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Or what about accounting and book keeping; which is a professional, white collar career that also happens to employ more women than men? Women were programmers

Or what about accounting and book keeping; which is a professional, white collar career that also happens to employ more women than men? Women were programmers very early on. I think we should look for some common thread between computer programming in the late 1950's/early 60's and accounting and book keeping today. While socialization may be a part of the equation, there's a lot more going on here and simply blaming women for being "too social" just panders to common stereotypes. I don't think you should be characterizing it as "blaming." Things are as they are. I remember reading a paper in grad school finding that software engineers actually had more need of interaction than other fields, despite stereotypes. I think there is some important factor we don't quite understand.

drak0n1c 9y ago
Programming started as a field very similar to Accounting. You manually assembled a list of operations to get the necessary numerical result. There was creativity, but in the same vein of creativity in accounting it was confined to the realm of statistics and business intelligence. Computers were used to calculate numbers from other numbers, and rarely did much else. The set of computer instructions were limited, and nothing was automated so there was a lot of tedium in physically writing programming out on paper. With the advent of personal computers and monitors the fields diverged rapidly.
erik_seaberg 9y ago
The way I've read it, "programming" was the name of a job where you take a flowchart from a "systems analyst" and punch machine code onto card decks. Then computers became cheap enough to run compilers, and that job was automated away.