October 22, 2014
"A lot of computing pioneers — the people who programmed the first digital computers — were women."
"And for decades, the number of women studying computer science was growing faster than the number of men. But in 1984, something changed. The percentage of women in computer science flattened, and then plunged, even as the share of women in other technical and professional fields kept rising. What happened?"
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84 comments:
Coding is a language skill, so it's no surprise that women would do well at it.
Programming used to be a clerical job. The women typed in what the guys said, or solved the problem the guys asked for.
If they managed to get and stay interested in it, they'd be as good as the guys. If not, not.
Since the 80s, computer science has been interesting to almost nobody, but more to guys owing to the jargon speak.
Coding isn't a language skill. It's a remembering what you did months ago skill.
Typical NPR: hang the entire assertion on a single expert with no data other than one or two anecdotes, and don't stop to consider any alternative explanations.
Also, programming languages changed to Object Oriented Programming which was a change from the previous linear structure.
The Smalltalk language, which was developed at Xerox PARC (by Alan Kay and others) in the 1970s, introduced the term object-oriented programming to represent the pervasive use of objects and messages as the basis for computation. Smalltalk creators were influenced by the ideas introduced in Simula 67, but Smalltalk was designed to be a fully dynamic system in which classes could be created and modified dynamically rather than statically as in Simula 67.[15] Smalltalk and with it OOP were introduced to a wider audience by the August 1981 issue of Byte Magazine.
It was around that time. The PC also probably played a role.
That is simply not a true statement - the reason Adm Hopper was so standout was because of her gender more than her contributions.
You could probably put the sum total of female programmers from the early mainframe days in a phone booth and still make a call.
I am not counting the support people who ran tapes, sorted cards, etc, etc.
-XC
PS - Does anyone else have a "My Man Friday" image in their head right now?
Programming used to be a clerical job.
Uh, no. Typing punch cards might have been a clerical task in some organizations, but the actual programming still had to be performed by professional coders.
I think it has to do with lesbians.
they became social justice warriors? Just curious but when did all these (insert segmented part of the American citizenry here) Studies Departments start taking root? If I remember correctly, the early '70s was when feminism really got going, self actualization books abounded if I remember my mother's coffee table and the stacks of paperbacks right.
huh, too bad. Traded a pre-eminent position in a coming technology explosion for the fuzzy "sciences".
Blame Friedan, Dworkin, et al.
Reddit beat NPR to this topic by a day. And some of the discussion and explanations were probably a bit more thought out.
In the '80's I knew a woman who was still working in a tech office, but more an organizer than programmer. But in the '50's she was a programmer for IBM! She work sterotypical womens suits back then....except on picture day for her group. Then it was, "please dress as mannish as possible, no earings, makeup, or anything that someone might see as 'female'...and we'll hide you in the back of the picture."
My mother in law (now in her late 70s) landed her first job after college with IBM, programming computers back in the days of punch-cards. She was hired because she was a pianist, and musicians were thought to have an aptitude for programming due to their understanding of symbolic codes, i.e. music notation. She hated it, so she quit, got married and had kids as soon as possible. Even though she was part of the "first wave" of programmers, it wasn't her first love, it was just a job. Compare that to young male computer geeks since the 1980s, who love computers more than they love human beings. I'm not saying that's a healthy attitude. However, people with real passion for a job will always succeed more than those without it, in any field.
No, the programming itself was a female job.
That was a holdover from when coding didn't have many options. Start at the top and finish at the bottom.
Apple II's were ubiquitous in schools in the 1980's. There has never been a shortage of personal computers for girls.
From the article: "And these toys were marketed almost entirely to men and boys."
It was the male hegemony!
It gets so tiring, reading the drivel.
Problem is the coding became far far more complex.
Mainframe became Cobol,PL1, assembly,JES, CICS, DB2, VSAM, PCS/ADS, IMS, FTP, etc... and the manuals have manuals to.
