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One thing to note about this downward trend of women in CS: its unique. If you look at the trends for women in law school, med school, physical sciences, and co

• SamReidHughes 8y ago
  The NYTimes article falsely claims that there was "a moment when women began to be forced out of programming" when in fact the absolute number of women kept increasing (in the 80's/90's). The percentage dropped because of vastly higher numbers of men, for reasons the article described. When I was a student (2004-2007) there was a huge contingent of males that played video games, watched anime, wanted to make video games, and badly needed haircuts, and spent all their time on computers, thus majored in CS. (Especially at my 3:1 ratio engineering school.) I don't think there was a big female version of that demographic.
• philwelch 8y ago
  There are fields (veterinary medicine, psychology, pharmacy, HR, accounting) where the proportion of women shot past 50% and reached a significant majority. Other fields, like medicine, are well on their way as older generations retire. If the working population in total is about 50/50, it’s mathematically impossible to have some fields with a gender imbalance one way without the rest of the workforce having an opposite imbalance. The main difference is one of status. In the 80’s or so, doctors and lawyers were high in status so it became a point of pride to prove that women could succeed in those professions. And they have, to the point that the male majorities in those professions are largely accounted for by the older generation. CS has not traditionally been a high-status field. If anything, the decline of women in tech has (or had?) a lot to do with women in general rising to a level of professional status where they didn’t have to pursue marginal, low-status jobs. Now, at a certain point they started giving us money, and then everyone noticed the gender imbalance. (Previously, it went about as unnoticed by wider society as the gender imbalance in logging.) And, of course, now that there’s been a huge push to get more and more women into tech, the prestige of the career is being torn down once again, though the money doesn’t seem to be going away yet, so who knows what the future will bring?
• renholder 8y ago
  >One thing to note about this downward trend of women in CS: its unique... I wonder why, though? If we're to follow the social trends, these same women - who worked in computing before the 80's - were the mothers and grandmothers of the children of the 80's, yeah? Did their attitude towards computing and women in computing suddenly change overnight - even though they were in the very same field, themselves? What would cause them to, in not even the span of a generation, decide that home computers should be relegated to boys, alone? Sure, Hollywood didn't help, but I feel like there must be something missing from this equation that would explain the why behind it. >A lot of these pictures ... women moving cords, operating keypunch machines ... it doesn't seem great. It looks like men relegated women to tedium. In the same way that women were typists back in the day. Now I realize those photos are much older, but maybe these sexist attitudes persisted back in the late 70's and early 80's and CAUSED more women to be in CS? Women did the "busy work" for the fancy new "computer machine business", while the men ran the business. I don't see how that's "busy work", when the computing infrastructures back then were way different. Your punch card were your modern-day versions of instructions sets and you had to know what you were doing with them to get the machine to do what you wanted to do (especially, if you had to punch the cards, yourself). Changing cables on an old switch panel is like connecting RJ-45 to your laptop, today. None of this is "busy work" and I'm not even sure how one would get the idea that it is busy work...? >Is this a bad take? Possibly. Having not been alive before the early 80's, myself, I won't try to lie and answer in the negative nor the affirmative. What I can tell you, though, is that women helped the industry thrive and grow (especially, during periods of war); so, it - more than likely - wasn't the cesspool of sexism that you're implying.
  • biophysboy 8y ago
    >I wonder why, though? One reply to my comment suggested that women in CS kept increasing, just not as exponentially as for boys. IF that's true (I don't know the data AT ALL), then the precise question is what kept them from coming in at higher rates like boys did. The best reason I can come up with is Nintendo->PlayStation/Xbox->Steam, but I have no proof. >I don't see how that's "busy work" Maybe it wasn't. But here's my idea: CS was respectable before it was respected. And my thought is maybe women "snuck in" during that interim period. And then all the men looking for status came in and drowned them out.
• black-tea 8y ago
  Those women weren't doing computer science. They were doing the tedium of moving cables around etc. They weren't "relegated" to doing that. That was just their job and they did it. Computer science started with Alan Turing. There have been no major contributions by women.
• jonjacky 8y ago
  > ... It looks like men relegated women to tedium. See the papers by Mary Ellen Wilkes I cited in this thread. Many HN readers would consider her work to be quite creative and innovative. BUT it must be said in those days, almost everyone would have considered this very same work to be mind-numbingly tedious. I began programming in 1967 (as a student, not at Wilkes' level). I recall that, in the popular mind, programming did not begin to acquire any reputation for creativity until the 1980s, when computing entrepeneur/celebrities like Bill Gates became well known. Programming was not Wilkes' first career choice (even though she was very good at it) and she left computing and had a forty-year career as a lawyer.