
How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution - adventured
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-08-19/how-women-got-crowded-out-of-the-computing-revolution
======
k__
I don't understand this whole thing.

Until recent years all developers I met were socially awkward men, me
included.

These are not the kind of people I would attribute any power to "crowd out"
anyone.

To me it seemed that they started doing computer stuff, because no one,
including women, wanted to have anything to do with them.

The "cool", way more aggressive, kids wanted to do sales, law, finance,
management and stuff.

Computers were new and complicated, a unsafe bet for people who were so good
included into society.

~~~
Edmond
The "socially awkward" archetype of a computer programmer I think is mostly a
western (probably American) cultural artifact. For instance I have worked with
a lot of Indian immigrants who are programmers and I don't find the
correlation between social awkwardness and the people doing programming.

While programming might be appealing to socially awkward western/American men
, I don't think one should go from that to concluding that they're the only
people innately drawn to it.

~~~
gaius
_The "socially awkward" archetype of a computer programmer I think is mostly a
western (probably American) cultural artifact_

It was around that time in the 80s that "the nerd" or "the geek" became a
staple movie character. Computers up 'til then had just been a piece of
industrial machinery like a lathe or a microscope. Now they were associated
with "losers". Richard Pryor in Superman III. Revenge Of The Nerds. Etc etc.

And by and large society was perfectly happy to relegate computing to these
losers and shun them. Noone cared about the demographics of these losers,
either, it was not "problematic". It's only recently when the geeks have built
something that took over the world, that people are saying, hey, I didn't do
the work or make the sacrifices but I deserve the rewards. That's where we get
"brogrammers" et al.

------
lsd5you
I am well aware that the climate is well against this position, but you cannot
just dismiss the 'Damore' view out of hand. He is not just 'wrong'. The Damore
view is at the very least plausible and tarring a whole industry filled with
many thoughtful and introverted (i.e. not messing with others, often taken
advantage of themselves) individuals to support some view of gender economics
is morally wrong.

We now live in a time where we are increasingly told what we should believe.
In my view morality shouldn't extend to belief. For one it leaves certain
individuals (like myself) out in the cold. Sorry, I cannot be told what to
believe.

Maybe this is just the current hot topic and many people want to read it, but
to me it reads as a form of propaganda (by definition media created to
determine what people believe) or at least journalistic activism, and who is
this guy (apparently some business journalist) to write authoratively on the
subject, based on one fact (the predominance of women in early programming
jobs). The fact of the matter is that programming has changed beyond
recognition, particularly between 1950 and 1980 or so and that is more than
enough to at the very least plausibly explain the change in programmer
demographic. Anyone who is in the industry knows these eras cannot be compared
(surely?).

~~~
danharaj
James Damore's arguments are only plausible in the weakest sense of the word.
The only way someone would find his arguments convincing is if one's priors
already favor his conclusion.

If one weighs the evidence for social factors against biological factors, the
question is how should a critical person weigh one against the other? It turns
out if one ignores all the evidence for social factors and squint really hard
at the biological ones, one can, I guess, scam oneself into thinking there's a
strong argument there.

~~~
mpweiher
His claim was that biological factors "could" explain the gap, at least in
part, in that you can't rule out that possibility categorically.

I don't recall him claiming that biological factors were the more important
factors, never mind the only ones.

~~~
danharaj
If you don't consider evidence you are aware of in an argument, it means you
don't think that evidence is necessary to consider. He wants his argument to
be considered rigorously in which case it is appropriate to make inferences
about what he didn't consider as well as what he did.

It's a quiet truth that most disagreements between people have a crucial basis
in the implicit nature of how we weigh and consider information.

A great deal of defense of Damore's arguments are to only consider what is
explicitly said and not how it fits into the broader discussion, which is
implicit by definition.

So Damore can claim he isn't saying that he thinks some female engineers
currently at Google are there because the bar has been lowered (explicit) and
this is accepted uncritically by some defenders, but it's not hard to draw the
inference from his arguments and his policy suggestions that he thinks
Google's current practices have a negative impact on the quality of engineers
it recruits (implicit).

Likewise we are told to evaluate the information he gave (explicit) but not
consider why he omitted discussing the mountains of evidence that suggest
alternative positions and how his arguments should be evaluated in light of it
(implicit).

My position is that there is the evidence of negative social feedback is
significant enough that companies should experiment with changing their
demographic compositions and empirically measuring performance.

Because software engineering requires a great diversity of skills, including
people skills, empathy and whole-systems thinking, I think it's very plausible
that making the gender balance less skewed will lead to more productive teams.

