Disrupting the Industry

2019
Cotton, linen, and copper on canvas
12 x 12 inches

Disrupting the Industry is a woven graph visualizing the rise and fall of the percentage of computer science bachelor’s degrees earned by women from 1966 to 2010. Despite a peak at 1984, marked in the weaving by a band of copper wire, by 2010 the level had dropped to almost where it was in 1966. A number of factors have been posited as contributing to this drop, including the image of the nerdy boy hacker popularized in such films as War Games, and enrollment caps on computer science majors that limited access to those with prior computing experience — most often boys whose fathers had bought them newly-available personal computers like the Apple IIe. Industry disruption is a Silicon Valley ideal and promised by tech company founders to potential funders. But what they often fail to consider is the subsequent disruption to society.