
1984 – When women stopped coding - rmason
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/17/356944145/episode-576-when-women-stopped-coding
======
grandDesigns
Because women are smarter. I notice that graph compares Computer Science
($50K-$150K/year), to Medical School ($150K--$1M), Law School ($120K--$1M),
and Physical Sciences (???).

Women see the writing on the wall on High School: Med/Law School offer a clear
career path to the upper middle class, while CS offers a muddy path at a
middle class life.

They also see "rich" old Doctors and Lawyers. They have never seen a "rich"
old programmer, because they don't exist. Programmers are washed out by 50,
while Doctors are in their prime at 50.

Data: I am an 80's kid. All the smart girls knew to go to med/law school. All
the nerdy guys like me wasted time learning 6502 assembly. We are all doing
OK, but the women make 2 to 3 times as much as the men.

~~~
jcadam
_THIS_. I love programming, and spent my childhood hacking away on Apple
IIs/Amigas/etc., but if I had my teens/twenties to do over again, I would
pursue a career in Medicine (couldn't have stomached a career in Law,
methinks) while continuing to program as a 'hobby.'

Alas, I followed my "passion." Blech.

~~~
omilu
Grass is always greener. If you were a medical professional you'd probably be
having the exact same thoughts, wishing you had taken up law or computers,
anything to escape from all the blood, broken bones and sick and dying people,
day in day out, with no end in sight.

------
purpled_haze
I have daughters and was not able to get them interested in any computer
unless it involves games or social media.

But the boys they hang out with are the same way- games only, for the most
part.

While I played a lot of games on my computer as a youth, I also spent a lot of
time trying to program games. Today, I'm a developer.

Because of kids' fascination with their phones and tablets, and because
programming isn't a "normal" thing on computers, I really don't have high
hopes for the future of the development community at all, much less for the
future of women in this field.

But, getting back to the topic of my daughters, my experience has been that:

1\. If given the choice, they would not choose the constructive, mechanical
toys I grew up with where they might get into robotics or mechanical
engineering (e.g. Thames & Kosmos or Mindstorms) although one enjoyed putting
a tin can robot together.

2\. They also would not choose the electrical kits to put things together and
get into electrical engineering, although I did get a kit and my daughters
played with them a few times. It just took too much time and attention to have
anything happen, and when it did, it wasn't exciting the way it was for me as
a kid- it was boring compared to their phones and tablets.

3\. As for development, I was able to show one of my daughters how they could
play music by programming in emulator of an old computer, but they had little
interest. I was able to get that daughter to work with me to use Scratch to
program something for about an hour and she really liked it, but she's not
asked about it since.

Today's environment is just not the same. As much as parents who are
developers try to get their kids into development, I just see it as a losing
battle.

What the world needs is an operating system (or systems) or even an
application or set of applications that almost everyone would want to use that
require programming in some form or fashion to accomplish everyday tasks
better.

But, iOS, Android, OS X, Windows, Linux and most applications that people use
and games people play- they don't really work like that so much. You can get
by without learning to code as a casual user, and the bar is so high now to
create anything that a casual user would actually want to use or play. The
closest thing to it really is a spreadsheet application or rules in an email
application, and most users barely use those.

~~~
Crito
Over the course of the next century programming will become a blue collar
profession. Children who develop an interest in programming will become about
as common as children who are interested in tablesaws or cutting torches.

~~~
cm2187
Programming is more akin to engineering than factory working. Languages are
getting simpler and more powerful but programs are getting more complex. 15
years ago a typical developper didn't need to worry about multithreading,
connectivity or security. It's fundamentally an intellectual job and will
remain.

~~~
Luc
From my Western European point of view, I see a lot of these intellectual jobs
being outsourced to Slovenia, Poland and even the Philippines.

I am advising my kids to have good technical skills but also great people
skills.