~~~
mpweiher
Wow. Just wow.

So basically, you are saying that you can judge him and what he writes not by
what he writes, but whatever you want to arbitrarily insert into his writing.

Even the inquisition had higher standards than that.

~~~
danharaj
Honest question in good faith: have you ever read a serious, rigorous exchange
of criticism in any field like philosophy or politics? Because what I
described is literally par for the course in critical thinking. If Damore and
his ilk want to participate in an honest critical debate then their arguments
are sure as fuck going to be analyzed the same way everyone's arguments are
analyzed in every serious intellectually rigorous setting.

Your refusal to take this idea seriously is a microcosm of what's rotten in
this whole discourse (or am I not allowed to draw a connection between what
you wrote and literally anything else?).

~~~
mpweiher
He wasn't participating in a rigorous exchange of criticism in philosophy or
politics.

>Because what I described is literally par for the course in critical
thinking.

No, what you described is completely arbitrary.

> his ilk

Right, "rigorous" and "critical" debate. No pure ad-hominems to see here. Move
along.

> every serious intellectually rigorous setting.

Er, no.

Just making shit up and attributing it to your opponent is the opposite of
"intellectually" rigorous. It maybe _ideologically_ rigorous, but that's about
it.

~~~
danharaj
> He wasn't participating in a rigorous exchange of criticism in philosophy or
> politics.

Um, his memo was intrinsically political. The matters of policy of a company
are political matters. Therefore it is completely valid to scrutinize it
politically and of course at a serious level which integrates it into the
surrounding context.

> No, what you described is completely arbitrary.

No, not really. If it was completely arbitrary then I would be considering
things like "Well James Damore didn't mention the ongoing debate on ham and
pineapple pizza and clearly shows his bias in doing so". There is an inherent
context to his memo that is completely obvious to everyone involved as
evidenced by the fact that literally every side in the discussion involving it
makes some sort of connection to that context.

On the side defending him, usually calling people who condemn his memo as
irrational or the intolerant left, or some-such hostile dismissal.

> Right, "rigorous" and "critical" debate. No pure ad-hominems to see here.
> Move along.

Ad hominem is "James Damore is a doofus, therefore he's wrong". "James Damore
is wrong, and because he is wrong in this way, he's a doofus", on the other
hand, is not ad hominem. The only thing more odious than whipping out the
latin is doing it incorrectly. From all the digital ink spilled on the topic,
I have concluded that there are only a very small group of people defending
him that earnestly consider the idea that he fucked up. The most common
discourse is to simply presume that he didn't and then demand that everyone
engage with him and his memo on their terms. Yawn.

> Just making shit up and attributing it to your opponent is the opposite of
> "intellectually" rigorous. It maybe ideologically rigorous, but that's about
> it.

James Damore's arguments are neither novel nor exemplary. The fact that he A)
insists that he's being shut out of conversation and B) proceeds to make the
same exact argument that has been discussed ad nauseum without bringing
anything new to the table is telling. Everyone has already met a James Damore;
they don't need another.

------
peoplewindow
Ugh. So basically when programming was unskilled and considered one step up
from being a secretary, women did that and men built the machines themselves.

As software became a larger and larger component of the machines, and more and
more complex, it became dominated by men. This, we learn, is because men made
it more rigorous and scientific as part of some bizarre sexist plot.

Or maybe the nature of programming today is pretty different to how it was in
the immediate post-war years, and the kinds of jobs women can get changed too.

~~~
cmiles74
I'd bet that as the field grew, they eventually had a surplus of engineers
working on new hardware and a deficit of people working to write new software.
Once there were men willing to do the work, they were seen as a better bet
than the women already in the field.

The same thing happened after WW2, this isn't a new pattern.

------
RealityNow
Even if the author's premise that women were "crowded out" of programming 40
years ago is true, that does not imply that “innate dispositional differences”
between sexes don't influence one's tendency towards pursuing certain fields.

