
An 80s Girl Talks About Computers: A Reminiscence - eaguyhn
https://medium.com/@wordsandcode/-2653446e40ae
======
ideonexus
The author's experience strongly echoes my mother's experience getting a
chemistry masters in the 1960s. One of her professors outright told her at the
beginning of the semester that she would not do well in the sciences because
she was a woman. That semester she actually tutored a group of men who were in
the class, and all of those men received higher grades than her (she got a
C-). These men told my mother they would help her fight the professor to get
the grade she deserved, but she let it go.

A few years later, my mother met other women who had the same professor and
had the same stories to tell about him. One of those women told my mother,
"Because no one is fighting him, he thinks he can just keep doing it." For the
next forty years, my mother never passed up another fight, excelled in the
sciences, and is a respected professor of nursing today in her 70s giving
talks around the globe.

When I attended the same university in the 90s, I told some friends about my
mother's experience. They laughed and said it couldn't be the same guy, but
their professor of chemistry announced on the first day that women were
inherently incapable of doing well in his class. I'm thankful that today such
a statement would get recorded, go viral online, and force dinosaurs like that
into early retirement.

~~~
ozmodiar
I've been to two mid-tier universities within the last decade, and each one
had a professor who would straight up say on the first day of class that they
would fail any women, because women shouldn't be in science. One was a Biology
professor (they were a young earth creationist to boot), the other was a
computer science prof.

I'm sure the laser focused fury of social media makes universities more wary
of having people like this on staff, but still most people don't want to get
caught up in that sort of fight. They were quite old though, so there's hope
for the future.

~~~
jlarocco
That's so blatant that I have a hard time believing it.

If that's really true, it's a jackpot discrimination lawsuit waiting to
happen, and I hope it happens sooner rather than later. Completely
unacceptable.

~~~
no897nhtoeui
> That's so blatant that I have a hard time believing it.

That's what I thought about those videos of guys following a woman around as
she walked down the streets of New York City minding her own business.[0] I
had never witnessed that sort of thing and thought, "There's no way this goes
on that often or I'd see it." And yet, dozens of female friends confirmed that
it happens all the time. I was like, "Why have you never mentioned this?" They
just said it happens too often and there's not a lot you can do about it, plus
half the time other people don't believe you.

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1XGPvbWn0A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1XGPvbWn0A)

------
hathawsh
Her key point is about her advanced math teacher. "My trig teacher was a
legend among the college-bound kids in my school. He’d been there forever. He
was generous and big-hearted [...] The other thing he liked to tell us,
though, was that girls shouldn’t bother taking math, because we were just
going to be housewives anyway. It wasn’t just every once in a while, either;
he said it at the beginning of the year, he tossed it into lectures
occasionally, he said it when he handed back failed tests."

I've heard this from a number of other women: an influential, well respected
person promoted a divisive opinion among teens for a long time. The effect was
subtle and perhaps unintentional, but pervasive; young women decided they were
not smart enough or strong enough to work in the field they wanted.

This illustrates to me how important it is to send the right message to kids.
Subtle divisiveness is dangerous among kids and teens.

~~~
rpiguy
This is a very important point and I agree, but the question posed by the
article is why was there a sudden decline in women in CS. Before 1984 they
were well represented and enrollment literally crashed to levels lower than
they were 15 years before.

We can't say systemic sexism caused the crash in enrollment, which happened
very suddenly. It is certainly a factor, and probably a bigger factor over
time explaining sustained low enrollment.

A snap drop in enrollment is more likely due to a shift in the culture
somewhere. Someone pointed out that the game market crashed the year prior,
that was probably a factor. Was it Reagan? Was it the number of high profile
movies in which nerds were stereotyped?

It is hard to say and a very interesting question.

~~~
tyingq
I think the boom in sales of home computers could be an explanation.

See: [https://cdn.arstechnica.net/articles/culture/total-
share.med...](https://cdn.arstechnica.net/articles/culture/total-
share.media/graph2-1.jpg)

Prior to anyone having a computer, your suitability for getting in CS would be
the math classes you took, which had some "equality of access".

Once the sales boom happened, anyone with a computer probably had a large
advantage to anyone that did not.

If that was the driver, though, it would imply some pattern where these
computers were less available, or less appealing, to young women.