And now for PC/Servers it becomes PHP, SQL, Javascrpt, Java, Pearl, Visual Basic, HTML/XML, ASP.NET, CSS, Python, Ruby, C/C#/C++, UNIX, MS servers, CISCO, and tons more...
Yes there are WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) softwhere that helps in the programming (like MS Studio 2010 or Drupal) but they all have some flaws and you end up still having to know the languages.
And if you cross platform code (mainframe and serves) you have to know alot about BOTH.
It is NOT a fun environment and it takes geeks that love to be geeks.
You can guess how I know.
The computer programming and systems design jobs of the late 80's involved a lot of batch program runs, which meant overnight and weekend testing and implementation (and crashes). The hours weren't really conducive to family life.
That was my experience, anyway. I know things have changed, but that could explain why those years were the beginning of the years women wanted to leave the field (or not enter it).
"I remember this one time I asked a question and the professor stopped and looked at me and said, 'You should know that by now,' " she recalls.
What a horrible professor!
I hope my kids, if they run into such a gasbag, would say Well I don't so what's the answer, Professor?
Paul, why don't you mention FORTRAN? :)
I heard the start of that NPR piece, the part you quoted, and it was incredibly stupid and unjournalistic. Yeah, Grace Hopper and all that, but c'mon, the big people in computers have almost been all been men.
Women can do it! Certainly. But the history is that men did it.
It all changed in 1984, according to NPR.
I worked with women engineers in the late 50s and my high school girlfriend was an engineer and president of the Society of Women Engineers a few years back.
I do think the programming languages changed in the early 80s.
The hours weren't really conducive to family life.
My cousin working in IT for years, coding, but she was on call a lot which gets old after a while. I think these kind of dynamics often get overlooked.
"And these toys were marketed almost entirely to men and boys."
Wait, they made this about toys? Do I need to look up what toys were marketed to men? Because when I was a kid, aside from dolls and a few other things, toys seemed to be much more unisex. Now you go into Target and there are literal blue and pink aisles.
By the way, must NPR wrest the early-computing award away from Alan Turing?
Men do tend to be more into jargon, technical minutiae, and quantification than women. For example, dudes are more likely to be into working on cars, tweaking engines ect. Dudes are more likely to be into memorizing minutiae like stats in professional sports or various metrics for auto engines, or min/maxing characters in an MMORPG.
And higher level programming languages, especially OOP languages, tend to be all about precision and minutiae. Things like remembering all the arcane syntax for doing stuff like dereferencing a key value of a list within a hashtable object is something that appeals to certain mindsets that tend to be male I guess.
"Apple II's were ubiquitous in schools in the 1980's. There has never been a shortage of personal computers for girls."
That's a funny idea of never! There were no computers in schools when I went to school, including when I went to law school, graduating in 1981.
The plunge in female programmers began in the mid-80s. So women were involved in the years before the years that are counting for you.
The NPR article attributes the plunge to the infusion of personal computers in the 80s, so I don't see how your statement does anything but confirm the NPR theory.
I find it hard to believe that theory, by the way. But what's a better theory? That women were attracted into competing fields like law and medicine? That the computer industry somehow became more sexist and exclusionary?
""I remember this one time I asked a question and the professor stopped and looked at me and said, 'You should know that by now,' " she recalls."
I think students are so afraid that they should already know something that they just don't ask. I know that's what I did as a student (and as I kid). It's very hard to figure out what it's dumb not to already know. It's really important for adults not to make younger people feel bad about asking for information, even when we're appalled by how someone could have come this far without knowing that.
FORTRAN?
Ah yea, Formula Translation. I used it a bit long time ago at a research hospital.
APL is another one. Good old Basic to.
I use AJAX, PHP, HTML5, MySQL now more than anything. I'm one of the few COBOL programmers to transition to the new stuff.
In 1984 a lot of jobs were opening up for woman that weren't really feasible before.
Highly intelligent and well educated women could get jobs on wall street or become lawyers and be hired by prestigious law firms.
Opportunities were opening up to make big money working in jobs that conferred high high social status and brought you into contact with people that shared your interests and were socially compatible.
