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> Women aren't interested in joining because of the sexist nature of the industries. I don’t know what your past/experience is, but I was a geek way before IT
by tomp 6y ago
> Women aren't interested in joining because of the sexist nature of the industries.
I don’t know what your past/experience is, but I was a geek way before IT industry was even a thing. And I can guarantee you, they 100% were not interested in joining. They being everyone (including 99% of men), not just women, of course. Everybody could do geeky stuff. Instead, boys were playing sports (computer games weren’t yet a thing), and girls were doing ... who knows what, we (boys) weren’t interested in them back then.
In addition, there was a lot of discouragement from all sides - parents, peers, teachers, bullies - this was of course before CS was big money, and honestly I suspect if things turned out differently (programming wasn’t paid well), noone would even notice the sex imbalance (like they don’t for truckers).
- vinceguidry 6y agoMaybe you just haven't been around long enough. Many of the earliest pioneers in the field of computing were women. It was "women's work" until all of a sudden it looked interesting to men and it magically became "men's work." A story as old as time. Kathleen Booth invented assembly language. In 1947.
- tomp 6y agoWe were kids. It wasn’t even work. Just playtime, doing what we were interested in.
- robin21 6y agoSo what precluded women from continuing working in the field?
- manfredo 6y agoThe peak of women's representation in computing was ~33% in the early 1980s. Not that much higher than the ~20% we see today. And many of these women in early computing not because it was their first choice, but because the jobs they wanted weren't open to women. Mary Allen Wilkes, for example, wanted to be a trial lawyer but went into computing because no firm she contacted would let women be trial lawyers [1]. This isn't unique to the US, but part of a broader trend of more gender equality being associated with lower rates of women in STEM fields [2]. 1. From Clive Thompson's "Coders" chapter 2. 2. 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...