Prompt Midwives

In Claire L Evans’ wonderful book Broad Band: The untold story of the women who made the internet there is a particularly interesting observation about how a conference held in 1968 in the Bavarian ski resort of Garmisch had a huge impact on the gender bias in the computing industry.

In the late 1960s there was a skills crisis in information technology. Computers were becoming more common and more powerful, but the skills to program them weren’t available. The Garmisch conference, convened by NATO and without any women invited, was supposed to address this skills gap. As Evans writes:

The most significant change they made, arguably, was semantic: programming, they decided, would heretofore be known as software engineering. As such, it would be treated like a branch of engineering rather than a rogue, wild-blooming field roamed by fiercely independent, self-directed misfits and women. Engineering is a job with clear credentials, not a shadowy priesthood. This change signaled a larger renegotiation of computing’s professional status that would unfold through professional journals and societies, hiring practices, and certification programs throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The more the discipline professionalized, the more it grew implicitly masculine.

Broad Band, Claire L Evans

I never can stress enough how naming things is more than superficial. What we call things deeply impacts how we perceive things. Why was calling programming software engineering so impactful? Let’s ask ChatGPT for a list of 10 professions that are perceived as being more male than female:

• Engineering (including mechanical, civil, electrical, etc.)
• Computer Science and Software Engineering
• Construction and Carpentry
• Aviation and Aerospace Engineering
• Plumbing and Heating
• Automotive Mechanics
• Military and Defense Forces (combat roles)
• Oil and Gas Industry (including drilling and extraction)
• Professional Sports (certain sports like American football, rugby, etc.)
• Investment Banking and Trading

And now let’s ask for 10 that are seen as more female than male:

• Nursing and Midwifery
• Teaching (especially primary and early childhood education)
• Social Work and Counseling
• Administrative and Secretarial Roles
• Interior Design and Decor
• Early Childhood Education and Daycare
• Fashion Design and Retail
• Nursing Assistants and Home Health Aides
• Human Resources and Personnel Management
• Beauty and Cosmetics Industry (including hairstyling and makeup artistry)

So what?

Well, last night I was listening to a particularly good talk about generative AI from my colleague Simon Case (for UK civil servants: no, not that one). In it he talked a little bit about the rise of a new role: the Prompt Engineer.

Prompt Engineers are not really engineers, in the same way that an Enterprise Architect is not really an architect. They are people who write prompts that can be fed into generative AI engines to solicit useful responses. There is apparently something of an art to writing AI prompts, akin to how in the early days of search engines you kind of needed a knack to write search queries that would solicit useful responses.

But the TechBro world of AI has decided, as their forefathers did in the 1960s, that this writing skill is something that needs to be called engineering.

Calling it engineering probably bumps up the salary. Why? Hmm. Let’s see shall we? Is it in part because it’s a hugely gendered term still to this day?

What if instead we called the role a Prompt Midwife. Now “Midwife” is about as female-gendered a term as one can get. It’s as good a metaphor for the job. But unfortunately, as a result, we’ve probably halved the pay rate.

Please don’t misunderstand me. Anyone can be an engineer. There are plenty of women engineers. But our societal norms are such that it’s harder for women to break into engineering professions because of centuries of gendered thinking about who should do what roles. (The term actually goes back to the 1300s when it was first used to describe people who built military weapons).

Let’s turn to ChatGPT one more time (these kinds of questions, given its corpus of data from which it has learned, I think are a pretty good application for a Large Language Model). What about gender-neutral professions?

• Accountant
• Graphic Designer
• Project Manager
• Marketing Specialist
• Environmental Scientist
• Data Analyst
• Business Consultant
• Research Scientist
• Technical Writer
• Financial Analyst

This leads me to conclude that if we wanted to make the use of AI far less gendered from the outset, maybe rather than calling them Prompt Engineers, we should call the role a Prompt Writer.

Because, after all, that’s exactly what they are doing.