Or you could spend your time in a cubicle coding a payroll system.
What happened in the time frame of the 80s is that computers stopped being cutting edge technology and became office machines.
Even Wikipedia hasn't yet caught on to the female influence in computer science.
Wikipedia will try to keep up. Watch for changes on that page in the next few days.
Hey, Marc Andreesen, they're trying to steal your Nobel on politically correct grounds!
"By the way, must NPR wrest the early-computing award away from Alan Turing?"
Ada Lovelace was born a century before Alan Turing.
I think it was Flashdance.
Came out in 1983. Enough said.
Wait, they made this about toys? Do I need to look up what toys were marketed to men? Because when I was a kid, aside from dolls and a few other things, toys seemed to be much more unisex. Now you go into Target and there are literal blue and pink aisles.
Shanna- yeah, I don't get the toys thing either. On the other side of the gender equation, we have the easy bake oven, marketed toward girls.
But who dominates the field of professional cooks? Men! They somehow managed to find their way into it without Mattel and Ogilvy.
It's not a battle of the genders, Professor. It's a battle of truth-telling, and NPR will probably win this battle, because it's the biggest radio network in America.
"By the way, must NPR wrest the early-computing award away from Alan Turing?"
In addition to Lovelace, Atanasoff was also older than Turing.
Here's a theory: it's pressure from other women. My personal experience is that men welcome women in the STEM professions. (Yes, there are exceptions, but those are exceptions.)
That NPR chart tracks one set of data points, and misses a completely different story.
Compare to the much more thorough analysis by Beth Andres-Beck:
There is currently a responsibility-dodging contest between industry and academia over who is to blame for the declining enrollment of women in Computer Science and declining employment of women in software development. I hear people in industry bemoan the "empty pipeline", while academics maintain that women aren't entering their programs because of perceptions of the industry. I have compiled some data that may help resolve the question by highlighting a third factor common to both: access to an Internet-based culture of computing.
Take a look at Ms. Andres-Beck's first two charts and you notice something very interesting. The percentage of men who majored in computer science also dropped dramatically in the mid-1980s. In terms of the raw number of U.S. computer science graduates, 1984 is a peak in the data for both sexes. Engineering graduates also peaks in the mid-80s, followed by a decline primarily among men.
The real gap opens up over the course of 10 years, from about 1995 to 2005. At this point, men begin moving back into computer science at enough of a greater pace compared to women to change the percentages significantly by 2005.
Ms. Andres-Beck suggests, very carefully, that the lack of interest by women in computer science may reflect their exposure not to the personal computer, but to Internet culture.
But there is also another very interesting question raised by this data. From 1985 to 1990, a lot young people, both men and women increasingly chose to major in fields other than computer science. There was a causal element at work that had nothing at all to do with gender.
This is a question that has bothered me for quite a while. The female presence in computer in the 60's and 70's was not at the bottom of the hierarchy. See Jean Sammet, Barbara Liskov. Some of the best minds in the computer fields have been women. So why the sudden decline in their participation.
The NPR piece is too simplistic, of course. But there might be a bit of truth. One thought is that it is not the ads or the choice of who to buy a computer for. But it might be one of those differences in the sexes. Computer programming before the professional level is very individual work. It is not cooperative. This might appeal to young males and not to young females. So even if the family had a person computer, it was the boy who spent hours learning it and playing with it, because he enjoyed that. The girl did not and so, as the NPR piece showed, enter college behind the boys and so left the field.
Anne, any comments? Do I have the psychology right?
MadisonMan said...
"I remember this one time I asked a question and the professor stopped and looked at me and said, 'You should know that by now,' " she recalls.
What a horrible professor!
I hope my kids, if they run into such a gasbag, would say Well I don't so what's the answer, Professor?"