The author suggests that the current stereotypical portrait of a geeky
socially awkward neckbearded male engineer was socially engineered, causing a
self-fulfilling prophecy. That's idiotic conspiracy nonsense. Geeky reclusive
men tend to pursue computer programming because dealing with a machine doesn't
involve dealing with a human, not due to society's marketing of computer
engineers as geeks.

The author is clearly not a computer programmer (professor of history
apparently), nor someone capable of basic logic. If you're going to cash in on
the diversity scandal for views, at least make a coherent argument.

(Also this post is a dupe, I submitted the same post before this and this is a
copy and paste of my comment on the original thread)

------
Klockan
> They found some predictable ones: a love of solving puzzles, for example.
> But the only “striking characteristic” that defined successful male
> programmers was “their disinterest in people.” A subsequent study -- one
> that was overlooked in subsequent years -- found this to be true of female
> programmers as well.

Isn't this trait much more prevalent among males though? Could explain why we
saw women flock to more social fields when the barriers were removed.

------
lumberjack
When do we start looking at articles like this as misandry? The author is
seriously implying there was some sort of conspiracy that all men partook in,
with the intent to exclude women from software development. Are you fucking
kidding me? This shit has gone too far.

~~~
cmiles74
There's no conspiracy, there's only satisfaction with the status quo that
leads to those with the upper hand working to preserve the status quo. This
dynamic is discussed all the time on this forum.

------
deepnotderp
Notice how they make the claim that males used underhanded tactics to force
women out of the software industry, but they never provide a single bit of
evidence for that.

The entire article is basically about the software industry evolved into more
male positions and things like altitude tests and requirements of advanced
degrees which are apparently part of some coordinated conspiracy to be sexist
against women.

I agree that aptitude tests and degrees are stupid , but for totally different
reasons. This is just incredible mental gymnastics to push an agenda.

------
Mz
If this is at all accurate, then all it is saying is that programming started
as a pink collar ghetto. The article itself indicates it was dominated by
women as long as it was considered "glorified clerical work." This is actually
really normal stuff, not peculiar to the computer industry. "Serious jobs"
tend to get dominated by men. This may be related to "the second shift" \--
that women seek jobs that don't take an excess of their energy so they can go
home and cook, clean, etc. Men are much more often in a position to say
"Woman, get me a beer" and just collapse after giving their all to their job.

I don't know a solution. But, I think we aren't going to find one if we don't
first recognize that one of the roots of such problems is not that women are
predisposed to certain kinds of labor, but that society as a whole expects
women to do "women's work" at home and this is rooted in the reality that
women can get pregnant, men cannot. A lot of traditional gender roles grow out
of that and a lot of societal expectations grow out of that and it wasn't
intended to oppress women. It evolved organically as a way for both adults in
a household to contribute meaningfully to making ends meet, raising the kids,
etc at a time when birth control was not readily available and yadda.

------
riskable
> Sexist stereotypes are used today to justify not hiring women programmers,

[Citation Needed]

Only once (recently) have I ever had the chance to interview a woman for a
job. She was fine. I gave my approval. We didn't end up hiring her. Why?
Because someone else had more of the _specific skills_ we were looking for.
She was just unlucky.

5-6 other people were also turned down for the same reason. The guy that was
hired just happened to have experience in some of the products we were working
with.

------
booleandilemma
"More women should be coding"

I see an article with some variation of this argument here every week. I’m
starting to believe that society has become obsessed with getting more women
to open up Visual Studio every morning.

But this isn't like recycling, saving the rainforest, stopping ozone depletion
or global warming. All of humanity benefits from doing those things. I
couldn't care less if the person who develops the next hot phone app is a man
or a woman. I don't think any end user cares.

Because the fact is it doesn't matter. A Git repository doesn't treat code any
differently depending on the gender of the person who pushed it.

And yet I see a new article about getting women to code every week.

Are women themselves fighting for the right to hit F10 and step through code
every day? Is it akin to another woman suffrage movement?

I don't think so. In fact, I think the majority of women just don't seem to be
interested in coding.

It's as if this is someone else’s agenda. An agenda to get more women to code,
whether they want to or not.

So who’s pushing this agenda? If corporations are pushing it, then the end
goal is probably to save money, because that's why corporations will push any
agenda.

------
deepnotderp
It's hilarious that they criticize the stereotype of nerdy outcast male. If
you're a girl, 9/10 you will never get flak for being nerdy (yes, exceptions
exist, i know, but in my experience), on the other hand, emasculating the male
nerd is practically a national pastime.

To add to the irony, a surprisingly large proportion of the anti - Damore
tweets were criticizing his appearance and/or calling him a virgin.

------
tnone
Luckily programming or computing hasn't changed at all since the 50s and 60s,
so we can effortlessly assume that what people said about it then still
applies perfectly to today's distributed, abstract, always-on landscape.

Even more, we can use the view from the 50s and 60s, a time which was not
sexist at all, to explain why today is more sexist than ever.

Women outnumber men in colleges. Women have an easier time getting jobs.
Single, childless women outearn men in that category.

Women just aren't choosing STEM. And apparently the solution is to tell them
loudly how horrible the people they'd get to work with are. Who are some
bizarre amalgam of a Goldman Sachs elevator and the cast of Big Bang Theory.
Which you can effortlessly get a flood of coverage about, even though you're
supposedly oppressed and are fighting the status quo.

Go away old media, go away tech feminists, go away white knights. If people
stopped seeing women as victims, you'd lose your meal ticket, your power
fetish and your moral superiority.

------
csomar
Why is the obsession with this topic? I have never been to the US but is there
a problem for a female to be a software developer in the US? Is this problem
just in the US?

By the way, there are countries where over 50% of CS Students are female.

------
hokkos
It's sad the article starts with the use of the Ada Lovelace trope, she is not
widely considered to be the first computer programmer, or maybe on a pop
culture way, not in a scholarly way.

------
aaimnr
Slatestarcodex in the article cited here multiple times made a point that men
didn't push out women out of other high paying fields like law or medicine. If
the theory is right, why did it only happen in IT?

------
setra
SlateStarCodex did an in depth cover of this issue at:
[http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-
exagger...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-
differences/)

------
sillysaurus3
I have always wondered: People often point to graphs showing a massive decline
in the percentage of women in CS in the 80's. But has anyone seen a graph of
the absolute number, not percentages?

If 1 million women were coding, then 100 billion men started coding, those 1M
women would still be coders. So there wasn't necessarily a decline. Or maybe
there was, and the numbers will reflect that.

I am interested in the actual numbers, not graphs or interpretations. But I've
never found a data source, so hopefully someone knows of one.

The whole debate is interesting because there are at least four separate
sides: men who don't believe it exists, men who recognize it as a systemic
problem, women who believe it's the most important aspect, and women who wish
the debate would go away so they can focus on doing good work instead of on
doing good work as a woman.

Me, I don't know enough about it. I'm just curious about the numbers over
time. And if I have a daughter hopefully I'll think of some crafty way to make
programming seem interesting. The one badass female dev I know said she
regretted not getting into it from a younger age, so it seems worth fixing.

