Mon, Jun 11, 2001 page24

• Hacking: not just a boy's world any more

  TECHNOPHILES In a field where status is determined mostly by skill, a growing number of women are finding a natural home for their ambitions and talents

  • NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  When Sarah Flannery was 16 in 1999, she won Ireland's Young Scientist of the Year award for her work in Internet cryptography. Although she is described in a recent book, The Hacker Ethic, as "a 16-year-old hacker," Flannery, now 19 and studying computer science at Cambridge University, isn't quite sure how to feel about that description.

  "I haven't read the book," she said in a phone interview. "I've been a bit confused about what a hacker really is."

  She is not alone. The word "hacker" calls to mind two stereotypes. The first is that hackers are bad guys. Among those who call themselves hackers, a "hacker" is generally defined as someone who loves to write precise programming code and takes joy in exploring the nooks and crannies of the Net -- including places that some would prefer they not explore. The second is that hackers are guys.

  

  Sarah Flannery, 19, pictured here at Cambridge University, breaks a number of stereotypes in that she is a so-called ''white hat,'' or good hacker, and that she is a women in a field largely thought to be dominated by men. At 16, Flannery won a national award in Ireland and international acclaim for her work in Internet cryptography.

  PHOTO: NY TIMES

  In fact, women who consider themselves hackers, as well as women like Flannery who just plain enjoy math and technology, have been part of the computer world for decades. Some are prominent for their accomplishments; all tend to stand out in their field because they are women.

  Flannery, who was obviously never given a "Math is hard!" talking Barbie as a child, has written about her adventures as a young mathematician and cryptographer in In Code: A Mathematical Journey, a book written with her father, David Flannery, and published this month in the US by Workman Publishing.

  In her book, Flannery writes of her experiences in Dublin during a stint at Baltimore Technologies, where she began to work seriously on what became her prize-winning Cayley-Purser algorithm -- named after a mathematician and a cryptographer -- which could be used for faster encryption of information on the Internet. In the spirit of the hacker ethic that information should be free, she declined to patent her algorithm, so that it would be available to anyone.

  Most of her work with the company was, not surprisingly, alongside men. "The women tended to be managers and secretaries and not to be involved in the technical side of things," Flannery recalled. "I wasn't treated any differently for it, though."

  But women with longer tenure in technology say that for better or worse, it is still hard to avoid being a curiosity. "The assumptions made about you when you get into a technical field are that you're either a feminist," said Carole Fennelly, 39, a Unix programmer since 1980, "or you're trying to make a statement, or you're some sort of supergenius.

  "I'm in technology because I happen to like it. I'm not trying to make a statement and I don't want to be treated differently. Technology is about facts and has nothing to do with gender."

  Fennelly is a partner in the Wizard's Keys Corp, a computer-security consulting firm in Tinton Falls, New Jersey, that she founded with her husband in 1992.

  Jude Milhon is a longtime programmer who taught herself the Fortran computer language from a library book in the 1960s. Although she was told to fetch the coffee for a room full of men at her first professional programming job, but spilled it so deftly on the table that her boss wisely opted to have somebody else bring it for future meetings, Milhon went on to work as a programmer and was an editor at Mondo 2000, a cyberculture magazine published in the early 1990s.

  "As soon as I got away from businessmen," she said in an e-mail message, "the world was different: respect for geekliness, double points for female." Female programmers are cherished, she said, explaining, "You're still a rarity: a blue rose, a precious freak."

  In addition to being an author and a programmer, Milhon, who is widely known by her online name, St. Jude, has been cited as one of the first known female hackers by Steven Levy in his 1984 book, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.

  "My own definition of hacking," Milhon said, "is the clever circumvention of imposed limits, whether imposed by your government, your own skills or the laws of physics."

  Of the women who hack, most learn their skills in places where they are outnumbered by men: in the rough-and-tumble online enclaves that hackers frequent or at hacker conventions. A spokesman for Defcon, the annual hacker gathering in Las Vegas, estimated that the event drew eight men for every woman.

  An Australian hacker in her early 30s who goes by the online handle Blueberry has similar memories of her early days on Internet Relay Channel chat areas, which she compares to a men's smoking room.

  "You throw open the door and everything stops," she wrote by e-mail, "all eyes are turned in your direction, and you could hear a pin drop." However she persisted in her pursuit of arcane hacker knowledge, learning the computer inside and out with help from male hackers online.

  Blueberry, who like many hackers chooses to be known simply by her online name for reasons of personal privacy and security, said women could silence derogatory comments from older hackers by proving their technical prowess on the PC. "You have to earn the respect," she said. But a female technophile may have to overcome the perception that she hangs out in online areas dominated by men so she can meet men with the potential for hefty stock options -- not because she is really interested in computers. The quality of her hacking may also be questioned and she is likely to draw chauvinistic comments.

  "I hate to talk in generalities, but a lot of times, younger guys just aren't experienced with women, and they're still kind of focused on that whole thing. There is more sexism in a younger atmosphere. That said, there are a lot of hacker guys who are great," said Fennelly, the computer-security consultant.

  In her years in the industry, Fennelly has had plenty of time to observe differences in the workplace. While women write programs just as nimbly as men, but other skills also become evident, she said. "Social engineering is a big deal in the computer field -- manipulating people to do things," she said. "Women can understand that pretty well."
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