Actually, I've noticed a trend among young troops where they don't retain information. We spend a lot of time going over simple implicit tasks that could be better spent doing something else. I've used that "you should know this by now"to signal that they need to pick up their game. I use it at home with my kids when I help them with homework, as they seem to do a brain dump at the end of each term, not realizing that, in math especially, the next lesson will build on the current one. students, and inexperienced troops, need to be held to a standard of what they should know by a certain point in their development.
Back in the late 70s / early 80s, the HS I went to (grad 82) had a computer lab. It had 1 teletype machine that acoustic coupled to a mainframe elsewhere, 1 apple II, 3 Commodore PETs and one or two other "PCs" that I can't remember any more.
Ada Lovelace was not much without Babbage.
It is not exaggeration to say that she was a manic depressive with the most amazing delusions about her own talents, and a rather shallow understanding of both Charles Babbage and the Analytical Engine ... To me, this familiar material [Ada's correspondence with Babbage] seems to make obvious once again that Ada was as mad as a hatter, and contributed little more to the "Notes" than trouble ... I will retain an open mind on whether Ada was crazy because of her substance abuse ... or despite it. I hope nobody feels compelled to write another book on the subject. But, then, I guess someone has to be the most overrated figure in the history of computing.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2010/03/ada_lovelace_day
"Apple II's were ubiquitous in schools in the 1980's. There has never been a shortage of personal computers for girls."
When I was a junior in high school in 1982 we had 4 Apple IIs in a converted closet. When I was senior in 1983 we had several dozen Apple IIs and one of the math teachers taught a class in BASIC.
What killed the idea of majoring in Computer Science for me was a freshman class in FORTRAN in 1984. It wasn't hard -- just unbelievably tedious. It was only 15 years later that I taught myself HTML and Javascript and became a web developer. As far as my case goes, the Internet meant non-boring programming.
DougWeber, in the 60s and 70s, computers were a tiny component of life and industry.
In the 80s, computers exploded as part of life and industry. In the 90s, they exploded again, and again in the 2000s, and again in the 2010s.
Looking back like that, it's sort of like trying to figure out who harvested the wheat in the 1600s. It might have been more women than men.
Does that mean women invented the combine harvester?
I got into the computer field in 1981 without any prior experience with computers or a college education by joining the Army for training and OJT. I didn't bother to get a degree for decades because you didn't need one. I finally got one because HR departments now refuse to consider anyone without a degree.
But I wasn't looking for a career, I just wanted a job and at the time computer jobs were the coming thing and my ASVAB scores qualified me for the training.
By the way, unless you are highly motivated and talented, I would discourage people from entering the computer field now. Very few people become billionaires and even back in the mid 90s I was seeing people come into the Army Computer Science School (where I was assigned working as a UNIX Admin and Networking Guru) with four year comp sci degrees but unable to get jobs because they had no experience.
Last I heard the Army Computer Science School provides training that results in achieving multiple certifications. That's right, they pay you to train and foot the bill to take the certification tests. For workaday IT folk that is far better deal than spending a fortune on a CS degree.
On the other side of the gender equation, we have the easy bake oven, marketed toward girls.
I was at Toys R Us the other day and they have a boy version! The girl version is a pink/purple and the boy version is blue. That's exactly what we didn't have in the 80's. Everybody had that stupid teddy ruxpin and speak and spell and lincoln logs...
(BTW, apparently the new easy bake oven sucks according to reviews. I never had the old one so I can't compare)
Ralph Hyatt said...
I was on a similar track. I did take some computer classes in HS which caused me to go into the Army when I graduated in 82. Entered the Army Computer school (74F) and after 4 years got out. Worked in the IT field ever since. No degree but like you, was encouraged to get one by various HR departments. Have credits but no degree. Having a degree might have helped but can't say for sure as I am currently the VP of Product Development at my current company.
I was lucky in that when I was looking for my initial civilian IT jobs, experience trumped a degree. As I worked my way up the ladder, the degree seemed to matter less and less.
At times I do miss the clarity of coding and still like to "play" with it at home.
Anecdotal, but I remember my CS classes in the early 70's being comprised of about 90% males. Higher math classes 80% male.
