
Women Who Contributed to Science but Were Buried in Footnotes - richardhod
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/02/womens-history-in-science-hidden-footnotes/582472/
======
quannah
It's a pity that this interesting research into changing customs in science
and publishing is so driven by a predetermined narrative.

They found women accounted for 59% of acknowledged programmers -- so 41% were
men and got the same treatment. The obvious conclusion would be that
_programming_ wasn't acknowledged the way it is now, but instead they push the
narrative that they weren't acknowledged _because they were women_. Giving
overlooked women in science some due attention is perfectly fine, but
unwarranted conclusions about the causes for various situations aren't, in my
opinion.

And the same with their explanation for how it changed. They state that it's
in part because the work started being done by graduate students and postdocs,
but then still conclude "Programmers, essentially, only became rewarded with
authorship when they started becoming male." (and this "when" here is clearly
intended to be read as a causal when). Of course there is a more plausible
explanation, namely that men started becoming more interested in programming
when it started presenting better opportunities for high-paying and high
status jobs. Fully what is expected based on evolutionary psychology.

~~~
moosey
> She and her colleagues found that in the 1970s, women accounted for 59
> percent of acknowledged programmers, but just 7 percent of actual authors.
> That decade was a pivotal time for the field of population genetics, when
> the foundations of much modern research were laid. “Based on authorship at
> the time, it seems that this research was conducted by a relatively small
> number of independent individual scientists, nearly all of whom were men,”
> the team writes. But that wasn’t the case.

Nice way of glossing over that section.

At some point you just have to reject the argument that it was "best
intentions" or "that's just evolutionary psychology". It was only 45 years ago
that the "Equal Credit Opportunity Act" was passed. There are still tons of
weird attitudes about women and their contributions to society. One that I see
often is that "Women select lower paying jobs", but I rarely see the obvious
counter argument "why in the hell doesn't our economy reward women for raising
the next generation of workers?", as they do 80% of the house work. Women are
often ignored in history books, Texas even made an attempt to have Hillary
Clinton completely removed.

This discussion is just one such example. There are mounds of evidence of the
sexism in our society. There might be scientific reasons that it exists, but
there is no scientific or ethical defense of it's continued existence. Whether
in the workplace or at home, women have been supplying half of economic output
for the entirety of our history, and it's time to stop pretending that it
isn't the case, or that historically those in power were powerless against
some natural economic state.

~~~
quannah
I'm not glossing over it, it's a different point. They are implying a causal
link between the 7% and the 59% when they haven't demonstrated that. They show
that individual authors got a lot of help that wasn't awarded with authorship.
You can point out that nowadays this work would be worthy of authorship, and
that women were somewhat overrepresented in the acknowledgements without
authorship. That doesn't demonstrate the big claims of sexism they're
stating/implying. If they showed men getting authorship for only the
programming help, and women not getting authorship in comparable situations,
that would be a different matter.

I didn't say sexism didn't (or doesn't) exist, there's plenty of other
evidence that it did/does. I'm just saying it doesn't follow.

And if I say something can be explained by evolutionary psychology that
doesn't mean that therefore it's fine, or that it couldn't be changed given
the right system of incentives.

~~~
moosey
You made the suggestion that as programming work became a higher paying field
that men suddenly looked for jobs there, due to "evolutionary psychology",
without a lick of proof that it wasn't the other way around.

Perhaps programming work is really well paid now because Nintendo of America
decided to advertise to boys, and then those boys grew up to become men who
were interested in programming, and because men pay other men more than they
offer women. Or perhaps because, as the SV folks like to say "They aren't a
good culture fit" when interviewing female candidates.

> We used wage data and productivity data from the whole of New Zealand to
> look at the reasons for the gender wage gap. We found that sexism (where
> employers prefer to hire men rather than women, are more likely to reject
> equally qualified women, or offer women less) is likely to be the most
> important driver of the gender wage gap. This is opposed to women working in
> low-paying industries or firms, being less productive, or being less
> successful at bargaining. [1]

Of course it follows. It is undeniable that many centuries of sexism are going
to take a lot of work to undo, and it isn't exactly easy when most religions
followed the world over, by huge swaths of humanity, also belittle their
contributions to society, and actually devalue them to be below men. These
beliefs and stories have a major impact on what we do.

So I'm going to stick with sexism because it is most likely the correct
answer.

[1] - [http://theconversation.com/women-paid-less-for-same-
contribu...](http://theconversation.com/women-paid-less-for-same-contribution-
to-work-and-sexism-is-to-blame-study-83052)

