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> Back in the 1960s there was discrimination and no women were in engineering. This was a terrible waste of talent. But by the late 1980s, women were 20% of eng

> Back in the 1960s there was discrimination and no women were in engineering. This was a terrible waste of talent. But by the late 1980s, women were 20% of engineering students. Decades of hand-wringing later, women are still about 20% of engineering students. Based on spacial reasoning ability, perhaps women SHOULD be about 20% of engineering students. I just wanted to point out that this is objectively wrong for our profession and misleading at best. Women were a large part of early software development and computer science, composing far more than 20% of majors [1] and that this article is specifically related to computer science and software engineering. Clearly something happened in the 80s that caused a transformation and I think attempting to explain it with a biological basis is simply factually wrong. It seems like whenever an explanation attempts to use gender differences as some sort of rationale it comes coupled with ignoring the very objective history of computer science. [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...

btilly 7y ago
I said engineering, and I meant engineering. Not computer science. See https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/table-of-the-day-bachelors-degrees-for-the-class-of-2016-by-field-and-gender-oh-and-the-overall-25-6-college-degree-gap-for-men/ https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/table-of-the-day-bachelors-de... to verify that in 2016, just under 21% of engineering degrees were given to women. The figures for the mid 1980s were almost the same. But if you can find figures, in the mid-1960s, engineering degrees were almost exclusively given to men. The ratios have been fairly constant in recent decades, but vary a lot from degree to apparently related degree. For example around 40% of degrees in mathematics go to women, and that factor of 2 difference from engineering has not changed appreciably since Reagan was President. Now you are right that women were a large part of early software development. "Computer" used to be a job that was almost exclusively held by women. Who then made the transition from actually being the ones who did the calculations to writing code. (Note, the preponderance of women can be explained by mathematical ability being fairly evenly distributed, but most careers using that ability having been barred to women historically.) See Grace Hopper and Margaret Hamilton for justly famous examples. However I have noticed that the gender ratio seems to be strongly dependent upon language. Some years ago I worked on a project with a COBOL and a Perl group. The COBOL group was largely women, but Perl was almost all men. I got to see what happened in Perl up close. You had a pretty good balance of men and women getting into web development. But a lot of men went from web development to back end web development into programming. Women were more significantly likely to go to front end, design and product management. And neither I nor the women that I talked to saw discrimination as having been the driving factor. So why does it happen? Here is my best guess. Between COBOL and more modern languages we have introduced many language features that are hard for most people to get their heads around. For example recursion, pointers, closures, and class hierarchies. These barriers are sufficiently hard that many teachers privately say that only some people are able to learn to program. My suspicion is that one or more of these concepts is more of a barrier for women than men.
- fzeroracer 7y ago
  My point was that this article is specifically using the term engineering in the sense of computer science. Using engineering as a whole is misleading because as I have demonstrated, software engineering had a historically larger amount of women which faced a decline post-80s. It's burying the lede to make a point about something as a whole rather than the specifics of the article. Also, your point about those language features being harder is also, objectively wrong. All of those features you mentioned existed before the 80s and were used at the time. If anything software engineering has gotten easier to understand over time, not harder thanks to more robust tooling, debugging and support. Back then you didn't have access to easy resources and had to do everything yourself, so you would have to provide a better explanation than 'things are harder now than they were before'.
  - btilly 7y ago
    Also, your point about those language features being harder is also, objectively wrong. All of those features you mentioned existed before the 80s and were used at the time. Existed, yes. Widely used? That was a period of transition! The period from the early 1980s to the late 1980s coincided with a host of changes. Including the rise of personal PCs and Unix, less VMS and mainframes, a decline in COBOL, a rise in C and Pascal, etc, etc, etc. In 1980 it was reasonable to take introductory programming courses in COBOL (the most commonly used language in business) or FORTRAN (the most commonly used language in science). At the time neither language supported recursion, closures, or object oriented programming. Pointers existed, but were not as heavily used as they were later. That cohort graduated 37.1% women in 1984. If you were taking your introductory programming course in 1986 on a personal computer in C or Pascal, you would have dealt with both recursion and pointers heavily. That was about when I took that course. This cohort graduated 29.9% women. Object oriented programming didn't break into the mainstream until the 1990s. (The original Code Complete written in the 1980s doesn't even mention it.) It existed, but was not widely adopted "by industry". Closures began to spread out from Scheme but remained a fairly niche concept until people got serious about them in JavaScript in the 2000s. So the timeline is not evidence against my suspicion. Of course so many other things were in flux that it isn't evidence for either.
  - 7y ago
perl4ever 7y ago
Circa the late 50s, I literally knew someone who was told there was only room for one woman engineering student at the school she wanted to go to, so she studied math instead and that's how she became a programmer. Subsequently, she became an assistant to an engineer, obviously being paid much less than him. Compare to Ursula Burns, who started at Xerox in 1980 and eventually became CEO. So, of course something happened that wasn't biological - the opportunities for women with the ability to program or do engineering dramatically increased.

