Hackette

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Even Playful Hackers have to take breaks.
The secretly female computer whiz is such a common trope these days that I've almost come to expect it. Oooh, there's this super 1337 hacker who the whole male cast is in awe of, but they have no idea who they are and they need their help. Then, unexpectedly, the first time they meet, that hacker is totally a hot chick. Shocking! "I, uh, I thought you'd be..." stammers the main character. "Taller?" says the hacker chick, as the movie's creators sit smugly thinking they've pulled one over on a gender normative audience. "GET ON WITH IT," yells the audience, "THIS HAPPENS IN EVERY MOVIE."
—The Mary Sue, "10 Great Fictional Female Hackers"

The Cops are hot on the trail of a hacker who is bringing down banks, shutting off traffic lights, and just generally causing mayhem.

They are given a list of possible suspects, all of whom happen to be men. After either narrowing down the list to one or two suspects, or dismissing all the suspects completely, the hero or his sidekick stumbles onto a startling revelation. The Hacker is a woman.

In the minds of all officers of the law and FBI agents (even female ones), hackers are exclusively male, and having a second X chromosome excludes you from any suspicion for anything having to do with computers or technology in general. When the truth is revealed, the notion that nobody previously thought a woman was capable of such things is either tossed aside, or even ignored altogether.

This trope only counts when everyone thinks it's a boy and it's later revealed the hacker is a female. It is not a list of generalized female hackers.

This is a sub-trope of Gender Reveal. If the character's technical talents lean toward the mechanical instead of the digital, she's a Wrench Wench. Compare with Samus Is a Girl.

Examples of Hackette include:

Anime and Manga

  • Everyone in Cowboy Bebop thinks Radical Edward is a boy, even after meeting her. Imagine the shock when her father shows up and gives his "baby girl" a hug!
  • In Princess Lover, Teppei is surprised to learn that his maid, Yuu Fujikura, heads an entire team of hackers (all maids, like herself). It even becomes a pivotal plot point, late in the series, when she spearheads a cyberspace counter-offensensive to regain control of the Arima Building from a group of terrorists, while simultaneously helping to disarm several remote detonated charges planted throughout the building.
  • Gundam Wing has Hilde Schbeiker. While aboard White Fang's orbital base, Libra, she hacks into their mainframe to access and download vital information on Vayette and Mercurious: their latest and most advanced in their line of mobile dolls.
  • Nene Romanova fills this role in Bubblegum Crisis. Much like the Princess Lover example, it becomes a plot point when Nene uses her hardsuit to hack into the AD Police mainframe (unbeknownst to her fellow officers) to regain control of the building from a terrorist and his team of rogue boomers. While, at the same time, guiding the police chief's niece to safety via the intercom.

Comic Books

  • While Barbara Gordon was confined to a wheelchair, Oracle was the go-to person for electronic information in the Batman comic franchise. Outside of her closest friends, nobody knew her real identity.

Fan Works

  • The version of Willow Rosenberg native to The Teraverse, starting when she was a pre-teen under the handle 5al1x680. At this point in her life she was critical to the capture and prosecution of the villainous Cracker P$ychon4ut. When she starts helping Terawatt as an adult, she takes the handle "Acid Burn" from the movie Hackers (see below). Finding out that that 5al1x680 was a woman only serves to heighten P$ychon4ut's desire for revenge on her.

Film

  • Sandra from Cube 2: Hypercube.
  • Acid Burn from Hackers. She was an alpha hacker so she had a coterie of boyhackers who thought she was awesome, but Crash Override was surprised to discover she was a girl.
  • Trinity, from The Matrix.
  • Lex outs herself to buy her family some time in the film version of Jurassic Park. (In the novel, her big brother was the hacker.)

"It's a Unix system...I know this!"

  • Jailbreak in The Emoji Movie.

Literature

Live-Action TV

  • Claudia, when she is hacking into the Warehouse in the first few episodes of Warehouse 13, is spoken of with male pronouns until they learn her identity.
  • Penelope Garcia from Criminal Minds is happy to surprise supervisors and people from other precincts with the fact she's a female.
  • The Lone Gunmen has a female hacker whose real name was never revealed, but she went by Yves Adel Harlow most of the time. All her aliases were anagrams of Lee Harvey Oswald.
  • An episode of Burn Notice featured a girl hacker. Not only was the fact that she was an attractive teenage girl a surprise, but she also turned out to be utterly vicious and cold-blooded, as evidenced when she drugs Michael and then ties him to a chair and rubber-bands a plastic bag over his head in an attempt to kill him via asphyxiation (luckily, Michael manages to talk his way out of it).
  • Riley in the new MacGyver is a black hatter turned white.
  • Raven in CSI Cyber has a similar history and pretty much any female member of the team will count as a hackette and will likely be recruited from the same background as you have to get them somewhere and getting people who weren't into mischief ain't gonna happen.
  • The Ghostwriter episode "Who Is Max Mouse?" had, not one, but two hackettes.
  • Cindy "Mac" Mackenzie from Veronica Mars. The Reveal came in her first episode, but there was still a reveal.

"Crime pays. Technologically assisted mystery-solving? Costs."

Web Comics

  • Miho from Megatokyo caused a massive crash of the Endgames MMORPG servers and asks Piro if he was surprised to learn the aforementioned hacker was a girl.
  • Heidi, Geek Girl Detective starts with a scene where a consultant is simply unable to grasp the concept that a female can be an IP specialist, let alone be "the networking guy".

Truth in Television

  • This is Truth in Television for most female programmers and computer technicians (whether they fit the general usage of "hacker" or not), since it's very much a male-dominated profession. In reality a significant percentage of digital intrusions are accomplished through social trickery (like posing as tech support and asking for passwords) which pretty women are noted to be particularly adept at.
    • That said the Ur Example would be Ada Countess of Lovelace; who wrote a series of instructions that could have been executed by Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine (which would have been a Steampunk computer, were it built) and is often considered the world's first computer programmer (in the sense she wrote the world's first computer program).
    • The techs who maintained the world's first computer (Colossus) were mostly women from the Women's Royal Navy (or "Wrens").
    • Susan Thunder.
    • Kristina Svechinskaya, dubbed the "world's sexiest computer hacker".
    • The Chinese female hacker collective CN Girl Security Team.
    • Adeanna Cooke, who's also posed for Playboy.
    • Ying Cracker.
    • "Kayla", a suspected member of Lulz Sec in the HB Gary Federal leak, originally thought to be Laurelei Bailey.
    • And then there's Admiral Grace Hopper, who invented one of the earliest linkers and popularized the idea of device-independent programming languages. Without her, we wouldn't have had "computer programmer" as a job title as early as we actually did.
  • There's a (The Customer is) Not Always Right story about a guy calling tech support/bringing his computer back to the store and demanding to talk to a male employee, being incapable of accepting that women can know enough about computers to help with his problem.
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