~~~
belorn
With the suggestion that "evolutionary psychology" isn't involved in men
seeking higher income jobs, why is there an extreme correlation between income
for men and having children, but not for women? Why is it that society reward
rich men with larger social network, while women has on average larger social
network than men that is not associated with income? perhaps, as people say,
"Poor men aren't as attractive"...

> So I'm going to stick with sexism because it is most likely the correct
> answer.

Personally I am sticking to the incentive model. A woman who prioritize other
aspect in their work and personal life over income does not have fewer
children, has the same social network size as other women, and get similar
respect in society at old age. For men the opposite is true, where a man who
make the same choices would end up (statistically) at the bottom of society,
alone, childless, with no respect in old age. As a result low income men also
has a lower life expectancy. Pretty strong incentives if you ask me.

------
jordigh
It's really interesting how back in the 50s-70s, programming was considered
boring, clerical women's work and the architecture side of things was
considered men's work. The attitude at the time was that the men did the real
work by writing flowcharts and the women were doing menial labour by turning
those flowcharts into computer instructions. A lot of these women in the
footnotes seem to be a footnote because of this consideration.

The Computer Girls is another interesting article about this attitude and how
programming became masculised:

[http://homes.soic.indiana.edu/nensmeng/files/ensmenger-
gende...](http://homes.soic.indiana.edu/nensmeng/files/ensmenger-gender.pdf)

~~~
ivanhoe
Because in those days big part of "coding" was actually transcribing program
logic into codes and then punching holes in cards for those codes. It was
tedious and boring process. What we today call code monkeys is super-creative
position compared to that.

~~~
rspeer
This is a revisionist and false narrative, and I believe it may be inspired by
the "just world fallacy": you may be inclined to believe the world couldn't
actually be unfair to women, so you search for another reason why their
contributions would actually have been less important.

Your narrative is historically incorrect. Women invented many of the things
that made software engineering _less_ tedious, such as debuggers (Betty
Holberton, 1945), subroutines (Kay McNulty, circa 1947), assemblers (Kathleen
Booth, 1947), linkers (Grace Hopper, 1952), and compilers (Grace Hopper,
1954). Programmers have always strived to make their job easier. If you don't
see these inventions as creative effort, I don't know how to help you.

Even the parts of programming that were tedious were still important. If you
saw someone tediously programming in assembly code today, you might celebrate
the effort.

The flowcharts that these women were handed by their managers were not
"program logic". There were many _difficult_ details to work out about how to
implement a program given the limited computing power of the time. You would
not describe a manager today who draws a flowchart as having "written a
program".

~~~
ivanhoe
You jump to conclusions and project your own anger/frustrations that have
absolutely nothing to do with me. First of all I totally agree with you that
to women it was much harder to succeed in those times, there's no need to
explain that to me. Second I never even mentioned gender issues anywhere, I
was talking about the difference between what was called "programming" and
what was "coding" back in those days. And of course women invented a lot of
great stuff, but as you said yourself it was programming. And the coding part
on the other hand was boring as hell, in order to write and run a program you
had to do a lot of manual labour. It's just not comparable to anything today.
You mention assembler, but imagine doing asm using only pen & paper, and then
you give that program to someone else to turn it into holes on punched cards.
And then you had to reserve some time to run that code on mainframe (where
operator would run it for you and hand you back the results) and there was a
usually a long waiting list for that, so if you've made any mistakes it would
take days to get a chance to re-run it again. It was very different than
coding today, involved more steps and more people.

------
DoofusOfDeath
I'd be interested to see a thorough breakdown of everybody, not just women,
who were "buried in footnotes".

