
Making programming masculine [pdf] - MartinMond
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~nathanen/files/cbi-gender.pdf
======
dkarl
_The ENIAC women would simply “set-up” the machine to perform these pre-
determined plans: that this work would be turn out to dicult and to require
radically innovative thinking was completely unanticipated._

Underestimation of a task seems to be key in allowing women to succeed. Not
only does it fool the gatekeepers, it also fools the women themselves. Put a
mop bucket full of water in a typical woman's hand, and she'll lug it around
as if it's nothing [EDIT: assuming she's into that kind of thing.] Hand her a
dumbbell the same weight, and she'll wilt and clutch at it with her other
hand. Take her backpacking in the mountains, and she'll prove herself ten
times as strong as she would allow herself to be under a squat bar. Same thing
in computing -- female office workers who can do wizardly things with
spreadsheets and accounting systems often don't see themselves as having any
aptitude for computing or programming. They see the IT help grunt who fixes
their email login as being naturally much more gifted than them at "computer
stuff." If they knew that what they were doing was basically computer
programming, far fewer of them would develop any skill at it.

------
pg
The author may not realize this, but in the 1960s the word "programmer" did
not have the meaning it does now. Software development was done by two
different types of people working together: "systems analysts" who designed
it, and "programmers" who translated their designs into code. What the systems
analyst produced was very precise; it was pretty much a program written in a
higher-level language than was then available. The programmer's job was to
translate this program into Fortran or Cobol.

So it's not only the female programmers of the 1960s who have disappeared, but
the male ones as well. The word "programmer" still exists, but the job it
described in the 1960s has mostly gone away. The female programmers weren't
replaced by men, but by compilers.

~~~
scott_s
My grandfather worked on a UNIVAC I that the Navy owned in the early '50s. We
still have the manuals from it (binders of them - they are amazing). While
looking through them on Thanksgiving, I found a reference to "automatic
programming" in a marketing brochure.

I knew it didn't mean what the term would imply now (to me, programs generated
through some machine learning process). My best guess was that it referred to
the compiler which would generate machine instructions from the assembly
instructions. So I think the idea that "programming" was the lowest-level act
feasible to instruct the machine what to do predated even the '60s.

edit: I should have read the paper more carefully. The author directly
addresses pg's points on page 10 by referencing the exact document I just did.
His distinction is between "coders" and "programmers."

~~~
lmkg
If I recall, FORTRAN was originally described by IBM as an automatic code-
generation program, not as a programming language. Probably because languages
didn't exist at the time, and (as usual) no one had any idea what they had
just created. It's actually kinda trippy to think of it this way, but they
basically designed the compiler first and the language spec came about as a
documentation of its function, rather than the other way around.

~~~
pg
In fact the name stands for "Formula Translation," because the math
expressions were where the compiler had to work the hardest. The rest of the
language was practically assembly language with syntax.

------
genderfree
This is a refreshing article.

On page 10 or thereabouts, it is noted that the line between "coder" and
"programmer" was blurred and women often took on the more intellectual aspects
of programming, not just data entry.

I am amazed at how little credit has been given women and how easily a male-
dominated board like this "pooh-pooh's" the female contribution.

I also think the male majority on this forum does not even realize how knee-
jerk their response is to this topic. And this comment will be modded down (or
won't be seen).

Sigh.

~~~
joe_the_user
Yes, the comments essentially discounting women programmers of the 1960s are,
uh, infuriating.

Further, I believe the women retained a good representation into the 1980s.