~~~
LogicalBorg
This may be what you're looking for:
[https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_349.asp](https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_349.asp)

According to that table, women's bachelor's degrees in computer science:

* were low in the 1970's, about 15% average

* were higher in the 1980's, about 35% average

* declined in the 1990's to about 25-30%

* steadily declined from 27 to 17% in the 2000's

~~~
sillysaurus3
Thank you. Perfect. Now I feel like we're in a position to have a productive
debate. For example, there was a sharp decline in the rate of bachelor's
degrees for women, but not master's degrees. Those remained nearly the same,
then declined at the same rate as men's.

It's interesting to see the actual numbers because it clearly shows there
is/was a problem. Now, how best to solve it?

One issue with quotas is that the rate of women graduates can't necessarily
keep up. It seems like we could use an influx of new students (in addition to
the current efforts).

------
PeachPlum
One of the stars of comptuing, Grace Hopper, rarely mentions her sex.

She talks of inspiring young people, her talks are technical.

I think we are too quick to get wrapped up in identity politics.

------
rhapsodic
Just once, I would like to read in one of these articles about an actual non-
anonymous woman who could plausibly demonstrate that a.) she had a strong
desire to be a software developer, b.) she had developed sufficient skills in
a marketable language to be employed as one, and c.) she had made a prolonged
effort to find employment as one, and d.) she was unable land a job as a
software developer.

Instead, it's always about something that a magazine ad said in 1969, or a
teacher who told them that woman couldn't be programmers, or the boys in their
school computer club ignored, them, etc. etc.

And the prescriptions, as usual, are that in order to get more woman into
software development, that changes must be imposed on men, not woman.

This crap got old a long time ago.

