reporters interviewed the right people. Some of their sources are politicians, CEOs, judges, police officers, people of high military rank. In Canada, these positions are occupied by men and women—but women are decidedly the minority in those cases. In 2007, according to the Status of Women in Canada, 35 percent of those employed in managerial positions were women. According to a one-week old worldwide survey by the new UN agency for women, 44 percent of Canadian judges are female. Only 18 percent of law enforcement workers are female, says a 2006 StatsCan report. According to StatsCan the Department of National Defense, only 15 percent of Canadian Military personnel were female. It’s no wonder that our feature on Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan quoted no female military sources, and that our reporters interviewed few females involved in law when researching our “Legalize Everything” issue.

Solutions

The best thing journalists can do to eradicate bias is to be aware of it, which is why we do this kind of analysis in the first place. Without this first step, we can’t ever hope to challenge our points of view. Acknowledging bias includes direct and indirect bias. The first type includes journalistic and editorial perspectives. The second type includes structures that perpetuate the unequal status of women, such as advertising bias, media ownership, and hiring practices in the wider world. So although it’s a great start, seeking out female sources in law enforcement, engineering, politics and technology is not going to cure the gender gap. Those in positions of power must attempt to correct gender, race, sexual orientation and class biases when they hire and promote workers. Voting reform would help, too.

Don’t lose heart — there are also positive signs in the numbers. The equality of male-to-female bylines and the greater female tendency to write without using as many direct quotes (often considered a sign of reportorial confidence among journalists) challenges Strauss’ guess that women may be meek or passionless about politics and critical journalism. For a magazine with the slogan “everything is political,” this is simply not true. It could, however, still be correct for the magazines Strauss surveyed. After reading a year’s worth of This, I can safely say our writers (female and male) are unapologetically critical in their approach — and nowhere near shy.

We want to do better in terms of bias, and we welcome any and all suggestions on how to improve our coverage of underrepresented topics, locations and communities.

*I don’t believe gender is necessarily fixed, but it certainly has a binary status in our language. Whether the sources actually identified as one of two genders or not, our magazine certainly identified them as male or female; no articles used “s/he” or mentioned any other gender. Due to the superficiality and time constraints of this survey, it’s not possible to tackle the language problem right now. However, I would love to hear your thoughts on how this might be possible in the future. Email hilary@thismagazine.ca.

Since 2007, Maly has, like so many others, written a blog on subjects he cares about. His is called Quiet Babylon, where he writes about technology, architecture and urban spaces. But in 2010, Maly made the brave and unusual decision to quit his regular job, dip into his savings, and set himself a deadline to turn Quiet Babylon into his livelihood. Now Maly spends his time collaborating, thinking, and “creating cool stuff.”

Some examples? He curated the “50 Cyborgs” project, which celebrated the 50th anniversary of the term “cyborg” by gathering 50 blog posts on the topic from an array of writers—from fellow bloggers to the founder of Wired magazine. In April, he set up a design studio that will generate art and ideas about the concept of border towns.

Part of what enables Maly to do this is the web, which has allowed him to find and foster a community of like-minded people, while drastically cutting the risk involved in creating and publishing work. It’s an approach that in its collaborative, creative nature is eminently contemporary—futuristic, even.

In a sense then, Maly is sort of from the future. His practice speaks to the possibility that we will increasingly carve out careers in the spaces made by new technology—inventing ways to merge what we love with how we live.

Looking for answers: Alex Colville, "To Prince Edward Island" (1965). Copyright National Gallery of Canada.

Their jobs sound like an oxymoron in Canada’s present political climate; arts professionals earn about half the average national income per year, a large chunk of which comes from grants. That public funding is in danger since Stephen Harper made it perfectly clear he doesn’t consider the arts a priority. Given that the main agenda of his Conservative majority is to balance the budget, the Canada Council Canadian Conference of the Arts recently predicted cuts of “at least $175 million” to arts, culture and heritage. And two weeks ago, adding insult to the threat of injury, Sun TV attacked interpretive dancer Margie Gillis by distorting grant tallies in a ham-fisted effort to devalue the arts. In this state of worry and frustration, what can bring some sanity back to Canadian arts policy?

