Keira Knightley plays Joan Clarke, the only woman on the British team that decoded the German Enigma machine.
By Allie Bidwell l Source: U.S. News & World Report
:: Many girls avoid STEM fields because they have no one to look up to, says the founder of Girls Who Code::
There’s a lot of cold calculation in “The Imitation Game,” a film set in the United Kingdom during World War II. A team of mathematicians, cryptologists and government intelligence officials become early computer scientists as they build a machine to intercept and interpret messages sent during the war, all the while hiding aspects of their own lives in order to succeed.
Alan Turing (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) struggles to connect with his coworkers as they try to decode the German Enigma machine, which sends ever-changing encrypted radio messages the allies are trying to intercept. He becomes engaged to Joan Clarke (played by Keira Knightley) in part to keep her around to work on decoding the Enigma machine, and in part hide his homosexuality.
Clarke, the lone woman in a group, advises Turing to try harder to fit in with his coworkers; when she quickly wins over the other men on team, Turing asks, shocked, how she did it so easily. “I’m a woman in a man’s job and I don’t have the luxury of being an ass,” Clarke says.
Reshma Saujani, founder and CEO of Girls Who Code, says the movie will give girls the role model they need to inspire them to pursue computer science and other STEM fields.
“Keira Knightley is going to be a great role model for young women who are wanting to potentially go into this field and to pursue STEM careers,” Saujani says. “Movies, media can do a lot to really change perceptions.”
Other parts of “The Imitation Game” may be all too familiar for women trying to make a name for themselves in male-dominated fields. When Clarke arrives to take the test Turing has designed in order to identify the brightest cryptologists, she is repeatedly told to head to another room where women are applying to be secretaries. Once she’s finally allowed to stay, she’s the first person to complete Turing’s complicated puzzle and win a spot on his team.
Still, while it’s clear Turing respects Clarke’s mind and abilities, she has to hold her ground to get what she wants. When Turing is being investigated by government officials, he tries to protect Clarke by sending her away. She refuses to leave.
“I’m not going anywhere. I’ve spent entirely too much of my life worried about what you think of me, or what my parents think of me, or the boys in Hut 8 or the girls in Hut 3, and you know what? I’m done,” Knightley says. “This is the most important work I will ever do, and no one is going to stop me, least of all you.”
The personal connection women may feel when watching the movie is a strong motivator, Saujani points out. After the television show “CSI” came into the spotlight, she says, more girls became interested in forensic science. Shows like “Grey’s Anatomy” also gave girls a strong female role model in the medical field.
“You can’t close the gender gap in technology just by running programs,” Saujani says. “We really need to influence culture and so girls need to see women who they admire who look like them doing the very things they don’t think they can do.”
Girls Who Code immerses young girls into the world of computer science and connects them with mentors so they can see women who are successful in the field.
Helen Denisenko, now a freshman at Brown University, participated in a summer program with Girls Who Code before her senior year of high school. She says she was so motivated by the program that she started a Girls Who Code after-school club upon her return.
But in her college computer science courses, she still sees women underrepresented.
“I think a lot of it has been intimidation,” she says. “Towards the end [of the semester] it was clear that the girls were just as smart as the boys and could keep up just as well. There was a lot less fear of being seen as dumber or less able.”
What helped, she says, was the fact that her professor is a woman, and she purposefully addressed the perceived obstacles that keep many women and other underrepresented groups from going into STEM fields. Denisenko says her professor made it a point to tell students the material is the same for each person, regardless of their race or gender.
“The most important thing is to try it because if someone tells you you won’t be good at this, or this might not be good for you — well, what do they know about you?” Denisenko says. “You know yourself best. You know what you like best. Just go for it. The worst that can happen is you find out you don’t like it, so you try something else. The world isn’t going to stop.”