(Coming Fall 2018)

CS 80Q: Race & Gender in Silicon Valley

This is a working draft by Cynthia Lee cbl@stanford.edu
Description: Join us as we go behind the scenes of a year of big headlines about trouble in Silicon Valley. We'll start with the basic questions of who decides who gets to see themselves as "a
computer person," and how do early childhood and educational experiences shape our perceptions of our relationship to technology? Then we'll see how those questions are fundamental to a
wide variety of recent events from #metoo and the fight against sexual harassment in tech companies, to how the under-representation of women and people of color in tech companies impacts
the kinds of products that Silicon Valley brings to market. We'll see how data and the coming age of AI raise the stakes on these questions of identity and technology: Exactly how much do
companies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook know about you, and how could that data be used to target you in potentially harmful ways? How can we ensure that AI technology will help
reduce bias in human decision-making in areas from marketing to criminal justice, rather than amplify it?
Course Goals: This course interrogates the social challenges of Silicon Valley, a place of privilege, privation, and precarity, and encourages students to perform their own ethnographical studies
through writing, coding, engagement, digital culture, and social practice. We will learn about the importance of technology in shaping our critical understanding of social conditions in our
community and the global economy. (1) Students will learn to beome close and careful analysts of technology and social change; through readings, ethnographic studies, coding projects, field trips
and debates. (2) Students will learn how to think critically about technology by comparing ethical frameworks and social criticism and debating the most effective roads to social justice. (3)
Students will learn to become skilled interpreters of the social and cultural challenges that Silicon Valley faces with respect to race and gender. (4) Students will learn about how technology
interfaces with diversity and the power dynamics of race, class, gender, health status, citizenship status. (5) Students will learn to translate their insights into sustained intellectual discussion and
lucid analytical prose.
See "Reading List links" tab (below) for a more extensive reading list than what has been slotted below (in progress)
Week Topic Reading Activity Student project milestones
King: “Letter from the Birmingham Jail”; Audre
Lorde: "Age, race, class, and sex: women
Race, Gender, Equality Frameworks redefining difference" Students debate frameworks
“What is Enlightenment” Kant and "What is
Justice?" Rawls; Programmed Inequality (book
Ethics framework Workforce diversity: excerpt); Steve Henn “When women stopped
1 historical coding” Apply Frameworks to Hidden Figures
Critical Ethnography. Method, Ethics, and
Ethnographical Framework Workforce Performance; Susan Fowler “Reflecting On
diversity: present One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber” Students debate ethnology frameworks
JS Mill; Gilligan;
Articles from The Economist editorial staff “The
e-mail Larry Page should have written to
Consequentialist Frameworks James Damore”; Cynthia Lee Rebuttal to “the Observe tech workplace physical space and
2 Workforce diversity: pushback Google Memo” workforce for climate
Judith Butler; Godwin, Potvin, Hazari, Lock
“Identity, Critical Agency, and Engineering: An
Affective Model for Predicting Engineering as a
Feminist Frameworks Career Choice”; three autobiographical
Student identity formation (who accounts: Tracy Chou, two Stanford students; Observe CS class (or lab or CS-focused club
thinks "I'm a CS person"?) Inclusive Classroom tips (list) etc) for climate
Susan Sisbley “Why Do So Many Women Who
Study Engineering Leave the Field?”; Alison
Feminist Frameworks Wynn, Shelley Cornell “Puncturing the pipeline:
Student identity formation (who Do technology companies alienate women in
3 thinks "I'm a CS person"?) recruiting sessions?” Observe campus recruiting talk for climate
Gender and Race Frameworks
Quick technical intro to data science Python and Jupyter beginner coding tutorial
and AI (web page) Coding exercise to learn tools

4
 Gender and Race Frameworks
4 Race & Gender in online harassment Gamergate (topic reading TBD)
Race & Gender in online harassment
5 Data in policing & incarceration
Gender and Race Frameworks
Data in policing & incarceration
Gender and Race Frameworks
6 AI Bias: search engines
AI Bias: search engines
7 AI Bias: voice assistants
AI Bias: voice assistants
8 AI Bias: data & privacy in marketing
AI Bias: data & privacy in jobs, loans
9 Student presentations
Student presentations
10 Student presentations
Hands-on big data coding exercise with Twitter
feed data
Leslie Jones and Kelly Marie Tran as examples
of intersectional harassment, alt-right, 4chan
(topic reading TBD) Propose topic, form groups
Voigt et al. “Language from police body camera
footage shows racial disparities in officer
respect”, Elora Israni “When an Algorithm Hands-on big data coding exercise with Kaggle
Helps Send You to Prison” dataset
citizenship and deportation reading TBD; law
review article?
Students discover and document new
examples of search engine bias (e.g. various
Algorithms of Oppression(book excerpt) Google image search results)
Algorithms of Oppression(book excerpt) Progress report due
How spoken English variations associated with
region, national origin, age, gender, and more
can impact voice recognition technology (topic
reading TBD)
Adrienne LaFrance “Why Do So Many Digital
Assistants Have Feminine Names?”
Facebook marketing; law review article? (topic Students download and examine their own
reading TBD) Facebook data file
Julia Angwin et. al. "Machine Bias"; home loans
reading (topic reading TBD)
Present work
Present work
Present work