~~~
ghaff
That's sort of the argument she's arguing against. Which is that, starting
with home computers, guys were more inclined to adopt them as a hobby thing
well pre-college. And, once that happened, if you arrived as a freshman and
had never really touched a computer (and at one point that was probably
literally true for many) it's challenging to go into CS if your classmates
have been playing with this stuff for years.

I don't know. Her examples are unconvincing. That they maybe advertised to
girls more could just as easily mean, the boys are _already_ buying them so
let's focus on the untapped market.

The common theory around early exposure seems plausible to me. [ADDED:
Together with the fact that it's supposed to be this all consuming thing.]
I've read equally well-written articles by woman nodding their heads.
[https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-08-09/as-a-
woma...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-08-09/as-a-woman-in-
tech-i-realized-these-are-not-my-people)

Unis could deal with it to a degree with intro to computing everything but CS
has emerged as an almost unique major (music is certainly another) where
showing up at college saying you want to try this computer thing is considered
odd.

No one expects a chemical engineer to have done much more than really enjoyed
their high school chemistry class. EDIT for clarity: Demonstrated "passion"
for chemistry isn't really a pre-req.

------
jandrese
I hazard a guess that the author is somewhat atypical for an 80s girl. She
certainly seemed to be comfortable with a lot of activities that would draw
scorn and condemnation from the popular kids in the 80s. Not giving in to peer
pressure is very hard for teenagers. I don't know for certain, but I suspect
it's even harder for girls than boys. Boys seem more willing to go it alone if
they have to.

This is mostly from my own life experience as a computer nerd during the late
80s and early 90s. You get shunned by anybody even remotely popular. This is
really tough during middle school since you become bully bait but perseverance
pays off in the end. In some ways I had it easier since I lived in a
neighborhood that had no kids my age (or within 3 year of my age), so being a
loner and an outcast wasn't a new situation.

~~~
mfoy_
The darnedest thing about stereotypes and generalizations is that _everyone_
is atypical in some way or another.

~~~
jandrese
Sure, but when you are atypical because you are an 80s girl who is into
computers it becomes hard to use your experiences to determine why there is a
large gender disparity in computer relented fields.

It's hard to draw conclusions about a population by only inspecting the
outliers, you get lots of noise in the data.

~~~
mfoy_
I don't know... if you're an 80s girl who got into computers _despite_ lots of
girls _not_ getting into computers perhaps your experiences, and the hurdles
you faced, are actually more interesting and relevant than the more "typical"
answers.

------
jacknews
A good read. Not sure about the conclusion.

My memory of that time in the UK was that being "into" computers marked you as
a greasy-haired "Anorak" (maybe that translates to "Dirty Mac", in American. I
suppose the slur is based on stereotyping computer enthusiasts who would often
peruse computer magazines at the newsagent, rather like some other
"enthusiasts" who might be browsing other, usually graphic, magazines,
possibly wearing a "Mac").

Though the term is "Nerd", now, and it's become possibly respectable, in those
times, especially in high school, it really wasn't cool at at all, and seemed
to attract more derision that being into StartTrek or even D&D.

I don't think the majority of girls wanted to be seen dead in such circles,
though not because of "bro" culture, far from it. girls were more than
welcome.

Possibly things have changed now, I don't know, but I'll note also that back
then there didn't seem to be much discussion of gender ratios in either
industry or in education.

I don't know if that's because of heightened general awareness now, or simply
that anything IT has become even more lucrative, and (probably as a result)
much cooler. What is the gender ratio in coal mining?

~~~
devmunchies
> Though the term is "nerd", now, and it's become possibly respectable

I don't think this is true. I think that there are "nerdy" things that have
become trendy (like thick framed glasses, playing retro video games and music,
or being smart), but its still not cool to be a true nerd. (or maybe "nerd" is
being redefined)

See this Portlandia sketch that explains my point:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9Jbz4c_WKA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9Jbz4c_WKA)

~~~
Jtsummers
Me last night: So I've been working through some math books for fun...

People I was with: Wait, go back. You're doing math _for fun_?

All claiming to be nerds, all hanging out at a local barcade (trivia night,
hobby of mine). Nerd _culture_ is cool, _being_ a nerd is not. They do
appreciate that I can answer about 80% of the trivia questions myself, though.

------
godshatter
I graduated high school in 1984, and I can't remember one girl in junior high
or high school that was interested in computers in any way, although both of
the areas with computers that were set up in classrooms were put there by
female teachers. I don't know if the lack of interest was due to teachers like
the author had (although we had no computer-related classes in high school),
if it was a social thing, or if there just wasn't interest there to begin
with. I was heads-down learning to program and soaking up information - I
wasn't attuned to others around me. I didn't understand why everyone else
wasn't this passionate about it. Obviously, social interaction wasn't my
strong suit going through school.

I had access to TRS-80 Level I's, and Apple ][e's. My parents bought me a
TRS-80 Color Computer, and I purchased an assembler cartridge and was off to
the races. I look back fondly as that fog of ignorance slowly lifted and I
realized what these incredible machines could do.

I remember maybe two or three women in my computer science classes in college.
That changed when I got my first job (in a university setting, where I'm still
employed). Developers here are roughly 60/40 male/female. System admins and
networking personnel skew wildly male.