Jeff Melanson, currently co-CEO the National Ballet School, and soon to be president of The Banff Centre, made a provocative suggestion at a talk in late May hosted by the Literary Review of Canada: a new Massey Commission.

Canada’s “Magna Carta of arts and culture,” as the commission’s report was nicknamed, was released in 1951. The detailed document gave advice on the state of Canada’s arts, sciences, humanities, and media based on three premises:

1. Canadians should know as much as possible about their country’s culture, history and traditions
2. We have a national interest to encourage institutions that add to the richness of Canadian life
3. Federal agencies that promote these ends should be supported

With then University of Toronto Chancellor Vincent Massey at the reins, the commissioners were poised to spur government spending in the arts. But before I let you in on their recommendations, let’s set the stage with some juicy historical context.

History of the Massey Commission

Rewind 67 years. Canada was nearing the end of the Second World War, a key part of which was fought using propaganda. Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia needed to keep their populations confused and complacent; the U.S. and Canada wanted their citizens to buy liberty bonds and join the army. Information and creative expression were deployed against the masses.

Before the war, Canada’s government had no real investment in the arts. The turning point came when arts groups began calling on their government to support culture as a way of protecting democracy.

As a negative argument, stifling creativity is censorship’s equal. As a positive argument, the arts play a role in driving democracy through freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression. (Thank you section 2(b) of the Charter.) Citizens who think critically and express their ideas creatively are a basic part of any healthy democracy — they hold government accountable.

After the war was over, Canada’s government created the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts. Two years later, the commission produced a body of research and advice that blossomed into an independent institution by 1957. To this day, many artists still fiercely protect the Canada Council for the Arts as if their lives depended on it—which for some is pretty close to the truth.

The report’s key recommendation

Please direct your gaze to section 15 (XV) of the Massey report: “The Artist and The Writer.” Here you will find a time capsule detailing the state of such creative endeavors as music, theatre, ballet, painting, architecture, literature, and Aboriginal arts. It is, I think, a must-read for all artists — and any naysayers. It will remind them that Canada indeed has written policy that places high value in artistic work.

This section begins with the suggestion that the extent to which a nation supports its artists is a measure of how civilized it is. Just how civilized was Canada back then? The report quotes the Arts Council:

“No novelist, poet, short story writer, historian, biographer, or other writer of non-technical books can make even a modestly comfortable living by selling his [or her] work in Canada. No composer of music can live at all on what Canada pays him[/her] for his[/her] compositions. Apart from radio drama, no playwright, and only a few actors and producers, can live by working in the theatre in Canada. Few painters and sculptors, outside the fields of commercial art and teaching, can live by sale of their work in Canada.”

This raised a vital question for the commissioners: if artists were so undervalued that they could barely sustain themselves, how could they gain funding? It only made sense for taxpayers to chip in — to protect Canada’s democracy and “civilize” our apparent philistinism.

The commission urged the resurrection of the Canada Council as an arms-length body. It would boost not-for-profits, promote artists abroad, and dish out scholarships. The independence of this body was key. As Margie Gillis calmly pointed out in the midst of Sun TV’s sensationalism, the government does not fund Canadian artists directly; instead it endows funds to the Canada Council. The Council consists of no more than 11 respected artists and educators who hold their positions for no more than four years each. Grant recipients are selected through a fair and open process.

A new commission on the arts

Today many of the report’s recommendations are dated. For example, Massey’s posse tagged radio as a “new technology.” While it remains an important medium, radio has been swallowed alive by the web and social media. Artists have harnessed these newer mediums for creative projects, including this fabulous example.

But technology is far from the report’s only concern. As Tom Perlmutter, chair of the National Film Board of Canada, told the Toronto Star:

“What we need now is not one particular policy patchwork fix but the new Massey-Levesque for the 21st century. We need to rethink the fundamental conceptual framework that can give rise to the cultural policies that will serve us for the next 60 years.”

Whether it is updated or started again from scratch, this not-yet-conceived report should be the brainchild of Canadian artists. They should review those ever-important premises about promoting the historical and cultural richness of our country. They should reassess how creative minds are using technology. They should research how Canada’s cultural policies compare to those abroad. And, most importantly, they must underline the fundamental reason that Canadians support the arts financially: the health and vibrancy of our democracy.