
Secret History of Women in Coding - Jun8
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/magazine/women-coding-computer-programming.html
======
biophysboy
One thing to note about this downward trend of women in CS: its unique. If you
look at the trends for women in law school, med school, physical sciences, and
computer science, they all gradually increased to ~30% until the time
highlighted in the article. After that, all of the fields kept growing to
40-50% ... except computer science, which sits at ~20% nowadays.

One thought I have: of those 4 fields, computer science has changed the most
in our culture. Nintendo happened, the internet happened, the personal
computer happened. Majoring in CS can mean money and status now.

A lot of these pictures ... women moving cords, operating keypunch machines
... it doesn't seem great. It looks like men relegated women to tedium. In the
same way that women were typists back in the day. Now I realize those photos
are much older, but maybe these sexist attitudes persisted back in the late
70's and early 80's and CAUSED more women to be in CS? Women did the "busy
work" for the fancy new "computer machine business", while the men ran the
business.

Is this a bad take? I just have a hard time believing the 70's/80's were a
better time for women in CS. Granted, they didn't have YouTube videos like
"Mr. Conservative DESTROYS SJW academic in CS debate", but still...

~~~
renholder
>One thing to note about this downward trend of women in CS: its unique...

I wonder _why_ , though? If we're to follow the social trends, these same
women - who worked in computing _before_ the 80's - were the mothers and
grandmothers of the children of the 80's, yeah? Did their attitude towards
computing and women in computing _suddenly_ change overnight - even though
they were in the very same field, themselves? What would cause them to, in not
even the span of a generation, decide that home computers should be relegated
to boys, alone? Sure, Hollywood didn't help, but I feel like there must be
something missing from this equation that would explain the _why_ behind it.

>A lot of these pictures ... women moving cords, operating keypunch machines
... it doesn't seem great. It looks like men relegated women to tedium. In the
same way that women were typists back in the day. Now I realize those photos
are much older, but maybe these sexist attitudes persisted back in the late
70's and early 80's and CAUSED more women to be in CS? Women did the "busy
work" for the fancy new "computer machine business", while the men ran the
business.

I don't see how that's "busy work", when the computing infrastructures back
then were _way_ different. Your punch card were your modern-day versions of
instructions sets and you had to know what you were doing with them to get the
machine to do what you wanted to do (especially, if you had to punch the
cards, yourself). Changing cables on an old switch panel is like connecting
RJ-45 to your laptop, today. None of this is "busy work" and I'm not even sure
_how_ one would get the idea that it _is_ busy work...?

>Is this a bad take?

Possibly. Having not been alive before the early 80's, myself, I won't try to
lie and answer in the negative _nor_ the affirmative. What I can tell you,
though, is that women helped the industry thrive and grow (especially, during
periods of war); so, it - more than likely - wasn't the cesspool of sexism
that you're implying.

~~~
biophysboy
>I wonder why, though?

One reply to my comment suggested that women in CS kept increasing, just not
as exponentially as for boys. IF that's true (I don't know the data AT ALL),
then the precise question is what kept them from coming in at higher rates
like boys did. The best reason I can come up with is
Nintendo->PlayStation/Xbox->Steam, but I have no proof.

>I don't see how that's "busy work"

