How To Be A Woman Programmer Analysis

Ellen Ullman wrote How to Be a “Woman Programmer” it embarks on the sexism that she has faced during the sixties where sexism had started to peak. She and two other women has endorsed comments from her boss and coworker, touched when hadn’t consented to it. Women had become outsiders in the male dominated work place, and Ullman hired start-ups which consisted mainly of younger women. She doesn’t tell other women to bit the bullet and take all the remarks and anything else that comes with sexism because she herself did not do that. To let all the prejudice women face and use it to make your dignity.
You throw like a girl. Five simple words, they are meant to be an insult towards males. Yet, it is not just an insult to males but females too. I’ve heard guys yell it to their friends every year in gym class, I’ve even heard it from my high school track coach. I’ve done track all four years of high school, but unlike more than half of the girls track team I didn’t run or jump, I threw with two other girls.
My senior year of high school we got a new throwing coach, it quickly became apparent that he would be focused more on hanging out with the guys than to actually coach anyone. Once practiced started we would go off to practice our
events. Us girls would practice discus almost everyday, while most of the guys would stay at javelin or shot put. Whenever, the coach decided to grace us girls with his presence he would talk to us slower and softer than he did to the guys, it was almost like hearing a person try to explain to a kid that their mommy has been in an accident but she’s okay.
There would be days when it rained so the track team would have practice inside. On those days the runners and jumpers would do interval running then yoga, throwers would have to option to do yoga and then hit the weight room. The boys track finished their warm ups first, the girls second, and me and the two other girls went to the weight room to see what the coach wanted us to do because he made sure we were always grouped together. We couldn’t find him but we saw other throwers in there and they told us to just make up a circuit and coach well get us because there was a specific workout he wanted everyone to do. We asked the teacher that runs the weight room for a circuit and he gladly obliged, he even remembered how much I could bench press and added a little more weight to intense the exercise. He even checked on us to see how we were doing, if we were doing the circuit right, even volunteered to spot us if we needed it. We ended up staying until the time practice ends for everyone while all the guys left, that's when coach decided to come in the weight room and he found us putting the weights back. He then asked if we were in there the whole time and if we even did anything at all besides gossip. It’s almost like the situation that Ellen Ullman writes; “the questions I am often asked about my career tend to concentrate not on how one learns to code but how a woman does” (726). As if females has to do things differently compared to men to become successful.
The next time it rained during the day but stopped about an hour before practice so there was a choice to go in the weight room or practice throwing, I picked throwing because I hadn’t practiced shot put in a while.
Coach made a comment on how my nails would get ruined because the shot put area is mostly mud. That’s when I just had to look him in the eyes because he was the prejudice I had to fight. Ullman wrote; “staring prejudice in the face imposes a cruel discipline: to structure your anger, to achieve a certain dignity, an angry dignity”( 730). That dignity that grew all season was angry dignity, and it was what got me to break the girls throwing discus distance by two inches. I believe that was my biggest screw you to my
coach.