~~~
adrianN
So? It's not like the people in Slovenia, Poland, or the Philippines are less
intelligent or less well educated than people from Western Europe.

~~~
Luc
So? So my kids don't live in a low wage country and will need to differentiate
themselves to keep making the big bucks.

------
panglott
1984 was the year that CS _majors_ began to drop off. You're not talking about
girls that were begging their parents for a C64. You're talking about girls
that were born circa 1962-1966 and after.

Many early programmers in the 1960s and 1970s were women because it was seen
as the equivalent of secretarial work, a sector of the office labor that women
were confined to due to overt sexism. The profession was then masculinized in
overtly sexist ways. If women fled CS, they were fleeing an overtly sexist
niche (which both locked them into submissive, secretarial roles as well as
undervalued their technical accomplishments).
[http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2011/researcher-reveals-
how-...](http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2011/researcher-reveals-
how-%E2%80%9Ccomputer-geeks%E2%80%9D-replaced-%E2%80%9Ccomputergirls%E2%80%9D)

------
crusso
_And these toys were marketed almost entirely to men and boys._

That's a pretty bad correlation-is-not-causation slip there. Marketing
efforts, especially in new markets tend to take the path of least resistance.
If they were marketing to males, it was most likely because males were showing
an early interest in those products and likely to be the quickest way to grow
marketshare.

My personal experience was that I didn't need anything marketed to me. The
K-Mart in my town had a couple of running new computers on an aisle where a
friend walked up to them and typed: 10 PRINT "I AM THE GREATEST!" 20 GOTO 10

I was immediately fascinated and wanted one.

~~~
jcadam
He forgot the INVERSE:FLASH :)

My first program on the new family Apple ][e was a flashing, infinitely-
scrolling insult directed at my older sister.

------
apalmer
Doesnt intuitively make sense to me... adult women stopped being drawn into
the computerfield at the same time that male children began getting computers
as gifts? wouldnt their be a distinct lag effect of maybe 5-7 years between
when the boys got their computers and entered the work force?

I think the shift probably had more to do with the perception that computer
programming was 'important', a lot of the early view on computer programming
was driven by the physical interface... women were viewed as suitable for
programming because they were historically suitable for typing and secretary
work... i think on some level it was being viewed as a form of dictation that
was in a bizarre 'shorthand'...

~~~
chongli
Your intuition around the 5-7 years lag time would seem to line up pretty damn
well with the beginning of the computer revolution in the late 70s. What's the
problem, exactly?

~~~
decode
I agree. Both the TRS-80 (which was specifically mentioned in the audio
version of the article) and the Apple II were released in 1977.

~~~
vlehto
>By 1982, an estimated 621,000 home computers were in American households, at
an average sales price of US$530.

In a country of 220 million people. If we assume about 4 people could access a
single computer, then 1,1% of population had access.

So it seems commercials of Apple II and TRS-80 was the thing that compelled
women to stay out of the field. Or alternatively getting your hands on dads
TRS-80 was incredibly compelling experience to almost every boy out there.

Edit: this stuff then
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05M80HHNB6s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05M80HHNB6s)

~~~
kps

      > If we assume about 4 people could access a single
      > computer, then 1,1% of population had access.
    

High school students aren't representative of the general population. Schools
had computers, so _all of them_ had access.

------
ishener
The actual article is here:
[http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-
women-stopped-coding)

~~~
ishener
I think it's important to also show the graph of absolute numbers of computer
science students. Maybe the absolute numbers will show that the number of
female students did not decrease, but rather the numner of male students
increased dramatically, making the female share drop.

Just an angle I would pursue.

~~~
lucozade
I had the same thought so I checked [1].

Really very odd graphs of both male and female students. I haven't seen
anything that really explains the peaky total number let alone the ratio
profile.

Interestingly the higher degrees seem to be pretty stable in ratio terms. Not
sure what they may be indicative of though.

Very strange.

[1]
[https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_349.asp](https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_349.asp)

------
cuillevel3
I don't think it's about absolute numbers, women did not stop coding. It's
just more men starting to code, which makes the share of women smaller.

~~~
arien
I was thinking along the same lines (personal computers = more boys interested
in CS). Then I found this in the comments section of the article:

[http://i111.photobucket.com/albums/n134/im_thatoneguy/CSDegr...](http://i111.photobucket.com/albums/n134/im_thatoneguy/CSDegrees_10-27-14_zps43c754a2.png)

Interesting that there was a dip of both males and females around 1984. So I'm
not so sure of the statement above anymore. However, around the year 2000
there's this peak where males do outnumber females by a great deal (even if
the number of females joining also increased).

If all these graphs are accurate I'd wonder more about the Y2K rather than
1984...