From 1985 to 1990, a lot young people, both men and women increasingly chose to major in fields other than computer science
Because of the over supply of comp sci degree holders created in previous years because of high school counselors guiding people into that academic path on the assumption that it would lead to jobs that weren't there and the (correct) assumption that getting a comp sci degree would lead to a dead end job coding business software.
Unless you are going to caltech or MIT or another school on that level, a comp sci degree means working in IT to most people.
A necessary job and I enjoy what I do, but not something that is going to inspire a lot of teenagers.
Ralph and Todd got it. 1980-1985 was when people discovered they could be BETTER than a college graduate at programming by simply doing it. In 1980 colleges were still teaching a lot of math (matrix algebra, etc.), a lot of theory (parsing) and a lot of useless crap no one needed to be a programmer. Of course people stopped majoring in it.
And the day to day job?
Long periods of boredom punctuated with periods of terror.
You spend months planning a system upgrade for an application that interfaces with 15 other apps using 5 or 6 different protocols, start the upgrade on Friday at 6:00 PM, finish testing Sunday at 6:00 AM, go to bed (you haven't slept in the intervening time) only to be awoke an hour or so later because actual users have discovered something that was missed in testing, perhaps one of the interfacing apps failed to test with their interfacing apps, perhaps a test case was missed, whatever.
You then reconvene everyone (its not just you, could have been 20 or more people involved in the change that weekend) and then decisions have to be made. Back out? Try to fix the problem before the real load starts Monday morning? Can you back out? Changes have been made to the schema and if you back out your going to lose transactions from that day. How much per hour is this system being down cost? Is there a workaround?
Good times.
My mom went back to school in the mid-80's and got a Computer Science degree. She's carried the title of "Programmer/Analyst" ever since. Though she did retire last year at the age of 67. Her specialty was printer-control software, mostly in the COBOL language, so she eventually became quite a niche, but she did well within that niche.
She's completely useless on a personal pc though -- I still have to constantly bail her out on that.
By way of qualification: I started programming in 1962. I got my last programming job when I was 80, and I still get email from recruiters. When I finish my current mission for my church I will answer those emails, fully expecting I will get at least one offer.
Women think differently from men. Some of those differences make them very good at crawling through twisty little passages of logic. I would expect that advantage to show up in lawyering, too. Over the course of 50 years I have worked with some bright programmers and some not-so-bright programmers. None of the NSBs were women. This probably had more to do with self-selection than the work environment. Unless you are fortunate enough to work on new stuff all the time, programming can be pretty dull, especially when you spend 80% of your time in meetings and complying with exhaustive documentation specifications. Guess who gets stuck with the paper work. A lot of us would rather change diapers.
The fun part of programming is innovative and entrepreneurial. I don't know whether that favors women or men. I do know it was more pleasant to work with brilliant women than with brilliant men.
And then you get to go to the outage meeting where they assure you they are not trying to assign blame, except of course that is exactly what they are trying to do.
And since there is a contract spelling out just what penalties must be paid for any unscheduled down time just who gets assigned culpability for the outage is a very very serious issue.
Since culpability means some of the profits the contracting firm you work for was expecting from this client this quarter just went poof.
So naturally the client isn't going to want to take the hit.
Shanna said...
BTW, apparently the new easy bake oven sucks according to reviews. I never had the old one so I can't compare
Yeah, it must be hard to bake something over the heat of a compact florescent bulb.
Comparing Ada Lovelace to Alan Turing, who was a flat out genius and did stuff only geniuses could do is a joke.
1984 you say? Duh
"But what's a better theory? That women were attracted into competing fields like law and medicine?"
And business. And academia. Which were all considerably more open--and socially acceptable--for women than they had been. Yes, that would exactly be my theory.
(What Ralph Hyatt 10/22/14, 10:33 AM said.)
In my opinion, it's more to do with the boom/bust cycles that the tech industry has gone through.
Note that the graph NPR uses is all percentages of a percentage, which can be misleading. If you look at the raw data, a different pattern emerges.