~~~
petsormeat
I also graduated high school in 1984. By that time, even my small-town
American school had a room full of TRS-80s (cassette tape storage!) and a
semester-long class in BASIC.

I remember the class being evenly split between boys and girls, and nobody
finding that remarkable--some of us even had moms or aunts who worked with
punchcards and mainframes.

The top students in the class were the same diligent girls who prevailed in
the honors math and English classes; again, not provoking comment. The
understanding was that we were acquiring practical skills for a drab something
vaguely understood as "business," so intense interest in programming would
have seemed very strange.

By the early Nineties, I noticed that programming had obtained this alienating
macho reputation, which I find ironic considering how much GUIs made it so
much more accessible, and the Web made it so much more interesting. I haven't
read a thorough treatment of this period of computing history--any
suggestions?

~~~
godshatter
I think the difference might have to do with whether or not a class was being
taught vs. simple self-discovery. Making no judgements, but it's been my
experience that men are more likely to develop on projects outside of work. I
have no idea why, maybe it's just a statistical aberration, but that's what
I've seen through the years.

------
ChuckMcM
I found this an interesting read. The higher level math teacher in my high
school was a woman and she also taught the nascent "computer" class (which was
BASIC programming on Teletypes that dialed in at 110 Baud to a mainframe)

I found myself in friendly competition with women in both Algebra II and
Calculus. Our high school produced a number of women engineers and computer
science majors as well.

Is that correlation ? causation? Or is it just modelling? I don't know. I
watched my kids grow up and saw that they took cues about what they were
expected _to be able to do_ from the environment around them. I don't think
there is much debate that people try to live up to the expectations put on
them by people they look up to.

So to the extent that her message is "We should mindfully decide to have
expectations that anyone, regardless of gender, can excel in STEM." I really
can't see any harm in that.

------
linkmotif
> The other thing he liked to tell us, though, was that girls shouldn’t bother
> taking math, because we were just going to be housewives anyway.

This, this this. US society took a socially conservative swing in the 80s as
peak women's lib began erroding.

------
ZenoArrow
To be honest, whilst I don't want to take anything away from the author's
story, and I accept that different social expectations would've played a big
part, I'd suspect that the main difference was because of gaming culture.

Perhaps some have forgotten, but the gateway drug for many people getting into
computers was games, especially in the 80s. Gaming culture at the time was
heavily skewed towards boys and young men. I'm sure there were plenty of girls
and women who played games too, but on average it seemed to be more of a male
activity. Current gaming culture is much more diverse, so don't get things
twisted, I'm talking about how things were back then. I think if you can
explain the major influences on the gamer diversity landscape back then you
can mostly explain the computing diversity landscape right now.

~~~
ghaff
If you accept that the early-mid 80s boy teenager became comfortable with
computers more than the girls did thesis, gaming is almost certainly part of
that. Gateway drug and all that as you say.

I got into computers a wee bit earlier myself but you just need to watch War
Games for an anecdotal example.

------
quirkot
That’s a very interesting hypothesis. It needs a little expansion to address
the reported “suddenly in 1984” aspect. I wonder if, around that time, there
was a change in many colleges that required more advanced math (or some other
topic) where HS teacher biases are stronger (or more impactful). Very neat
read.

~~~
jacknews
1984 was about when the entire home-computer game industry collapsed, and
presumably, many people's dreams of riches.

~~~
mikestew
An interesting thought, however I would argue that the vast majority of
programming jobs at the time were not with game companies but at a bank or
insurance company maintaining some LOB app.

~~~
jacknews
Indeed but writing a game was something you could do in school. I know I was
inspired by news reports of teenagers getting rich from games they'd written.

------
savanaly
>I listened to (and played) jazz, often the kind inspired by Lord of the Rings

I want to know more about this part.

