8 ms·

An 80s Girl Talks About Computers: A Reminiscence

114 points by eaguyhn 9y ago

dominotw 9y ago
too many indians in tech = offensive. too many men in tech = say it girl! irrelevant google "memo" = war on women thousands of men bleeding to death in streets of Chicago = their fault, toxic masculinity .
- adamjc 9y ago
  What has this got to do with this article? Have you read it?
  - eric_h 9y ago
    that comment was pure troll. I'd recommend the old adage of "Do not feed the trolls". Just flag/downvote and move on.
savanaly 9y ago
>I listened to (and played) jazz, often the kind inspired by Lord of the Rings I want to know more about this part.
- knodi123 9y ago
  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/
- aidenn0 9y ago
  This was something my uncle was into. I don't think I've ever met a more interesting group of people than those that attended his funeral, including s professional APL developer that was in a filk group with him.
jandrese 9y ago
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_ 9y ago
  The darnedest thing about stereotypes and generalizations is that everyone is atypical in some way or another.
  - jandrese 9y ago
    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_ 9y ago
      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.
- icantdrive55 9y ago
  I had a computer in the eighties, and was never scorned. Very few people thought the home computer would ever be anything other than a fad, or a toy. I remember buying an Atari 1200ST, I believe? I was the only kid in my classes that had a computer, and printer. (The best printer I ever owned. Out of ink? Dip the ribbon in ink--done.) I knew pretty soon, it would only benefit me with word processing though. I felt I had such a advantage, I thought, it felt like I was cheating. My point is computers were not easy to use. Very few guys were doing much with the boxes. They were considered anti-intellectual in many circles. Guys like Wos, and Steve obviously saw the potential, but I don't remember anyone making fun of people for liking computers, except in Hollywood movies.
quirkot 9y ago
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 9y ago
  1984 was about when the entire home-computer game industry collapsed, and presumably, many people's dreams of riches.
  - rpiguy 9y ago
    That may have been a factor but it don't think it fully explains the sudden "snap" downward to levels lower than 20 years before. Kudos though for actually addressing the question of what caused the sudden change, rather than just focusing on the general climate of 1984 for nerds.
  - mikestew 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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.
- lookasun 9y ago
  I've heard that in the 80s, that at the same time many more people started wanting to study comp sci (due to the home computer boom) many faculty were also leaving for industry. This led to a shortage of teaching professors. Due to this, many schools started only accepting the top tier students for their programs. If HS teacher biases were hurting women's performance in mathematics and such, this would be reflected in their lower participation in college comp sci programs
tyingq 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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.
      - 9y ago
jacknews 9y ago
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?
- rjsw 9y ago
  I think that the term "Anorak" came from the idea that before home computers were available the boy would probably have been a trainspotter. Looking at trains is done outside so they would all wear waterproof coats.
  - genon 9y ago
    Correct. It's odd that someone could contrive a meaning to do pornography. I also don't think "dirty mac" (as in "dirty mac brigade") is a term used in the US.
- devmunchies 9y ago
  > 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
ideonexus 9y ago
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.
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  My mother had almost the same experience getting a math degree in the 50s. "Women don't belong in math" or some such garbage from a professor.
- Pigo 9y ago
  I'm the first person in my family to even graduate high school, so I don't have any family stories. But I had a female professor that announced to the whole class that she strives to make sure no men get above a C in her classroom. And that was around 2004. It makes me wonder what kind of articles will be written 30 years from now, based on what I read is happening on campuses.
  - sbov 9y ago
    I feel like the bad experiences probably stand out more than the average. My wife got her masters around 2012, and one of her teachers would discuss political topics then participate in heckling anyone with stances that weren't completely left leaning. Even defending people with these views made you a target. But all of the other teachers were pretty standard.
losteverything 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
hathawsh 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    I think the boom in sales of home computers could be an explanation. See: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/articles/culture/total-share.media/graph2-1.jpg https://cdn.arstechnica.net/articles/culture/total-share.med... 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.
dmix 9y ago
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.
godshatter 9y ago
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.
- SteveGerencser 9y ago
  I had the exact opposite experience, I graduated in 84 as well. Our first computer classes were nearly 50/50 male female in high school. That changed in college.
- petsormeat 9y ago
  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?
ZenoArrow 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
ameister14 9y ago
This article makes it even more interesting that math majors have risen in terms of female distribution at the same time CS has dropped.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- ghaff 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    I wonder whether there was a point at which computer science departments began to become independent of math departments, and when that occurred?
    - ghaff 9y ago
      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.
excalibur 9y ago
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?
ChuckMcM 9y ago
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 9y ago
> 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.
speakeron 9y ago
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.
twobyfour 9y ago
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".