Basically, men and women behave differently around the peak of the boom. In the boom years, a lot more men jump into comp sci. In the bust years, a lot fewer women go into comp sci. Those two factors account for most of the gap.
Can see graphs here: http://blessingofkings.blogspot.com/2014/10/women-in-computer-science.html
The #1 skill you need to be a good programmer: mastery of logic.
The rest is syntax.
Yeah, it must be hard to bake something over the heat of a compact florescent bulb.
I'm sure that has something to do with it. Politicians ruin everything.
Another theory: With the rise of the internet there are many design and writing jobs related to computer science that pay well and draw in people with different interests than traditional Computer Science.
Technical writing used to be dominated by men. Burned-out programmers used to end doing technical writing the way roofers with bad knees end up clerking in hardware stores. Now technical writing is dominated by women. In parallel with this development, the field is much more rigorous.
Graphical design, user interface design, information architecture, information design -- all these fields have much more gender parity than computer science.
I don't know why, exactly, but then I don't know why men major in Computer Science. I identify with the designers.
They were basically key punch operators back in the day when data was processed via key punch cards. Particularly astute key punch operators picked up coding along the way, but they were just typists for the most part.
I'd expect that software development in the 1950s and '60s would be very, very different than it is now, and would have required different skills and talents.
In a world in which each modify-compile-run cycle took days, the most important skill would be meticulous attention to detail, so as to minimize the elapsed time it took to produce something that worked.
And the software design stage would be very different. With limited memory (and no virtual memory), slow processors, and very costly hardware, much emphasis would be on devising algorithms and coding so as to minimize use of machine cycles and memory, with little or no emphasis on user interface. In any case, these same hardware limitations would have placed a low limit on the complexity of any software that could actually run on these machines.
What software developers do today may require more or less rare skills and talents than those required in those early days, but they surely are very different skills and talents.
A lot of the IT folks at my company are immigrants. All but one of the immigrants are male. When did we see a spike in importing CS and IT workers, and what % of those workers who came in were female?
I've been programming IBM mainframes for over 30 years. Graduated from college in the early 80s. Sex distribution skewed about 80/20 male in both classroom and professional experience. I'm guessing this gush of female programmers occurred... never.
Key punch operator is not a coder
Women were called "calculators" as they painstakingly created ballistics tables for the artillery corp for their field guns. I think someone got flummoxed by that designation.
My dad used to program computers for H-bomb warheads in the 50's all via punch cards. In the 80's punch cards were on their way out so I'd say someone just failed to do their homework...
Steve Sailer is always interesting on this stuff
http://www.unz.com/isteve/npr-when-women-stopped-coding/
I enjoyed programming, but it was always in support of my engineering projects. The appeal to me was that it either worked, or it didn't. I liked definite endpoints. And I liked that I ran into other girls in the computer lab. I rarely had their company in my engineering classes. Early 70s.
Built my first very primitive computer, mounted on a piece of plywood, from an instruction in Scientific American back when I was a kid. I was inspired by Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine.
My dad thought knowing how to use a computer would be a big thing, so he bought an IBM home PC in 1984, and in the years following he always kept our home computers up to date with current hardware and software. When I was nine years old, he told me that he would buy me my own computer if I didn't watch television for a year, so I didn't, and I got my own computer.
My brother is younger than I am and was not yet born in 1984, so my father obviously didn't think computers were for boys when he bought our first PC.
In the end, however, my brother took it farther. I loved coding here and there, and I'd be happy to stay up all night every now and then on a computer project. Meanwhile my brother wholly immersed himself in it, and his computer knowledge is now worth hundreds of dollars an hour.
So I suppose we fit the graph but not for the reasons NPR posits.
The Air Force paid for my grandfather to study computer science at Stanford, but back then there was no name for computer science, so his diploma designates his major as having been in statistics.
Well, probably not "no name" but no major named that.
