6 ms·

What happened to all the women? This office would make diversity/inclusion officers salivate.

shrewduser 8y ago
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more-gender-equality-the-fewer-women-in-stem/553592/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
reaperducer 8y ago
What happened to all the women? This office would make diversity/inclusion officers salivate. I don't know what slideshow you're looking at, but the vast majority of the pictures I see are women. http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/album/thumbs/Bell_Labs__0033.jpg http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/... http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/album/thumbs/Bell_Labs__0040.jpg http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/... http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/album/thumbs/Bell_Labs__0025.jpg http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/... http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/album/thumbs/Bell_Labs__0002.jpg http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/... http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/album/thumbs/Bell_Labs__0012.jpg http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/... The real horror is how that page hijacks keypresses and touch gestures. It's unusable with Javascript on.
- greggyb 8y ago
  We are agreeing. To expand: What happened to all the women in tech fields? This office would make diversity/inclusion officers (who are modern additions to organizations) salivate, because current workplaces do not look like this slideshow.
  - Aloha 8y ago
    I've spent most of my career in Telecom, this is how my experience in telecom is, AT&T got into equal opportunity early, and the notion stayed with the company past divestiture.
- delish 8y ago
  The GP may have been saying, "What happened [recently] to all the women [that they're not around any more]?"
- spooneybarger 8y ago
  "What happened to all the women? This office would make diversity/inclusion officers salivate." The OP meant, if you were to do a slideshow now, there would probably be considerably fewer women now.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
Men took their jobs. At the time, programming wasn't held in such high esteem by the general populace since it wasn't far removed from the menial busy work of shuffling around card stacks and tape reels. When it became more lucrative, the demographics shifted.
caymanjim 8y ago
Not only that, but everyone's got some fashion sense here, while still dressing professionally. Today, there'd be nothing but grey and beige. The office is also colorful and better-decorated than most these days.
- Latteland 8y ago
  It was the end of the 60s, people! My personal experience of that time was that my dad was in his heyday, he worked at IBM as an engineer. I remember seeing equipment like that in the early 70s when I visited him at work. People dressed in flamboyant clothes, had long hair, a lot more counter-cultural acceptance, in certain circles at least.
  - newnewpdro 8y ago
    Yep, ~1969 seems like peak USA in a number of ways. Music, psychedelics, muscle cars / car styling in general, clothing, journalism, what else?
    - naniwaduni 8y ago
      Moon?
      - Latteland 8y ago
        My whole adult life I wished I was living in a repeat of the 60s. Not because of the war or turmoil, sexism, racism, murder of people like MLK (sounds bad when you put it that way), but because of the freedom, the sense that america was moving forward. We didn't have our best days behind us. I never had that in my adult life.
        cm2012 8y ago
        Rose colored glasses. The 60s had the most terrifying increase in crime in living memory (one of many graphs: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#/media/File%3AProperty_Crime_Rates_in_the_United_States.svg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#/...). Until MLKs death he and other civil rights movement leaders were incredibly unpopular (check polling of time). By most measures, now is less of a time when the best days are behind us.
codemac 8y ago
There are great essays on the topic, but basically - they were kicked out when the position started to earn money for the business. Programmed Inequality by Marie Hicks [0] is a great introduction to some of the history. As my mother was a software engineer in the 70s, it's so incredibly upsetting to hear folks describe how it's just an inherently male interest, forgetting the history of sexism that just happened. [0]: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/programmed-inequality https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/programmed-inequality
- antt 8y ago
  >Programmed Inequality by Marie Hicks [0] is a great introduction to some of the history. That's largely bullshit. The position of 'programmer' today would be that of a systems architect from 1960. The position of 'programmer' of 1960 is the linker/assembler program of today. The jobs where women used to be a majority of the staff were simply automated away. Before you cry sexism the position of CNC programmer, a largely male dominated profession, has suffered from the same. With the job going from being a hugely skilled profession in the 1960s to being something you press a button in a cam package, with the pay dropping correspondingly from the 60s to today.
  - derangedHorse 8y ago
    That’s all based on the potentially dangerous assumption that the majority of women were working in now obsolete jobs. Your post also implies that those same women weren’t qualified to work other jobs even after their old jobs were retired. I would also say that the assumption isn’t entirely correct based on the percentage of CS graduates that were female around that time compared to today. Maybe these early women in tech could transfer to other positions but got rejected on application because of biases among employers?
fmajid 8y ago
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.
- lloydde 8y ago
  > 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.
- kurthr 8y ago
  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.
- ido 8y ago
  If you look at female percentage of enrollment in CS courses, you will find it actually declined since the 70s It apparently peaked at 1984: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2474991/women-computer-science-grads--the-bump-before-the-decline.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2474991/women-computer...
ghaff 8y ago
I have a book from a minicomputer company I worked for in the late eighties and nineties. A Year in Development. Basically documentation of projects and people in 1984 or 85. Showed it to a friend of mine and her first reaction was Wow, so many women.
bartimus 8y ago
For one thing I guess in these times the keyboard was still something associated with a female role. Then what perhaps also contributed is the roles of workers by collar color. Coding was perhaps more considered manual labor (blue collar). Yet people seem to forget it's actually the computers doing the manual labor. The developer is much more a complex designer role thinking up the execution architecture. So we got the waterfall movement where it was believed the higher payed intellectual roles didn't need to know how to code. I think this caused many men and women shifting towards those roles. We got the feminist movement which was very much focused on getting women into those higher payed top jobs. Coding wasn't considered one of those. Then perhaps the education system is partly to blame. It has become a commercial enterprise making sexy promises for a future life. In earlier times it was more common to start at the bottom and work/promote your way up the career ladder. You would move up because you were more valuable doing other things. Other people could take over parts of your job. In our current time the idea is that you can just get some university degree, skip all the lower jobs and stream in sideways. This leaves the "upper jobs" somewhat disconnected from the "lower jobs". It perhaps causes some dysfunctional organizations. Especially in Europe. I think this is what "the establishment" dictates. Meanwhile there were still those creative people getting their hands dirty hacking up cool solutions in their basements, garages and attics. Much more driven by a certain attitude than the safety and promises of a certain education. Their products simply outperformed the ones coming from the establishment. We get the weird situation we see today.
salivation 8y ago
Salivation? Isn't that a form of uninvited, micro-aggressive sexualization?

