Well into the 90s one of my aunts was a programmer on the 5ESS switch code, mission-critical stuff that needed to be 99.9995% reliable. She was eventually laid off when Lucent abandoned the line and she transitioned into a far more lucrative career as a realtor. I know other ladies of my mother's generation (I was born in 1970) who worked at IBM and the like.
If you look at female percentage of enrollment in CS courses, you will find it actually declined since the 70s, in part because PCs were aggressively marketed towards boys only. In other words, we've regressed as an industry.
Agreed, when I was a kid I met a programmer who used to be a computer. She was older than my dad, and he considered her an expert in his 30s. Punch cards were the rage.
Since then, I've met 2 women who worked directly at Bell Labs (with LeCun) in the 90s, both of whom I would consider experts in AI (and the present tools of DL), even though they are now retired. They started studying CS in the 70s.
The real boom happened in the 80-90s when it wasn't a respected field and educated women went into Medicine, Law, Marketing... It's only in the last 15-20 years that programming has been considered a "real" major. Before that most programmers had an education in something else.
> in part because PCs were aggressively marketed towards boys only.
I've seen this repeated a lot without, as far as I can see, any credible evidence that (a) this was actually the case and (b) that the causality worked the way indicated.
To me, it's at best a classic "wet roads cause rain" fallacy that doesn't make sense at any level.
1. Companies are dollar driven
This idea that companies would forego a massive market in order to...I don't know, "keep the girls out of computers" just doesn't make any sense. Even typing these words is weird, the idea is just so utterly ludicrous.
And the idea that it might have been just oversight also doesn't wash. At least one company would have at some point asked the question, tried it out and made a killing.
2. Nobody wanted to keep girls out
Heck, I grew up in the 80s, and the very last thing on the mind of any of us computer nerds was "oh my god, we need to keep the girls away from this stuff". We would have given almost anything to get more girls interested. They just weren't.
3. The effects of marketing are vastly overstated
Us computer nerds did not want computers because they were "marketed towards" us. We wanted computers because we really wanted computers. In fact, I had no awareness of computers until exposed to Apple IIs in summer camp, first a little BASIC and then shape tables. Oh boy, shape tables! And yes, the computers were open to anyone who wanted.
In fact, we got an Apple, despite all the marketing material I remember being the Tandy catalogs. They even had a 68K based model at that time!
4. The ads were gender neutral
Although I don't remember much in terms of ads, what I remember was fairly neutral. As a quick check, I did a Google image search and the ads were quite balanced, for example families grouped around a computer with mom+dad+girl+boy.
> Although I don't remember much in terms of ads, what I remember was fairly neutral. As a quick check, I did a Google image search and the ads were quite balanced, for example families grouped around a computer with mom+dad+girl+boy.
Hoo boy, are you naive. I still have computer mags from the 1980s (and maybe I have a pack-rat problem, but that's not important now).
A awful lot of the hardware ads had buxom nubile while female models, sometimes draped over the machine, sometimes with a sultry expression (why are you biting your lip over a freakin' backup tape system, woman?), often with caked-on hooker makeup. The software ads almost always had some young white man with an IBM-approved white shirt and pocket protector.
Ads in popular computer mags in the 1980s were definitely target-marketed towards white male hetero people. To claim the advertizing was ineffective and such people "just wanted" the devices is disingenuous at best.
> (why are you biting your lip over a freakin' backup tape system, woman?),
Hmm...and young boys are the target market for backup tape systems?
Maybe I should have been more specific: the context was home computers, not the professional systems. I thought that much was obvious.
And even there, do you seriously think that the motivation for those ads was "oh, we must make sure that women don't enter the profession" or was it more "we know that 95+% of our target audience is male" and so they used the same sort of tactics that were used to sell cars and auto tuning products[1]?
To the degree there's something to the PCs became a thing mostly with teenage boys, which discouraged others from getting involved with computers at a later age... And I think there probably is. You need look no further than skeptical comments here about hiring someone who didn't have a "passion" for computers from a young age. Or college curricula with entry-level courses that clearly assume prior familiarity with computers. But it's probably more of a connection between PCs and gaming.
Which means that dynamic should be changing again as PCs are far less relevant as a gamer platform. Though arguably the environment is established and is hard to change as a result.
> If you look at female percentage of enrollment in CS courses, you will find it actually declined since the 70s
I agree with your points, but I wonder if looking at CS won’t reveal the scope or timing of the problem. Based on my own experience entering the workforce mid-90s, it was only sometime in the 90s when the majority of software developers had CS coursework. When I started near a majority had physics, math, engineering and other backgrounds, with their computing experience being industrial.
If you look at female percentage of enrollment in CS courses, you will find it actually declined since the 70s, in part because PCs were aggressively marketed towards boys only. In other words, we've regressed as an industry.