Last night I dreamed about different ways of linking buffers together - technology that is probably 40 years old now. Weird. And, even weirder because I haven't done any real programming since mid summer (VB Net 4.5 - mostly to learn how different it was from VBA).
I was a year ahead of Ann in school, and being a math major, discovered programming around 1970 or 1971. Sat down with the text book the day before my first programming class started, read it, and thought that I must be missing something. It can't be that easy. It was, at least for me. And, in the 43 or so years since, it has been one of my greatest passions. Worked professionally as a programmer/analyst for fifteen years, before getting side tracked into patent law, and many times regret that transition. My expertise was in data communications and operating systems software.
Programming has always been quite visual with me, which is why I suspect that women do not do as well as men, at least in the more complex areas. They tend to be more linguistic, and less spatial, on average than men (on average, because some women, such as my mother, are/were as adept spatially as most men - but her degree was also in math. The mother of my kid was also very good, and has three degrees in this area). COBOL, sure. But, that has long been in my estimation some of the most brain dead programming possible (and notably, Adm. Grace Hopper is credited with leading the project that resulted in COBOL). Only thing worse than COBOL was RPG.
With very few exceptions (like the mother of my kid), the women I worked with were never as good as the top men. Part of it, as I suggested above, was that they tend to be more linguistic (and emotional), and less spatial. And, another may be that women tend to crave balance more than men do, and a lot of the programming and design I did was the furthest thing from balanced. I did a lot of all nighters throughout my latter 20s through my mid 30s (after which, I was in law school). Sure, you shouldn't ever need to do that, but the reality was that often it was necessary - I remember once in my latter 20s working 40 hours of overtime a week for a couple weeks to make a deadline, and then asked when the project had initially been due, and the response was the day we got it. That sort of thing has long been epidemic in the profession. This sort of intensity seems to burn out women faster than it does men.
"Comparing Ada Lovelace to Alan Turing, who was a flat out genius and did stuff only geniuses could do is a joke."
She was a woman !
For years the feds credited a black surgeon with the "first open heart surgery." They have backed off a little but it is a joke.
He sewed up the hole in the pericardium in a patient with a stab wound of the heart.
Williams was the second to have successfully performed pericardium surgery to repair a wound
With a stab wound of the heart, you NEVER do that ! You sew the heart wound but NOT the pericardium ! If the heart wound rebleeds, it needs to leak out into the pleural space.
Rehn of Frankfurt did the first repair of a heart wound. Most Germans at the time were white, I believe.
"the women I worked with were never as good as the top men."
I have had a similar experience with women surgeons. I have been retired for a few years from surgery so maybe they are better now but I always thought they would have much better fine motor skills than men. It just wasn't true. They are rougher than male surgeons. The OR nurses I know say that is still the case.
If you have been in programming for years, you probably know about Gamergate. Popehat has great post on that today.
Women sleeping with game reviewers to get better reviews on their own games, then accusing gamers of sexism if they don't like those games.
Hilarious.
Since it seems to be anecdote day, here's mine.
In 1980-81 I was finishing an EE/CS degree (a new thing, then) at Berkeley. Essentially all of my fellows were either in CS (in the College of Letters and Science) or EE (College of Engineering). There was a modest bias among the women to be on the CS side, maybe 60:40. Overall, I vaguely remember there being roughly 30% women in classes, regardless of the EE or CS division.
However, during a Senior year conversation about joining SWE or TBP or UCSEE (all engineering honor societies), an astonishing number of the women objected, vigorously, to being characterized as engineers, and no-one pushed back on that.
I suppose a confounding factor might be the huge majority of various asian groups at Cal in those days - people used to say "if you are looking for Fred, go into the class and find the one non-black-haired person."
Addendum: by "huge majority" I meant, within the EE & CS classes, not Cal overall.
"Revenge of the Nerds" came out in 1984 and that killed computer science for most women.
Robert Carradine and Anthony Edwards and as Gilbert and Lewis, do I have to explain it? Not men that women would want to hang out with. Not marriage material.