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more-gender-equality-the-fewer-women-in-stem/553592/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...

reaperducer 8y ago

What happened to all the women? This office would make diversity/inclusion officers salivate. I don't know what slideshow you're looking at, but the vast majority of the pictures I see are women. http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/album/thumbs/Bell_Labs__0033.jpg http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/... http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/album/thumbs/Bell_Labs__0040.jpg http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/... http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/album/thumbs/Bell_Labs__0025.jpg http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/... http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/album/thumbs/Bell_Labs__0002.jpg http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/... http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/album/thumbs/Bell_Labs__0012.jpg http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/... The real horror is how that page hijacks keypresses and touch gestures. It's unusable with Javascript on.

greggyb 8y ago
We are agreeing. To expand: What happened to all the women in tech fields? This office would make diversity/inclusion officers (who are modern additions to organizations) salivate, because current workplaces do not look like this slideshow.
- Aloha 8y ago
  I've spent most of my career in Telecom, this is how my experience in telecom is, AT&T got into equal opportunity early, and the notion stayed with the company past divestiture.
delish 8y ago
The GP may have been saying, "What happened [recently] to all the women [that they're not around any more]?"
spooneybarger 8y ago
"What happened to all the women? This office would make diversity/inclusion officers salivate." The OP meant, if you were to do a slideshow now, there would probably be considerably fewer women now.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

kevin_thibedeau 8y ago

Men took their jobs. At the time, programming wasn't held in such high esteem by the general populace since it wasn't far removed from the menial busy work of shuffling around card stacks and tape reels. When it became more lucrative, the demographics shifted.

caymanjim 8y ago

Not only that, but everyone's got some fashion sense here, while still dressing professionally. Today, there'd be nothing but grey and beige. The office is also colorful and better-decorated than most these days.