~~~
knodi123
haha, I've encountered this. it's a trip! Check out the free samples:

[https://smile.amazon.com/Lord-Rings-
Vol-1/dp/B00OZTPQZG/](https://smile.amazon.com/Lord-Rings-
Vol-1/dp/B00OZTPQZG/)

------
dmix
This articles touches on an interesting subject, whether female-targeted
advertising and gender-based 'cultural' events are really the best way to
recruit more women - or the lack of which is why the divide exists in the
first place.

There's always this implied assumption, such as in the Planet Money podcast
she referenced, that the cause of the problem is obvious and known. But if it
was that simple we would have likely made a lot more progress with the issue
by now.

------
tyingq
Doesn't speak to gender bias, but just plain access to computers was a big
factor in the 80's. Non technical parents might be hard to talk into the
expense. Among my largish circle of friends, only 2 of us had home computers.
And, if your high school had a nice system with various development
environments (C, Pascal, Fortran, etc), you had options even those with home
computers didn't.

~~~
jandrese
If you had a computer in the 80s you at least had BASIC. Higher level
compilers tended to be business tools (with business prices), but near
_everything_ shipped with BASIC. Often burned into the ROM.

The exception, appearing late in the decade, was the Mac. The Mac had
something better: Hypercard.

~~~
tyingq
Yes, but that's what I mean. Having access to something besides BASIC gave
some people a leg up. It was also fairly common to not have any persistent
storage, which made the BASIC much less useful. You could buy it, of course,
but it wasn't cheap. Similar for printers.

~~~
jandrese
Floppy drives weren't that uncommon. Or even those horrible audio cassette
tape systems. It depends a bit on the era I guess. If you're talking mid 70s
Altair type computers then compiling a program practically required access to
someone with an EE degree. By the late 70s though you're looking at stuff like
the Apple II and the Commodore 64 which were usually sold with some sort of
mass storage option.

Only knowing BASIC wasn't nearly the handicap it would become either. Most
people were in the same boat.

As for the price, that's true of everything computer related in the 80s. If
you were buying a computer in the first place you were more likely to be able
to scrounge together a couple hundred more bucks for the disk drive and
printer.

~~~
tyingq
I'm speaking from my own experience, so perhaps biased. I felt my access to a
minicomputer put me way ahead of my peers. And many did have parents that paid
for a computer, but not for the tape drive, or floppy.

------
excalibur
Is it bothering anyone else that the article itself has no apostrophe in the
title, and the HN post added one in the wrong place?

------
speakeron
From about 1983 onwards, home computers were commonplace in the UK. This was
mainly the Sinclair Spectrum (a device that, perhaps, caused a mini industrial
revolution in the UK by teaching a generation how to code (and how to hack
hardware)), with a smattering of Acorns, BBC Micros (also an Acorn, really)
and Commodore 64s.

I learned Z80 assembler and built some add-on boards on a Spectrum and never
looked back.

------
ameister14
This article makes it even more interesting that math majors have risen in
terms of female distribution at the same time CS has dropped.

~~~
ghaff
It may be worth noting that, at a lot of schools CS was (is?) part of the math
department as opposed to engineering. It's plausible to me that as CS became
more about programming (and brought a lot of associated cultural baggage with
it), people who were in CS essentially for pure math reasons switched out of
CS.

~~~
twobyfour
I wonder whether there was a point at which computer science departments began
to become independent of math departments, and when that occurred?

~~~
ghaff
It seems to vary a lot by school for historical reasons though I haven't
studied the subject. Some schools it's been connected to electrical
engineering forever. Other schools it grew out of math. There are areas of EE
that have very little to do with computers, especially decades ago, so I
suspect that a lot of it is historical happenstance.

------
twobyfour
The author discusses how people saying "math isn't for girls" was part of why
she didn't go into a computational field.

I'm surprised there isn't more discussion in the comments here of how women
are discouraged from entering tech by the assertion and defense of the notion
that "women are biologically unsuited for software development".

------
losteverything
Nothing about computers back then was social. There was no social component.
Programs done by yourself, at a keypunch. Output read by yourself. Hard to
study in groups. You can't really have a debate about the sign bit.

Pre-wed majors were social.. Comp sci was not

~~~
rjsw
I was a CS student at the same time as the author. Undergraduate programming
was done in rooms with multiple terminals so it could be social if you wanted
it to be.