~~~
rhapsodic
The parent of this post has been getting about an equal number of upvotes as
downvotes.

------
b6
Such bunk. I spent thousands of hours fighting with computers due to
obsession, certainly not because I had some notion that it was important or
that it would be considered a good occupation 20 years in the future. I was
practically living a double life as a computer bodybuilder, _despite_ the
reaction society gave me about it. When I look back over how I got good at
computers and programming, I see no reason women could not have done the same
thing. Yet most didn't. Why they didn't, I don't know. Sexism could probably
stop a woman from being in construction, but not so much programming. Let's
stop with these persecution myths.

------
danharaj
There's a strong correlation between women entering a field and it having low
prestige, and men entering a field and it having higher prestige.

Guess which field of ours was considered busywork for women to do until men
realized it was going to transform society as we know it.

~~~
innocentoldguy
Perhaps, but even if the article is correct, and male programmers in the 1960s
did intentionally crowd out women, doesn't that demonstrate what Damore
posited when he said women are less assertive and less aggressive, in general?
It seems disingenuous for the author of the article to declare Damore "wrong,"
when studies back up what Damore said, and this article itself suggests those
tendencies to be accurate, at least to some degree.

~~~
danharaj
James Damore asserted that women are less aggressive than men because of
mostly biological factors which is ridiculous if one has ever at all paid
attention to the social signals given to women.

Also, why the fuck would we ever stand for our industry to be organized along
hierarchies of dominance and aggression? What exactly is the argument here?

~~~
innocentoldguy
Had he said psychological differences instead, would you then agree with him?
There are differences, which is obvious. So I am curious what you think the
root cause of those differences is, and why you're willing to throw out the
whole premise, based solely on Damore's understanding of the root cause? Isn't
that a bit like denying the sunrise, simply because someone says the sun moves
in the sky because it revolves around the Earth?

Please read the links I offered in another response in this thread for more
information.

------
botverse
How advertising of computers was made had an important accelerating effect
towards the exclusion of women from the industry.

[https://qz.com/911737/silicon-valleys-gender-gap-is-the-
resu...](https://qz.com/911737/silicon-valleys-gender-gap-is-the-result-of-
computer-game-marketing-20-years-ago/)

~~~
botverse
Thanks for the down-vote.

More on this, computer were expensive toys, and traditionally boys get more
expensive toys than girls. It's quite understandable the marketing decision
there.

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/dec/06/gender.christm...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/dec/06/gender.christmas)

------
abalone
This is an important and well-written article that succinctly exposes the
history and mechanisms of sexism in the industry. How once software became a
valued profession a complex of obstacles at the cultural and professional
level were put in place to change its composition from primarily women to men.

It is also a damning indictment of the HN community. It is clear this post has
suffered a campaign of down voting. Every comment that is positive toward the
article, even just summarizing its content, has been downvoted. By the time I
finished reading it it had disappeared off the front page entirely.

Meanwhile, many of the comments merely state anecdotal experiences and
armchair theories reinforcing why men end up dominating the field, while
entirely ignoring the content of the article.

There are clearly some high-karma men aggressively censoring this topic. I
hope this article makes it back onto the front page because it's really worth
a read by our whole community -- even if you disagree.

~~~
rhapsodic
_> It is also a damning indictment of the HN community. It is clear this post
has suffered a campaign of down voting. Every comment that is positive toward
the article, even just summarizing its content, has been downvoted. By the
time I finished reading it it had disappeared off the front page entirely._

I don't know for sure, obviously, but based on the patterns I've casually
observed on HN in the past, I suspect this article was flagged not because it
promotes a male-blaming POV, but because the anti-male-blaming types seem to
be winning the arguments in the comments.

And on topics as polarizing as this one, I suspect that every comment, on
either side, gets some number of downvotes and upvotes. It's the countering
effect of the upvotes that keep them from getting killed.

Personally, I upvote a lot more than I downvote, and I routinely upvote posts
I disagree with if it appears they were made in good faith and some thought
was put into them, but are nonetheless suffering a lot of downvotes.

