

The computer girls (1967 issue of Cosmopolitan) - amyshelton
http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/07/28/normalizing-female-computer-programmers-in-the-1960s/

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ZoFreX
There are a hundred usability reasons why sharing text in images sucks, so
here's a transcript (I've taken a couple of minor liberties for the sake of
clarity):

The Computer Girls By Lois Mandel

A trainee gets $8,000 a year . . . a girl “senior systems analyst” gets
$20,000—and up! Maybe it’s time to investigate . . . .

Ann Richardson, IBM systems engineer, designs a bridge via computer. Above
(left) she checks her facts with fellow systems engineer, Marvin V. Fuchs.
Right, she feeds facts into the computer. Below, Ann demonstrates on a viewing
screen how her facts designed the bridge, and makes changes with a “light
pen.”

Twenty years ago, a girl could be a secretary, a school teacher . . . maybe a
librarian, a social worker or a nurse. If she was really ambitious, she could
go into the professions and compete with men . . . usually working harder and
longer to earn less pay for the same job.

Now have come the big, dazzling computers—and a whole new kind of work for
women: programming. Telling the miracle machines what to do and how to do it.
Anything from predicting the weather to sending out billing notices from the
local department store.

And if it doesn’t sound like woman’s work—well, it just is.

(“I had this idea I’d be standing at a big machine and pressing buttons all
day long,” says a girl who programs for a Los Angeles bank. “I couldn’t have
been further off the track. I figure out how the computer can solve a problem,
and then instruct the machine to do it.”

“It’s just like planning a dinner,” explains Dr. Grace Hopper, now a staff
scientist in systems programming for Univac. (She helped develop the first
electronic digital computer, the Eniac, in 1946.) “You have to plan ahead and
schedule everything so it’s ready when you need it. Programming requires
patience and the ability to handle detail. Women are ‘naturals’ at computer
programming.”

What she’s talking about is _apititude_ —the one most important quality a girl
needs to become a programmer. She also needs a keen, logical mind. And if that
zeroes out the old Billie Burke-Gracie Allen image of femininity, it’s about
time, because this is the age of the Computer Girls. There are twenty thousand
of them in the United _(cont. on page 54)_

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bfe
Whether or not you think this is tremendously important, it is.

We could easily unleash almost twice as much human potential of the human race
we are right now in coding, and engineering and science in general, if we go
back and inspect all the hideous details and biases inhibiting girls and women
from pursuing scientific and technical interests and positions of authority.

( _Almost_ twice as much, since a few women have managed to emerge with
amazing technical superpowers from a still very sexist and sexist-tolerant
society.)

For a very long time I had faith in how far we had progressed in sexual
equality in American culture. But very many experiences over the past many
years have convinced me overwhelmingly of how very far American culture still
needs to go before every girl and woman has a level playing field at EVERY
STAGE of educational and professional opportunity.

This is extremely important for every single one of you. If you're an American
male programmer or engineer or scientist today, keep in mind always that
almost half of your potential awesome colleagues or awesome employees aren't
there working with you because they faced obstacles you might never have
imagined.

Please, everyone, make it better and treat every single person the same way in
every way from now on.

~~~
Niten
Where are all these obstacles you refer to? You're immediately jumping to the
dogmatic conclusion that if there are less women in computer science right
now, it _must_ be because someone else is setting up obstacles to hold them
back. But we don't actually know this to be the case.

It may instead be down to a lack of interest. It may be because the best and
brightest programmers are all hackers who have been obsessed with computers
since age 12; that's the kind of person you need to be, it seems, to keep up
in this field, and that's a very male profile. Are we to cry "discrimination!"
if it turns out that 12 year old girls are genetically predispositioned to
prefer socializing with friends, over intrinsically loner activities like
tinkering with computers?

It may even be a matter of aptitude. It's well known that although males and
females, as groups, have roughly the same mean IQ scores, males have a greater
variance in their scores. This means that if you look at the extremes of low
or high intelligence, you'll find more males than females in either direction.

<http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm>

Programming is not only an intellectually demanding career, but your potential
as a programmer seems to correlate with your intelligence more tightly than in
most other occupations. And if you take the group of people with an IQ higher
than x, with x >> 100 (or lower than x, with x << 100, for that matter),
you'll generally end up with more males than females. This may be taboo to
speak of, but we shouldn't let dogmatic value judgments cloud a discussion
about empirical truth.

So what am I saying? I'm not claiming to know why there are more males than
females in computer science. If there is some sort of hidden institutional
misogyny keeping women from succeeding in this field, then of course that's a
bad thing and should be fought. But we can't just leap to the conclusion that
anti-female sexism must be the cause of this discrepancy when there are other
possible explanations we haven't ruled out.

We must treat everyone as equals, in the sense that we give everyone the same
_opportunities_ regardless of gender. But that doesn't mean we're necessarily
doing something wrong if, at the end of the day, we don't have an even gender
distribution.

~~~
bfe
No we wouldn't need to try to balance genders in any given profession at the
end of the day if everyone had completely equal opportunity at every stage of
intellectual and educational and professional growth. But if you think we're
anywhere near that point you are living in a self-serving shell and haven't
educated yourself at all about this.

~~~
Niten
But that's _exactly_ what you're arguing:

> We could easily unleash almost twice as much human potential of the human
> race we are right now in coding, and engineering and science in general, if
> we go back and inspect all the hideous details and biases inhibiting girls
> and women from pursuing scientific and technical interests and positions of
> authority.

In other words, women are in a minority in this field, therefore someone
_must_ be oppressing them.

> But if you think we're anywhere near [the point of everyone having
> completely equal opportunity] you are living in a self-serving shell and
> haven't educated yourself at all about this.

I'm of the opinion that modern young men and women have equal enough
opportunities in education and in the programming job market that a lack of
opportunity probably is not a primary cause of the gender gap in computer
science, any more than I think a lack of opportunity for men accounts for the
predominance of women in education for example. You keep talking about
discrimination but you still fail to provide any evidence; if you want us to
believe there is a legitimate gender discrimination problem here, the burden
of proof is on you to show that it actually exists. At the moment all you
offer is hand-waving.

~~~
bfe
I guess default perception of burden of proof, prior to sufficient learning on
the topic, has a lot to do with life experience, and I'm not going to spend my
Saturday night looking up citations for someone who is wrong on the Internet,
especially when they could easily find them themselves if they were actually
interested, but I am certain if you are able to discuss it with woman friends
who trust you, in any of a wide variety of professional fields, they will be
able to tell you enough experiences they've had to, at the least, shift your
perceived burden of proof.

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83457
Sounds like an article about my mom. If I recall correctly in the late 50/60's
she was a secretary at Virginia Power in Richmond. She took an aptitude test
for programming, along with others, and did well then began a 30+ year career
programming on/for mainframes.

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chopsueyar
Still the original computer girl...

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace>

~~~
bfe
Wow. This is a fascinating article. Thank you so much!

~~~
chopsueyar
If you think that is interesting, read this book:

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374223130/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374223130/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=littdidd-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399369&creativeASIN=0374223130)