~~~
vlehto
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_cras...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_crash_of_1983)

------
facepalm
I don't believe this narrative of "it's because home computers were marketed
only to boys". At least, I would like to see some more evidence for it.

It seems more likely to me that the story starts sooner, there must have been
a reason why computers were marketed to boys. Maybe the first home computers
were considered part of the electronics hacking scene (radio shack and what
not), and that was already more popular with boys? How many women went to the
Homebrew computer club were people were trying to create their own computer
before you could just buy them off the shelves (people like Bill Gates, Steve
Jobs and Steve Wozniak)?

Maybe girls saw home computers and didn't like them.

I don't know - but neither do the tellers of the "marketing is at fault"
narrative.

------
jessaustin
_The share of women in computer science started falling at roughly the same
moment when personal computers started showing up in U.S. homes in significant
numbers... And these... were marketed almost entirely to men and boys._

Great, another travesty for which we have marketing to thank.

~~~
DeusExMachina
The hate towards marketing that is present on HN is almost comical at times.

My experience is that, the more you study how marketing works, the more you
realize marketing is about what people already want and try to appeal to that.
Sure, big companies like Coca Cola have more sophisticated techniques to make
their brands appealing, but still, if you look at Coca Cola's marketing, what
they sell is "happiness", which is what people want, and they make the
association to their beverage.

From this point of view, there is no "travesty" to thank marketing for. The
reality was that probably personal computers were more appealing to men, so it
made more sense to spend marketing resources towards them.

Why it was more appealing to them is a good question to ask, and it could be
because of many reasons, including culture and society. But marketing probably
didn't create that desire, it just used it.

~~~
darkr
I think you've totally missed the point _why_ people hate marketing. It's not
because of a lack of understanding on it's mechanics.

> From this point of view, there is no "travesty" to thank marketing for. The
> reality was that probably personal computers were more appealing to men, so
> it made more sense to spend marketing resources towards them. Why it was
> more appealing to them is a good question to ask, and it could be because of
> many reasons, including culture and society. But marketing probably didn't
> create that desire, it just used it.

Marketing is _absolutely_ about the manufacture of desire. Though above you
make the connection between Coca-cola and the harmless association of this
beverage to "happiness", this is over-simplifying things somewhat. The
psychology of the brand, upon which modern consumer society is dependent, and
which marketing ruthlessly exploits, is based around the construction of a
self solely through conspicuous acts of consumption rather than through human
experiences, relationships with friends and family, or other pursuits
traditionally considered to be more laudable.

Though arguably it is required in keeping the wheels of capitalism spinning
(and by proxy food in our bellies); in reality, marketing is the process of
co-opting, subverting, and ultimately extinguishing joy and the human
experience.

~~~
caskance
Marketing only manufactures desire if you interpret desire in the most narrow
possible sense as desire for a specific product.

What marketing actually does is make desires concrete and suggest to the
audience how that desire can be fulfilled. If you look at one of the most
famous examples of successful marketing, diamond marketing created demand for
a specific product, but it was only able to do so because the emotional needs
the marketers tied their products to were already there and not being
adequately met.

~~~
darkr
The term desire works in a broader sense, as long as you differentiate between
a need and a desire.

A _need_ (I guess I'm referring here mostly to needs in the context of those
defined by Maslow's Hierarchy) is defined as something that is an absolute; an
end state. There is a requirement of truth for something to be a _need_.

A _desire_ is defined as "a strong feeling of wanting to have something or
wishing for something to happen". A desire is open to suggestion, to invention
and misrepresentation.

Taking your example of the diamond industry: The "needs" being targeted here
are pretty much the solid base of the pyramid (sex & shelter,
family/stability, love & intimacy). Does a tiny, expensive shiny rock from
Sierra Leone provide those needs? No; obviously it is the symbolism of giving
to/receiving from someone in the hope that they will provide those needs to
you. Did humans manage to satisfy those needs before De Beers came along? I'm
pretty sure they did.

The desire for diamonds among the general populace was completely
manufactured, whereas the aforementioned needs always existed, and (I strongly
suspect) were always being filled before the normalisation of diamond rings as
intentions of marriage.

