3 ms·

I talk regularly to academic math people (because cryptography) and the sense I have is that if anything, CS is far more social than the work they do --- to get

I talk regularly to academic math people (because cryptography) and the sense I have is that if anything, CS is far more social than the work they do --- to get anything significant done in technology, you have to coordinate and cooperate amongst teams of people. I recall a paper I read in grad school which found that programmers actually had more need of interaction than other fields. As jdavis notes elsewhere, accounting and bookkeeping employs more women nowadays. I also note that very early on, computer programming was seen as a desirable job by women. Is there a common thread between computer programming in the very early days and accounting and bookkeeping today?

tptacek 9y ago
I don't know. But I do know that the masculinization of computer science seems to line up chronologically with the emergence of the home computer movement, which was began as a male-dominated 1970s hobby. And I don't think it's hard to find serious CS people who can trace other malign influences from "homebrew hobbyist CS" in our field. We're basically a field that experienced a bizarre and potent deprofessionalization a few decades ago, and then rebuilt back up from that. Forget about the social and equity issues and just look at poor engineering practice, a lot of which is traceable to programming cultures that emerged from hobbyist computing.
- stcredzero 9y ago
  just look at poor engineering practice, a lot of which is traceable to programming cultures that emerged from hobbyist computing. Do you have citations? I do think you're onto something here, though I don't think it's necessarily the best idea to vilify men or the masculine. Anthropologically speaking, didn't the subculture of hobbyist programming come out of the subculture of model train building?
  - tptacek 9y ago
    I'm not "vilifying men or the masculine". I am a dude. Also a dad, of a STEM college boy and a STEM HS girl. I like beer and pork fat and whiskey and cars. I don't so much like video games, but only because I'd rather code or yell on message boards. I'm happy to keep talking to you about this stuff, but I will not do that if you're trying to trap me in some weird ideological conflict about the persecution of men. The problem with the field is not that "men are bad". Would you like to try asking me that again? It's also OK if you and I just don't try to have a dialog on this thread.
    - stcredzero 9y ago
      I'm not "vilifying men or the masculine". I am a dude. Also a dad, of a STEM college boy and a STEM HS girl. Also a dad, of a STEM college boy and a STEM HS girl. I like beer and pork fat and whiskey and cars. Glad to hear it. I'm happy to keep talking to you about this stuff, but I will not do that if you're trying to trap me in some weird ideological conflict about the persecution of men. Well, likewise. I don't want ideological conflict, though sometimes I feel it's foisted upon me. I'm also quite open to the idea that something in the subculture of programming could be pushing women away. Please don't take my mention of vilification as an accusation, and my apologies if it came across that way. I don't think anyone can deny that the whole area of discussion has a history of someone vilifying someone else, so I think that steering away from that is useful. When have I ever tried to ideologically trap you? If there was ever anything ideological I'd associate with you, it's this phrase about, "the social compact." (Not that I'm absolutely against redistribution. It just sounds like reparations between sovereign powers from centuries ago.)
      - tptacek 9y ago
        I didn't say anything about men being bad, I don't believe there is anything intrinsically bad about men, and in fact I reject a lot of hypotheses about gender disparity based on "masculine behavior" explanations, such as the notion that women are put off by competitiveness (I am married to an extremely competitive woman engineer and, through her roller derby escapades, have met more than my fair share of other competitive women). You implied that I did. I'm shutting that down hard. Thanks for acknowledging. Like I said: I think our field is weird in that home computing deprofessionalized it. I think programming methodology also deprofessionalized. I don't think it's a weird observation to make that our field stagnated or even regressed and that a lot of practices and technologies we work with today are (a) rooted in the 1970s and (b) ignore decades of subsequent research. Since you can trace a lot of badness in our field back to home computing (which: to be clear, was a very good thing! life is complicated!), I find the "we're male dominated because hobbyist computing in the 1970s was an insular and chauvinist culture" explanation pretty powerful. I think all these things feed into each other, too. There can be more than one explanation.

tptacek 9y ago

I don't know. But I do know that the masculinization of computer science seems to line up chronologically with the emergence of the home computer movement, which was began as a male-dominated 1970s hobby. And I don't think it's hard to find serious CS people who can trace other malign influences from "homebrew hobbyist CS" in our field. We're basically a field that experienced a bizarre and potent deprofessionalization a few decades ago, and then rebuilt back up from that. Forget about the social and equity issues and just look at poor engineering practice, a lot of which is traceable to programming cultures that emerged from hobbyist computing.

stcredzero 9y ago
just look at poor engineering practice, a lot of which is traceable to programming cultures that emerged from hobbyist computing. Do you have citations? I do think you're onto something here, though I don't think it's necessarily the best idea to vilify men or the masculine. Anthropologically speaking, didn't the subculture of hobbyist programming come out of the subculture of model train building?
- tptacek 9y ago
  I'm not "vilifying men or the masculine". I am a dude. Also a dad, of a STEM college boy and a STEM HS girl. I like beer and pork fat and whiskey and cars. I don't so much like video games, but only because I'd rather code or yell on message boards. I'm happy to keep talking to you about this stuff, but I will not do that if you're trying to trap me in some weird ideological conflict about the persecution of men. The problem with the field is not that "men are bad". Would you like to try asking me that again? It's also OK if you and I just don't try to have a dialog on this thread.
  - stcredzero 9y ago
    I'm not "vilifying men or the masculine". I am a dude. Also a dad, of a STEM college boy and a STEM HS girl. Also a dad, of a STEM college boy and a STEM HS girl. I like beer and pork fat and whiskey and cars. Glad to hear it. I'm happy to keep talking to you about this stuff, but I will not do that if you're trying to trap me in some weird ideological conflict about the persecution of men. Well, likewise. I don't want ideological conflict, though sometimes I feel it's foisted upon me. I'm also quite open to the idea that something in the subculture of programming could be pushing women away. Please don't take my mention of vilification as an accusation, and my apologies if it came across that way. I don't think anyone can deny that the whole area of discussion has a history of someone vilifying someone else, so I think that steering away from that is useful. When have I ever tried to ideologically trap you? If there was ever anything ideological I'd associate with you, it's this phrase about, "the social compact." (Not that I'm absolutely against redistribution. It just sounds like reparations between sovereign powers from centuries ago.)
    - tptacek 9y ago
      I didn't say anything about men being bad, I don't believe there is anything intrinsically bad about men, and in fact I reject a lot of hypotheses about gender disparity based on "masculine behavior" explanations, such as the notion that women are put off by competitiveness (I am married to an extremely competitive woman engineer and, through her roller derby escapades, have met more than my fair share of other competitive women). You implied that I did. I'm shutting that down hard. Thanks for acknowledging. Like I said: I think our field is weird in that home computing deprofessionalized it. I think programming methodology also deprofessionalized. I don't think it's a weird observation to make that our field stagnated or even regressed and that a lot of practices and technologies we work with today are (a) rooted in the 1970s and (b) ignore decades of subsequent research. Since you can trace a lot of badness in our field back to home computing (which: to be clear, was a very good thing! life is complicated!), I find the "we're male dominated because hobbyist computing in the 1970s was an insular and chauvinist culture" explanation pretty powerful. I think all these things feed into each other, too. There can be more than one explanation.