In many ways I think it was de-skilling of programming itself that broke the
trend. Essentially, being a programmer is no longer a career with a future,
seriously. It's more like bike messengering than accounting - they work you to
death, you get the cachet of industry excitement and then you get thrown away.

~~~
dkarl
It isn't really true that programming is "de-skilled." Entry-level programming
may require nothing more than cleverness and knowledge of a language, but most
programming jobs have an element of engineering to them. Not only that,
programmers in many jobs have surprising latitude to design user interfaces,
information architectures, and other elements that really "should" be left to
experts, but which are left to programmers by the same mechanism --
underestimation of the task and underestimation of the influence of individual
performance -- that created opportunities for women to program in the first
place. Especially at a small startup, "mere" programmers are left to decide
for themselves things that aren't considered vital enough for the "leaders" to
pay attention to. And you know _some_ of those things will end up being more
vital than anyone expected.

I think it would be more accurate to say that programming has been "de-
institutionalized." By and large, programmers learn their craft outside of
formal schools and training programs. In fact, it's very hard to get into
programming through formal education (see my comment here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=971157>) without also following the now-
traditional way of hobby programming as well. So the selection process for
becoming a programmer is not one that confers prestige. Being a Stanford
graduate confers prestige. Being a better and more desired programmer than a
Stanford CS graduate confers no prestige whatsoever except in the eyes of
other programmers.

People in fields where degrees are important, and where colleges are the
gatekeepers, are seen as more well-rounded and more generally intelligent than
people in fields where long private pursuit is more important than a degree.
The fact that programming is within the grasp of any kid whose parents buy him
a computer diminishes it in society's eyes.

I think it also diminishes the career in women's eyes. The university-
controlled career path in, say, chemistry, provides a built-in work-life
balance and a shared experience with people in other fields. In programming,
the coding virtuosity acquired by hours and hours of practice is overvalued
and is often confused, especially by other programmers, with a programmer's
overall ability. Yet this time is not officially recognized by educators and
professionals. It is not discussed or accommodated. Musicians and athletes are
expected to spend long hours practicing, but CS programs have no concept of
programming "practice" in the sense of hours spent repetitively honing a
skill. Programmers must sacrifice other parts of their lives in order to
acquire this practice, and most who enter the field are happy to do so. Women
feel like they can't compete unless they make the same sacrifices, and
naturally, they don't like a field with a built-in bias against people who
aren't obsessive.

(In programming, that bias is obvious from the start. In academic research
science, the bias emerges in graduate school and in the slog for tenure.
Elizabeth Blackburn, who just won a Nobel Prize in medicine, said, "But many
women, at the stage when they have done their training really want to think
about family . . . and they just are very daunted by the career structure. Not
by the science, in which they are doing really well." Blackburn's point is as
valid in programming as it is in science: obsessiveness and exclusive
dedication may be helpful and may be a common element in mythologies about
great scientists, but it is far from a requirement for making outstanding
contributions, and we lose a lot of talent by filtering out (intentionally or
unintentionally) people who don't want to dedicate the whole of their being to
their career.)

In the time since I made the post linked above, I've been thinking about how
to ameliorate this bias towards obsessiveness and the resulting distortion and
loss of talent. I'm encouraged by the hours of repetitive practice that are
taken for granted in music and athletics. I think programming could be made
much more friendly to women by simply recognizing the importance of
"practicing" programming in the same way that musicians practice. It is
understood that a significant amount of a musician's time and effort must be
dedicated to practice, and that this practice time must be balanced against
instruction and theoretical study. Music buildings are full of practice rooms.
The hours that a budding programmer spends coding should be recognized and
labeled as _practice_. The time dedicated to it should be acknowledged.
Computer science professors -- who certainly _know_ better -- should stop
pretending that their classroom curriculum is sufficient to produce skilled
graduates.

If the time spent practicing programming is acknowledged and accommodated the
same way musical practice is, I think women (and, not insignificantly, men as
well) will see software as profession where one can excel and also have a
reasonable, balanced life.

~~~
joe_the_user
Yes, I guess "de-professionalized" is a better term than de-skilled.

I appreciate your general narrative of the processes involved here. I'm a bit
skeptical of the "spin" you are putting on the events, however. Indeed, you
give a good description of the end of the traditions of "reserved
contemplation" that originally evolved in the intellectual professions in
Europe over the last few centuries. A process of continuous competition can
indeed foster _some skills_ but I skeptical that all intellectual endeavors
should be organized in a fashion akin to try-outs for the professional sports
(the news is full of sad human cost as well as the cheaping involved in high-
level athletics - and the news seldom even mentions the many more "loser"
would-be athletes who get nothing after several years of college/minor league
basketball/football/etc).

------
tjic
I'm amused by the fact that it says "Draft copy - please do not circulate" ...
and we're all reading it.

~~~
scott_s
I noticed that too, but the author explicitly links to it from his papers
section.

------
Tichy
I don't think the cooking analogy is bad or sexist. Cooking is about the only
daily activity that comes to mind where people follow a set of written
instructions. As such it simply seems to be THE best analogy for explaining
programming, no matter if told to a man or a woman. (I am male and I do cook
on a regular basis). The only time I used it so far was when I explained
programming to a man (not that many people actually want to know what
programming is).

If you know a better analogy, I would be interested to hear it.

Another one that I would use to prove that everybody can program: giving
directions on the street. It's basically programming an agent to reach a
destination, even with loops ("while the park is on the right..."). Cooking
still is better, because of the written instructions.

~~~
scott_s
Indeed I think it is the best analogy, and I have an entire spiel involving
how to bake billions of cupcakes with multiple ovens in multiple houses that
covers most of the important concepts in high performance computing.

~~~
Tichy
Sounds like fun, readable anywhere?

------
spudlyo
Title is disingenuous. I don't believe since Ava Lovelace that programming was
ever female dominated. Even when the referenced Cosmo article was published,
it was estimated that one in nine programmers were female. Even if reliable
observers suggest that it was closer to 30 or even 50 percent, that's still
not female dominated. Having said that, I've really enjoyed what I've so far
read of this essay.

~~~
scott_s
Sadly there are no numbers, but I had the impression that the all of the
"programmers" for ENIAC were women - hired for a job that the machine
designers didn't anticipate would be so intellectually rigorous.

~~~
spudlyo
I hadn't quite read that far in the essay before I made my comment. This is
why it's good to read the entire thing before opening your mouth ;)