In real life, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates reinforced that. Read their bios. Both had longtime girlfriends who declined to marry them, despite having already become enormously wealthy.
Nevertheless, I've known several good women coders. But it is a profession of odd ducks, and it's more socially acceptable to be an odd duck as a man than as a woman.
It would be interesting to see the stats for women software project managers, where the mythical innate female multi-tasking ability kicks in. That works against you as a coder, where the ability to single-task-focus is paramount.
Hollywood has produced some great women computer scientists. Sandra Bullock in "The Net". Chloe on "24", Cameron and Donna on "Halt and Catch Fire".
I taught undergradute and graduate courses at a research university and my classes, the more popular and essential classes like Databases/Networks, used to have less than 10 female students (in a class of 40) and more than two-thirds of them were Chinese or Korean or Indian.
America has a STEM problem for female students. It is a good idea to analyze what social factors may have contributed to the lack or decline. But in general, in this country, the smarter women go for medicine or law where the big money is. There is not as much money in STEM.
By the way, computer programming is an often misunderstood profession. It has many specialties, but all can roughly be divided into four categories: architect, engineer, coder and tester.
Architect is akin to a building architect, though very fuzzily defined. With buildings, an engineer does lots of calculations and ensure the design has, for lack of a better word, a correct structure--the latter is true in computer programming.
The last area is the coding or actual implementation, akin to the people who actually build the building, though it covers everything from the proverbially pouring foundations, putting up drywall and doing fine finish work. On top of that, the best coders write highly optimized code--this is very geeky stuff.
I am a very good coder and not as good engineer. Architect comes in last on my list.
If I rank all the programmers I've worked with, not a single women shows up in the top 20 for coding, though one might be in the top 40. BUT, I can think of several who would be in the top 20 for engineering.
Architecture is a little more difficult since there is a big difference between the very small group of truly brilliant software architects and the rest. However, putting that elite group aside, I know a few women who I'd hire for that roll.
Testing is arguably a discipline all it's own. Interestingly, I know several women who were/are fantastic software testers. Until ten years ago, the best tester I worked with was a woman. (In 2005, I ended up with a team of three male testers who blew me away at how good they were--I still miss working with them.)
To extend my previous remarks, the best software engineers, especially coders, which I know are all computer geeks. They love computers themselves. They write software in their spare time, they build their own computers, they argue with other programmers about geeky shit like what CPU has the best micro-architecture and why. When they say "this code runs faster because it stays in the L2 cache and doesn't context switch" other nerds know what they are talking about.
Relatively few women fall into this category and I don't think there's much you can do about it.
(This doesn't mean this group are mono-maniacs. Yes, they love computers, but they also have a wide diversity of hobbies including music, art, cars, athletics, computer gaming and bar hopping.)
America has a STEM problem for female students. It is a good idea to analyze what social factors may have contributed to the lack or decline. But in general, in this country, the smarter women go for medicine or law where the big money is. There is not as much money in STEM.
I think that you overestimate this. Women have been getting a majority of degrees in such areas as biology and chemistry for awhile. Physics in particular has tended to remain majority male. Math is mixed, and has been for quite awhile (my mother got a math degree in 1945, and her aunt got her master's degree in maybe 1925). Engineering is also a mixed bag. A lot of female civil and chemical engineering grads, but still relatively few in EE and CS. Mechanical is nearing parity, at least in grad school, at least in a lot of programs.
It is far different from when I was taking engineering classes in the mid 1970s and even 1990s. A lot of the (graduate) classes then would be 100% male, but 75% foreign. Doesn't appear to be as many foreigners, at least in grad school, partially, apparently, because at least PhD programs typically need to be externally funded, and the federal govt. programs tend to prefer U.S. citizens and permanent residents.
Anyone who's used Windows, or any other Micro$oft product, knows that the key to being a successful programmer--or analyst, or developer, or solutioner, or whatever the fuck they're calling themselves this week--is having been kicked in the head by a horse as a child. Girls are better with horses--mystery solved.
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