~~~
jordigh
I find this kind of comment a bit off-putting.

Women deserve a focus.

Other people also deserve a focus. They should also get it.

But for now, this article is about giving women a focus. Talking about giving
other people a focus seems to be an attempt to get the focus away from women
or denying that they deserve it. It seems a bit like derailing. Given HN's
overwhelming male demographics because computers and software are
overwhelmingly male, it's a bit harmful to be talking about other people
whenever women are mentioned.

For now, just read about women. That's a big chunk of the population. Later,
read about other non-women people who also were left out. But give women a
chance.

~~~
ljj1122
It's a bit like asking why there isn't a Straight Pride Month, really. Men in
science haven't really been categorically underrepresented/excluded from
science the way women ever have.

~~~
johnisgood
Representation is irrelevant, it has 0 value, and it is a silly game anyway,
because you can just pick another arbitrary category. For example: blonde
people are underrepresented, and so on. Is it interesting? No. Is it relevant?
Not really.

~~~
minikites
Are blonde people systemically discriminated against through laws and broad
cultural values?

~~~
johnisgood
Women and blacks are not "systemically discriminated against through laws" in
most countries. I will emphasize that US and UK are not the countries in which
they are.

And as to broad cultural values: I should have brought up gingers then,
because I am sure you can agree to it that they are. Plus, you really cannot
claim anything about the relevant people's cultural values and if they really
have been a major influence on the decision of putting people in the
footnotes, and that it was due to this people's biological sex. Why do you so
want it to be the case? Why cannot it be something else, like something
related to the contribution itself? That would definitely make more sense and
would be more likely than some random, arbitrary attribute.

~~~
minikites
>Women and blacks are not "systemically discriminated against through laws" in
most countries. I will emphasize that US and UK are not the countries in which
they are.

This is patently and obviously false:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining#Banks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining#Banks)

>A 2017 study by Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago economists found that the
practice of redlining—the practice whereby banks discriminated against the
inhabitants of certain neighborhoods—had a persistent adverse impact on the
neighborhoods, with redlining affecting homeownership rates, home values and
credit scores in 2010.

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

>Low income black communities that have been segregated by social forces
through city design have higher levels of criminal activity rates.

[https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2010/08/03/data-show-
ra...](https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2010/08/03/data-show-racial-
disparity-in-crack-sentencing)

>According to U.S. Sentencing Commission figures, no class of drug is as
racially skewed as crack in terms of numbers of offenses. According to the
commission, 79 percent of 5,669 sentenced crack offenders in 2009 were black,
versus 10 percent who were white and 10 percent who were Hispanic. The figures
for the 6,020 powder cocaine cases are far less skewed: 17 percent of these
offenders were white, 28 percent were black, and 53 percent were Hispanic.
Combined with a 115-month average imprisonment for crack offenses versus an
average of 87 months for cocaine offenses, this makes for more African-
Americans spending more time in the prison system.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2018/09/18/t...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2018/09/18/theres-
overwhelming-evidence-that-the-criminal-justice-system-is-racist-heres-the-
proof/)

>Blacks were more than twice as likely as whites to be searched after traffic
stops, even though they proved to be 26 percent less likely to be in
possession of illegal drugs or weapons.

[https://www.nber.org/papers/w9873](https://www.nber.org/papers/w9873)

>The results show significant discrimination against African-American names:
White names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews. We also find
that race affects the benefits of a better resume. For White names, a higher
quality resume elicits 30 percent more callbacks whereas for African
Americans, it elicits a far smaller increase.

------
qrbLPHiKpiux
Footnotes are the most important text, in my opinion! I remember from college,
to remember and study footnotes. Because, always (100% guarantee) exam
questions come from those! Little golden nuggets of information are placed in
those and reading them is habit, for me - through today!

