This morning as I was lazily browsing through the Twitter #deepdream stream, I ran across a tweet that made me pause:

I hadn’t even realized that this was happening, but a quick snapshot of 1092 #deepdream posts from keyhole.co yielded the following:

So what’s causing this? My initial hypothesis is that deepdreaming isn’t very accessible by non-techy users yet; most of the sites that automate the process have been “hugged to death,” and running the script yourself requires a *nix operating system or the ability to run a virtual machine on your PC/Mac. Once you’ve got that figured out, you have to either learn how to run an iPython notebook or adapt the python script to your tastes. A few tutorials have been written, but the comments sections are inundated by users trying to learn how to cd and ls.

Full disclosure: if you haven’t figured it out, I’m female. But I’m also painfully aware that we’re underrepresented in the STEM fields, including those related to computer science.

I’m guessing that once deepdreaming becomes easy (someone writes an app that sends your photo to a server farm and auto-dreams it for you), we’ll see a dramatic uptick in posts from women. After all, we’ve got a higher share in the selfie market.

I’m not trying to make any argument that “girls can’t understand deepdreaming because it’s not makeup or shoes,” as my husband (who doesn’t know python) jokingly suggested. I just think that this is yet another symptom my gender’s lack of representation/interest in programming, whatever the cause may be. Unfortunately, this means that a new form of technology-dependent art is currently suffering from a lack of diversity of thought, which is also a constant struggle in the art world.

There is a different kind of “greatness” for women’s art than for men’s, thereby postulating the existence of a distinctive and recognizable feminine style, different both in its formal and its expressive qualities and based on the special character of women’s situation and experience. -Linda Nochlin

But these thoughts are getting too big for me. Time to go back to playing with my Barbies.