114 points by eaguyhn 9y ago

too many indians in tech = offensive. too many men in tech = say it girl! irrelevant google "memo" = war on women thousands of men bleeding to death in streets of Chicago = their fault, toxic masculinity .

adamjc 9y ago
What has this got to do with this article? Have you read it?
- eric_h 9y ago
  that comment was pure troll. I'd recommend the old adage of "Do not feed the trolls". Just flag/downvote and move on.

savanaly 9y ago

>I listened to (and played) jazz, often the kind inspired by Lord of the Rings I want to know more about this part.

knodi123 9y ago
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/
aidenn0 9y ago
This was something my uncle was into. I don't think I've ever met a more interesting group of people than those that attended his funeral, including s professional APL developer that was in a filk group with him.

jandrese 9y ago

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_ 9y ago
The darnedest thing about stereotypes and generalizations is that everyone is atypical in some way or another.
- jandrese 9y ago
  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_ 9y ago
    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.
icantdrive55 9y ago
I had a computer in the eighties, and was never scorned. Very few people thought the home computer would ever be anything other than a fad, or a toy. I remember buying an Atari 1200ST, I believe? I was the only kid in my classes that had a computer, and printer. (The best printer I ever owned. Out of ink? Dip the ribbon in ink--done.) I knew pretty soon, it would only benefit me with word processing though. I felt I had such a advantage, I thought, it felt like I was cheating. My point is computers were not easy to use. Very few guys were doing much with the boxes. They were considered anti-intellectual in many circles. Guys like Wos, and Steve obviously saw the potential, but I don't remember anyone making fun of people for liking computers, except in Hollywood movies.

quirkot 9y ago

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 9y ago
1984 was about when the entire home-computer game industry collapsed, and presumably, many people's dreams of riches.
- rpiguy 9y ago
  That may have been a factor but it don't think it fully explains the sudden "snap" downward to levels lower than 20 years before. Kudos though for actually addressing the question of what caused the sudden change, rather than just focusing on the general climate of 1984 for nerds.
- mikestew 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
lookasun 9y ago
I've heard that in the 80s, that at the same time many more people started wanting to study comp sci (due to the home computer boom) many faculty were also leaving for industry. This led to a shortage of teaching professors. Due to this, many schools started only accepting the top tier students for their programs. If HS teacher biases were hurting women's performance in mathematics and such, this would be reflected in their lower participation in college comp sci programs

tyingq 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
    - 9y ago

jacknews 9y ago

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?

rjsw 9y ago
I think that the term "Anorak" came from the idea that before home computers were available the boy would probably have been a trainspotter. Looking at trains is done outside so they would all wear waterproof coats.
- genon 9y ago
  Correct. It's odd that someone could contrive a meaning to do pornography. I also don't think "dirty mac" (as in "dirty mac brigade") is a term used in the US.
devmunchies 9y ago
> 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

ideonexus 9y ago

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.

AnimalMuppet 9y ago
My mother had almost the same experience getting a math degree in the 50s. "Women don't belong in math" or some such garbage from a professor.
Pigo 9y ago
I'm the first person in my family to even graduate high school, so I don't have any family stories. But I had a female professor that announced to the whole class that she strives to make sure no men get above a C in her classroom. And that was around 2004. It makes me wonder what kind of articles will be written 30 years from now, based on what I read is happening on campuses.
- sbov 9y ago
  I feel like the bad experiences probably stand out more than the average. My wife got her masters around 2012, and one of her teachers would discuss political topics then participate in heckling anyone with stances that weren't completely left leaning. Even defending people with these views made you a target. But all of the other teachers were pretty standard.

losteverything 9y ago

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 9y ago
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.

hathawsh 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  I think the boom in sales of home computers could be an explanation. See: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/articles/culture/total-share.media/graph2-1.jpg https://cdn.arstechnica.net/articles/culture/total-share.med... 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.

dmix 9y ago

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.

godshatter 9y ago

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.

SteveGerencser 9y ago
I had the exact opposite experience, I graduated in 84 as well. Our first computer classes were nearly 50/50 male female in high school. That changed in college.
petsormeat 9y ago
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?

ZenoArrow 9y ago

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 9y ago
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.

ameister14 9y ago

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

deleted 9y ago
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ghaff 9y ago
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 9y ago
  I wonder whether there was a point at which computer science departments began to become independent of math departments, and when that occurred?
  - ghaff 9y ago
    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.

excalibur 9y ago

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?

ChuckMcM 9y ago

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 9y ago

> 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.

speakeron 9y ago

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.

twobyfour 9y ago

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".