Maybe it wasn't. But here's my idea: CS was respectable before it was
respected. And my thought is maybe women "snuck in" during that interim
period. And then all the men looking for status came in and drowned them out.

~~~
renholder
>The best reason I can come up with is Nintendo->PlayStation/Xbox->Steam, but
I have no proof.

Eh, the ability (or favour) of playing games doesn't equate to skill in the
computing field, which is also what the article inferred. I think that the
idea was to have entrants into university who already had exposure to early-
level technology (e.g.: phreaking or hacking or debugging, as the old
definitions apply). Universities could, in theory, save money by expending
less on entry-level classes, which didn't proffer the same opportunity to
those whom weren't previously exposed to the field.

From a capitalist perspective, that idea makes sense: Increase profit margins
by the supply/demands of the market; if you have more candidates with
exposure, of course it's more encumbant for anyone _not_ exposed to the field
to even try - you tailor for those already exposed and save tons of cash.

Where the delineation occurs is between the previous workforce (pre-80's) and
the up and coming workforce (80's and later). The finger-pointing seems to
infer that it all boils-down to boys having the better opportunity because
they were more-so exposed to computers/technology than girls; however, the
same families that were buying computers and putting them in boys' rooms
would've had women that previously worked in the computing field, yeah? So,
then, the inference comes of "who made these specific decisons?" and that's
where we start losing insight. To say that fathers had sole power in the
family dynamics during the 80's is to discredit the entire reality that
divorces saw an exponential increase in the 70's[1]. So, it would be a
falsehood to presume that men are solely responsible for shouldering the blame
during this time.

Even worse, because we lose sight of the _why_ , I fear that we're far more
susceptible to repeating the same pattern[s] because we don't know what to
look-out for - if that makes sense?

>And my thought is maybe women "snuck in" during that interim period.

Eh, I think it isn't as nefarious as we're inclined to believe that it is.
Given the time period[s], the saturation of women in all fields was bore out
of want (and possibly some necessity): Conscription during war-times means a
vaccuum in the work-force and, without steady income from the "bread-winners",
women not only chose to enter the workforce, it was considered a civic duty to
contribute to the war-effort[s] (see: Rosy the Riveter[0] as an example).

During the solid-state era, I'll call it, women bore the shoulder of the brain
and physical work in the computing field. When it became more wet-ware (plug-
n-play), that's when we started to see the decrease. If that's correlatable to
other reasons, we might find the culprit there? I'm not sure.

However, we also need to include other considerations: Women who were working
in the 50's, if they worked the predominance of their time in one company,
likely saw retirement in the 70's and 80's, yeah? So, during that time, there
should've been a noticable lack of available women in the workforce - if women
entering the chosen education fields decreased before then. Yet, from the
study perspectives, the predominance of those _seems_ to be purely related to
women entering the chosen fields in education, yeah?

So, if the available market has more demand than supply, then entry via
experience (which is how - I believe - we got to the "experience in lieu of
education" aspect) make sense as to the rationale of _why_ the became
dominated by boys/men; yet, we come full-circle back to asking, "Why did they
have those opportunites _more_ , in the first place, if the previous workforce
_saw_ more women than men in that field? Was there some underlying reason why
daughters and granddaughters _didn 't_ want to be like their mothers or
grandmothers? Was there some foreshadowed type of warning about _not_ working
in that field?"

We're addressing the effect, which is great, but we still don't understand the
_cause_. The article seems to boil-it down to sexism in the workplace but the
question it doesn't answer is: "Did that sexism exist _before_?" If so, then
it would make sense that older generations would warn and ward-off younger
generations from entering the field. If not, then there's something amiss.

If the sexism did _not_ exist, before, then we should also investigate the
_why_ it came about after the decline, in the first place. Was it akin to the
Irish disliking the American-Irish for their abandonment during the Great
Famine? If so, then did that morph - much the same way as the hate for the
American-Irish, when they call themselves Irish today - because it became the
modus operandi for the general work-force over time? These are painfully
complicated social questions, I'm aware, but I think that they need to be
asked, so that we can understand the picture - fully - to prevent it from
happening ever again.

If the failure was entirely due to multiple aspects of society, all at once,
then addressing one or two isn't going to prevent it from recurring and that
should be our ultimate goal - for everyone, yeah?

(Sorry for the diatribe.)

[0] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosie_the_Riveter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosie_the_Riveter)
[1] -
[https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/jan/28/divorc...](https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/jan/28/divorce-
rates-marriage-ons)

------
jonjacky
Mary Ellen Wilkes [1], one of the women featured in the NYT article, wrote
several reports and papers about her work on the LINC laboratory minicomputer,
including [2] and [3].

From [2]: "LAP6 is an online system running on a 2048 word LINC which provides
full facilities for text editing, automatic filing and file maintenance, and
program preparation and assembly. ... The small memory has had surprisingly
little effect on the functional specification of the system ... and perhaps
operated with a positive effect on the criterion of simplicity. Compromises
were, of course, necessary, but we also found that operating features which
may seem highly desirable, for example, to a professional in the computer
field, can be so much excess baggage in an on-line applications environment.
..."

[3] describes the ingenious virtual memory scheme: "An algorithm that runs on
a 2048-word LINC provides efficient on-line editing of character strings
virtually unlimited in length. Fixed-address LINC tape holds the character
sequence in the manner of a scroll. Edited characters are spliced directly in
or out of the scroll as it moves across a display scope under the viewer's
control. A 512-character "playground" created at the splice point provides
sufficient ease to permit changing the scroll contents dynamically..."

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Allen_Wilkes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Allen_Wilkes)

2\. "Conversational Access to a 2048-word Machine," Comm. of the Association
for Computing Machinery 13, 7, pp. 407–14, July 1970.
[http://www.digibarn.com/stories/linc/documents/LINC-Mary-
All...](http://www.digibarn.com/stories/linc/documents/LINC-Mary-Allen-
Wilkes/Conversational-Access-CACM-1970.pdf)

3\. "Scroll Editing: an on-line algorithm for manipulating long character
strings," IEEE Trans. on Computers 19, 11, pp. 1009–15, November 1970.
[http://www.digibarn.com/stories/linc/documents/LINC-Mary-
All...](http://www.digibarn.com/stories/linc/documents/LINC-Mary-Allen-
Wilkes/Scroll-Editing-Proc.-IEEE.pdf)