I suppose diamonds (at least in the context of use as jewellery), and the
whole story of De Beers are a shining example of commodity fetishism.

------
analog31
1984 was also when manufacturing jobs went into decline. In my locale a lot of
displaced auto workers went into programming.

(edit: Off-by-one-century error)

------
cicero
I've read elsewhere how in the earliest days of computers, men designed the
hardware and relegated the programming to women because it was seen as
clerical work, albeit advanced clerical work. Because of this, women, such as
Grace Hopper, became well established in the field.

The advent of the Apple II and TRS-80 exposed kids (including myself) to
computers, and with these machines, programming was the most accessible
aspect. You could try to modify the hardware, but then you risked ruining the
most expensive piece of equipment in the home. However, you experiment all you
wanted with the BASIC prompt, and that's how I learned to program. There is
something different about girls and boys such that this kind of tinkering with
gadgets appeals much more to boys than girls.

I remember excitedly showing our new Apple II to my cousin who is 6 years
older than me, and who had recently finished her CS degree and was working in
"data processing." I expected her to have the same gee-whiz reaction I had,
but she was not impressed. To her, the Apple II was a silly and expensive toy.

I think that in a way, when myself and other male "Micro Kids" entered the
university and professional CS world, we changed the dynamic from a more
professional to a more hacker-like culture. Not only did our numbers heavily
tilt the gender distribution, but I think we also made the culture less
attractive to women.

My cousin, now in her late 50s, is still in IT as a higher-level manager in a
large oil and gas firm. Right now, she appears to be spending a lot of time
dealing with the logistics of some major office relocations. It is probably
the kind of work that many on HN would consider boring, but I am sure it is
essential to the smooth operation of a large modern corporation. When I hear
her talk about her work, she comes across as being more responsible and
practical than her younger male peers, and I don't doubt that's the case.

~~~
deveac
_> There is something different about girls and boys such that this kind of
tinkering with gadgets appeals much more to boys than girls._

There is something different about what our culture teaches and signals to
girls and boys from the moment they are born such that this kind of tinkering
with gadgets appeals much more to boys than girls.

~~~
stuxnet79
Same thing if you want to be a programmer and happen to not be indian, white
or chinese.

------
coldtea
> _But a lot of computing pioneers, the ones who programmed the first digital
> computers, were women. And for decades, the number of women in computer
> science was growing. But in 1984, something changed. The number of women in
> computer science flattened, and then plunged._

Those statistics kind of refute those lamenting male culture etc for the lack
of more women in computer science.

One would imagine the 1969-1984 that the graph shows, the "male culture", bro
attitudes, etc were far more imposing that they are in the milenial, PC
environments of today. We're talking about the seventies to early eighties,
after all!

And yet, there were more women back then than they are now.

(Always suspected the usual explanations weren't the reason. It's not like
medicine, law school, finance, etc have much better male cultures than
computer science).

------
scotty79
Isn't that about the same time when greed driven people started doing such
crappy games that adults (women included) stopped playing them altogether?
After the market nearly died they had to move games from electronics to child
toys but they had then pick either boys toys or girls toys and they went with
boys.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i08CVkBxvBM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i08CVkBxvBM)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_cras...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_crash_of_1983)

It seems that there is only one way for normal people to enter programming and
it's through games.

------
aggieben
Can someone post the TL;DR (uh....TL;DL?) from the podcast here? Looks like a
decent discussion going on, but can't tell that anyone actually listened :-)

I'll cop to the fact that I'm just not going to spend the time, though I'm
interested in the conclusion(s).

~~~
nmc
The post was updated with a link to this transcript/summary:
[http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-
women-stopped-coding)

------
bboreham
I started Edinburgh University in 1983, and there were about 10% women on the
CS course. There were more, I think, on the AI course, but that was in a
completely different department.

------
TurboHaskal
Because they know better than doing unpaid overtime, keeping up to date in an
ever changing industry driven by popularity contests and having to work for
free on some open source project because somebody thought that what you do in
your free time is somehow more relevant CV wise than what you actually do for
a living.

I wouldn't worry much anyway. We won't be seeing many of those articles once
the bubble bursts.

------
tzs
> But in 1984, something changed. The number of women in computer science
> flattened, and then plunged.

So did the number of men. Bachelor's degrees in CS peaked in the US with 27k
men, 15k women in 1985-86. Then they dropped by 1993-94 to 17.5k men, 7k
women, and then started going back up. By 2002-04, they both had reached new
peaks of 44.5k men, 15.5k women.

There's something going on here that is more complicated than what is captured
in that sex ratio graph.

Data from here:
[http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_349.asp](http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_349.asp)

------
anjanb
A lot of indian women are taking to coding/programming career. Currently, the
estimate of number of women programmers in india is about 1,00,000. They are
expected to grow to 2,00,00 in less than 10 years.

