Black women use programming to tell their stories and reduce technology inequality

When he turned 15, Aline Bezzoco exchanged the traditional debutante party for a computer. “That opened my mind,” he says, describing the moment he started using the tool. It was the early 2000s and personal computers were becoming more popular in appliance stores.

From there until actually working in the area, it took six years. Before, he studied graphic design even with the impression that he wanted to work with technology, continuing the studies he was doing in computer technical high school. “At the time I went to some university fairs and I didn’t feel represented. I only saw white men and asked myself: ‘What am I doing here?'”, says Bezzoco.

Today she is a front-end developer, that is, the interface of a web page, the part that users see and interact with. In a 2018 project, she created a tool that tells the story of black women: Black Women History, an API (Application Programming Interface), a programming code that facilitates integration across platforms.

Through her project, it is possible to know that Mariana Crioula “was the leader of one of the biggest slave revolts in Rio de Janeiro”, that Laudelina de Campos Melo was the “founder of the first union of domestic workers in Brazil” and that Rebeca Andrade she was “the first Brazilian woman to win two races in the same edition” of the Olympics.

The space for contributions like this one, however, is still limited. A survey on PretaLab technology professionals, carried out between the months of November 2018 and March 2019, shows an unequal reality. Men represented 68% of the workforce in the sector, and whites, 58.3%, and there are no more recent surveys signaling any radical change in this situation.

To change these numbers, initiatives aimed at black women emerged. This is the case of Minas Programam, an institute for teaching programming.

With the support of Frida, funding fund for feminist organizations, and Epic Games, a giant in the development of electronic games, the institute offers free 3-month introductory courses in programming, as well as short workshops and lectures.

There are now more than 250 girls who have gone through the main course, usually between 14 and 23 years old and, from 2020 onwards, when it went online, from all over Brazil. About 90% of students are currently black.

“For us, it is essential to have more black girls in this space”, says Bárbara Paes, one of the founders of the institute. “For them, accessing knowledge about technology is more difficult. We face more barriers to be seen as potential technology producers.”

Despite not being the focus of the organization, the heated innovation market can be a door to take these girls out of situations of vulnerability.

A survey released in March this year by the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) shows that unemployment caused by the pandemic has hit black people more. On average, the unemployment rate had grown 1.62 percentage points compared to the previous year, but among black and brown people the increase was higher, 2.6 and 1.75 percentage points, respectively.

An internal survey carried out by Minas Programam shows, according to Paes, that 60% of former students are working with programming or technology, while 30% are still engaged in looking for a job in this area.

And this is important because “not seeing black people as possible producers of technology is a way of excluding us from a decision-making space”, says the founder of the institute. “Today science and technology are shaped by society as they shape society. It is a two-way street.”

The last few years have been full of revelations about racist biases in algorithms. In May, an internal Twitter study showed that the social network’s image-cropping algorithm tends to exclude blacks from photos. The disclosure was made after users pointed out the error.

Even the UN (United Nations) took a stand on the issue in November 2020, when it issued a warning about the use of artificial intelligence for facial recognition and police controls.

“There is a big risk that [a inteligência artificial] reinforce prejudice and, thus, aggravate or make possible discriminatory practices”, said at the time the Jamaican expert Verene Shepherd, who is part of the UN committee for the elimination of racial discrimination.

To guarantee the permanence of the students, the work of Minas Programam overflows with technical knowledge. “A good part of what we do is work on this issue of rebuilding intellectual self-esteem,” says Paes.

One of the strategies is to show who is already in these spaces, as in the project in which they conducted a series of interviews with black women in technology. “We always share stories of pioneering black scientists, book reviews, and I think that’s how we managed to change the idea that there’s only white men working with this a little bit.”

Aline Bezzoco felt sorry for having no reference when she was a teenager. “It took me a while to follow my dream because at the time I felt very cornered,” she says. “It wasn’t an environment I felt welcome in.”

The computer came into her life in the days of blogging, and she took the opportunity to learn more about building a website, as well as fixing other people’s machines to make some extra money.

She is proud of the Black Women History API. First, because it brings information about the role of black women in history. “Look at the amount of things that we black women have done. Not only for Brazil, but for the world,” says the developer. “Black people are lacking in technology power spaces to bring our gaze. We know our reality.”

But the advancement of the tool is also in its technical characteristic, which it considers more democratic. As it is open source, it can be used by anyone on the network. It is possible, for example, to test the knowledge of black women with the tool, consulting the information and returning it to an application screen.

“In a restaurant, we have the waiter, the kitchen and the lounge, where the tables and chairs are. The waiter is the API. He makes the connection between the kitchen and the lounge. The lounge is the visual part, the screen, and the kitchen is the server, where you have all that information saved in a database”, compares Bezzoco.