btilly 7y ago

I said engineering, and I meant engineering. Not computer science. See https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/table-of-the-day-bachelors-degrees-for-the-class-of-2016-by-field-and-gender-oh-and-the-overall-25-6-college-degree-gap-for-men/ https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/table-of-the-day-bachelors-de... to verify that in 2016, just under 21% of engineering degrees were given to women. The figures for the mid 1980s were almost the same. But if you can find figures, in the mid-1960s, engineering degrees were almost exclusively given to men. The ratios have been fairly constant in recent decades, but vary a lot from degree to apparently related degree. For example around 40% of degrees in mathematics go to women, and that factor of 2 difference from engineering has not changed appreciably since Reagan was President. Now you are right that women were a large part of early software development. "Computer" used to be a job that was almost exclusively held by women. Who then made the transition from actually being the ones who did the calculations to writing code. (Note, the preponderance of women can be explained by mathematical ability being fairly evenly distributed, but most careers using that ability having been barred to women historically.) See Grace Hopper and Margaret Hamilton for justly famous examples. However I have noticed that the gender ratio seems to be strongly dependent upon language. Some years ago I worked on a project with a COBOL and a Perl group. The COBOL group was largely women, but Perl was almost all men. I got to see what happened in Perl up close. You had a pretty good balance of men and women getting into web development. But a lot of men went from web development to back end web development into programming. Women were more significantly likely to go to front end, design and product management. And neither I nor the women that I talked to saw discrimination as having been the driving factor. So why does it happen? Here is my best guess. Between COBOL and more modern languages we have introduced many language features that are hard for most people to get their heads around. For example recursion, pointers, closures, and class hierarchies. These barriers are sufficiently hard that many teachers privately say that only some people are able to learn to program. My suspicion is that one or more of these concepts is more of a barrier for women than men.

fzeroracer 7y ago
My point was that this article is specifically using the term engineering in the sense of computer science. Using engineering as a whole is misleading because as I have demonstrated, software engineering had a historically larger amount of women which faced a decline post-80s. It's burying the lede to make a point about something as a whole rather than the specifics of the article. Also, your point about those language features being harder is also, objectively wrong. All of those features you mentioned existed before the 80s and were used at the time. If anything software engineering has gotten easier to understand over time, not harder thanks to more robust tooling, debugging and support. Back then you didn't have access to easy resources and had to do everything yourself, so you would have to provide a better explanation than 'things are harder now than they were before'.
- btilly 7y ago
  Also, your point about those language features being harder is also, objectively wrong. All of those features you mentioned existed before the 80s and were used at the time. Existed, yes. Widely used? That was a period of transition! The period from the early 1980s to the late 1980s coincided with a host of changes. Including the rise of personal PCs and Unix, less VMS and mainframes, a decline in COBOL, a rise in C and Pascal, etc, etc, etc. In 1980 it was reasonable to take introductory programming courses in COBOL (the most commonly used language in business) or FORTRAN (the most commonly used language in science). At the time neither language supported recursion, closures, or object oriented programming. Pointers existed, but were not as heavily used as they were later. That cohort graduated 37.1% women in 1984. If you were taking your introductory programming course in 1986 on a personal computer in C or Pascal, you would have dealt with both recursion and pointers heavily. That was about when I took that course. This cohort graduated 29.9% women. Object oriented programming didn't break into the mainstream until the 1990s. (The original Code Complete written in the 1980s doesn't even mention it.) It existed, but was not widely adopted "by industry". Closures began to spread out from Scheme but remained a fairly niche concept until people got serious about them in JavaScript in the 2000s. So the timeline is not evidence against my suspicion. Of course so many other things were in flux that it isn't evidence for either.
- 7y ago

perl4ever 7y ago

Circa the late 50s, I literally knew someone who was told there was only room for one woman engineering student at the school she wanted to go to, so she studied math instead and that's how she became a programmer. Subsequently, she became an assistant to an engineer, obviously being paid much less than him. Compare to Ursula Burns, who started at Xerox in 1980 and eventually became CEO. So, of course something happened that wasn't biological - the opportunities for women with the ability to program or do engineering dramatically increased.