~~~
scbrg
Not to be nitpicky, but you probably want to review how you typed those
numbers. The second is smaller than the first, and the commas are not grouping
the zeroes in groups of three. I suppose you mean either 10^5 or 10^6, but I'm
not sure which.

~~~
gauthr
They're using the Indian numbering system -- see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_numbering_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_numbering_system)

~~~
talmand
That's really interesting, thanks for the link.

But it still doesn't make sense, because if you remove the commas from
1,00,000 and 2,00,00 you end up with 100000 versus 20000. Based on the
examples in your link I'm assuming that the last figure should be 2,00,000. In
the examples all the high number always end with three zeros.

------
hasenj
Maybe it's actually the time that men became more interested in software.

The first programmers were mostly females because men in STEM were probably
more interested in physics and hardware. This is entirely a hunch on my part,
but even the term "soft-ware" sounds almost derogatory.

Imagine if math was called a soft science? Why, it's all imaginary!

I think the term "soft science" is some derogatory towards fields like social
sciences.

------
ashmud
I find it interesting the transition towards physical sciences and away from
computer science in the late 1980s. At that time, my mother, who was educated
and worked in chemistry, started working at home as a programmer. It was a
very good job that allowed her to work remotely most of the time and set her
own schedule.

------
golergka
Transcript or tl;dr available?

I assume it has to do with computers becoming a mass-market commodity and
marketing strategies involving "traditional" gender roles.

~~~
red_admiral
Yes. Last paragraph of the page, link after Update:

-> [http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-wom...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding)

------
BerislavLopac
I would like to see a parallel breakdown of _professors_ by gender, for the
same fields in the same time frame.

------
amelius
According to [1], 1984 was the year when Common Lisp and MATLAB were invented.

But perhaps a more causative correlation is that in 1983, C++ was born (after
being called "C with classes" a few years before).

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languag...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languages)

~~~
slazaro
But what would these technologies have to do with the decline of women in CS?

~~~
Ygg2
Probably nothing.

More likely marketing computer as boy/nerd toy is what caused a shift.

~~~
facepalm
Why is that likely?

~~~
Ygg2
I said more likely, but why is that more likely? Because huge shift in public
opinion are from my experience, most likely made by marketing agencies.

Also ads like these: [http://howtonotsuckatgamedesign.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/...](http://howtonotsuckatgamedesign.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/12/fear-of-the-female-geek-xlg_two_bytes_better.jpg)

~~~
facepalm
Certainly a horrible ad. But it is for buying a machine. If such ads were the
culprit, women shouldn't be driving cars either? I don't know what the ads
were like at the time, but I am pretty sure they made similar ads for cars.
Also not sure what kind of ads were targeted at women. It's pretty common to
this day, although cheap, to just mix a random product with the claim "will
make you more attractive to the opposite sex".

Wasn't it also the case that at first operating computers was deemed a task
for secretaries, and then the perception changed?

I suppose they could have shown ads of secretaries being loved by their bosses
because they work so efficiently thanks to their shiny new computers.

Edit:
[http://www.macmothership.com/gallery/MiscAds/AdamAd.JPG](http://www.macmothership.com/gallery/MiscAds/AdamAd.JPG)
\- women should just have used Macs?

~~~
Ygg2
Cars != computers.

Cars are a means of transportation and much more of a requirement to live in
urban environment than a computer.

~~~
ectoplasm
There are quite a few massive cities in wealthy countries where a significant
number of people choose not to drive even though they can afford it.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_most_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_most_households_without_a_car)