Latteland 8y ago
It was the end of the 60s, people! My personal experience of that time was that my dad was in his heyday, he worked at IBM as an engineer. I remember seeing equipment like that in the early 70s when I visited him at work. People dressed in flamboyant clothes, had long hair, a lot more counter-cultural acceptance, in certain circles at least.
- newnewpdro 8y ago
  Yep, ~1969 seems like peak USA in a number of ways. Music, psychedelics, muscle cars / car styling in general, clothing, journalism, what else?
  - naniwaduni 8y ago
    Moon?
    - Latteland 8y ago
      My whole adult life I wished I was living in a repeat of the 60s. Not because of the war or turmoil, sexism, racism, murder of people like MLK (sounds bad when you put it that way), but because of the freedom, the sense that america was moving forward. We didn't have our best days behind us. I never had that in my adult life.
      - cm2012 8y ago
        Rose colored glasses. The 60s had the most terrifying increase in crime in living memory (one of many graphs: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#/media/File%3AProperty_Crime_Rates_in_the_United_States.svg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#/...). Until MLKs death he and other civil rights movement leaders were incredibly unpopular (check polling of time). By most measures, now is less of a time when the best days are behind us.

codemac 8y ago

There are great essays on the topic, but basically - they were kicked out when the position started to earn money for the business. Programmed Inequality by Marie Hicks [0] is a great introduction to some of the history. As my mother was a software engineer in the 70s, it's so incredibly upsetting to hear folks describe how it's just an inherently male interest, forgetting the history of sexism that just happened. [0]: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/programmed-inequality https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/programmed-inequality

antt 8y ago
>Programmed Inequality by Marie Hicks [0] is a great introduction to some of the history. That's largely bullshit. The position of 'programmer' today would be that of a systems architect from 1960. The position of 'programmer' of 1960 is the linker/assembler program of today. The jobs where women used to be a majority of the staff were simply automated away. Before you cry sexism the position of CNC programmer, a largely male dominated profession, has suffered from the same. With the job going from being a hugely skilled profession in the 1960s to being something you press a button in a cam package, with the pay dropping correspondingly from the 60s to today.
- derangedHorse 8y ago
  That’s all based on the potentially dangerous assumption that the majority of women were working in now obsolete jobs. Your post also implies that those same women weren’t qualified to work other jobs even after their old jobs were retired. I would also say that the assumption isn’t entirely correct based on the percentage of CS graduates that were female around that time compared to today. Maybe these early women in tech could transfer to other positions but got rejected on application because of biases among employers?

fmajid 8y ago

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.

lloydde 8y ago
> 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.
kurthr 8y ago
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.
ido 8y ago
If you look at female percentage of enrollment in CS courses, you will find it actually declined since the 70s It apparently peaked at 1984: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2474991/women-computer-science-grads--the-bump-before-the-decline.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2474991/women-computer...

ghaff 8y ago

I have a book from a minicomputer company I worked for in the late eighties and nineties. A Year in Development. Basically documentation of projects and people in 1984 or 85. Showed it to a friend of mine and her first reaction was Wow, so many women.

bartimus 8y ago

For one thing I guess in these times the keyboard was still something associated with a female role. Then what perhaps also contributed is the roles of workers by collar color. Coding was perhaps more considered manual labor (blue collar). Yet people seem to forget it's actually the computers doing the manual labor. The developer is much more a complex designer role thinking up the execution architecture. So we got the waterfall movement where it was believed the higher payed intellectual roles didn't need to know how to code. I think this caused many men and women shifting towards those roles. We got the feminist movement which was very much focused on getting women into those higher payed top jobs. Coding wasn't considered one of those. Then perhaps the education system is partly to blame. It has become a commercial enterprise making sexy promises for a future life. In earlier times it was more common to start at the bottom and work/promote your way up the career ladder. You would move up because you were more valuable doing other things. Other people could take over parts of your job. In our current time the idea is that you can just get some university degree, skip all the lower jobs and stream in sideways. This leaves the "upper jobs" somewhat disconnected from the "lower jobs". It perhaps causes some dysfunctional organizations. Especially in Europe. I think this is what "the establishment" dictates. Meanwhile there were still those creative people getting their hands dirty hacking up cool solutions in their basements, garages and attics. Much more driven by a certain attitude than the safety and promises of a certain education. Their products simply outperformed the ones coming from the establishment. We get the weird situation we see today.

salivation 8y ago

Salivation? Isn't that a form of uninvited, micro-aggressive sexualization?